Ahura Mazdā

Ahura Mazdā (Old Persian Auramazdā, "the Wise Lord") is the one god the Achaemenid kings name again and again in their inscriptions, and the divine author of their authority. The standard preamble of a royal text opens by invoking him as creator: "A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king." He grants the kingship, and he sustains the king who upholds Arta (Truth, right order), the Truth or right order, against The Drauga (the Lie), the Lie. On the great relief at Behistun and on the royal tombs, a figure in a winged ring hovers above the king; it is commonly read as Ahura Mazdā, though the identification is not certain (see below).

Ahura Mazdā is also the supreme divinity of the Gāthās, the oldest hymns of the Iranian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster). This raises the central and much-debated question of Achaemenid religion: were the kings "Zoroastrians"? They worship the same Wise Lord, they set the Truth-against-the-Lie at the heart of their ideology, and their rites are conducted by the Magi; yet no royal inscription ever names Zarathustra, the royal religion tolerates and even funds the gods of subject peoples, and Ahura Mazdā is at times invoked "together with the other gods" (a phrase a strict dualist reformer might not have used). Most scholars now describe the Achaemenid state cult as broadly Mazdaean — devoted to Ahura Mazdā within an Iranian religious world from which Zoroastrianism also grew — while leaving the precise relationship to the prophet's reform open.