Arta (Truth, right order)

Arta (Avestan aša) is the Iranian word for the right ordering of things — truth as against falsehood, order as against chaos, in the cosmos and in society alike. It is one of the deepest continuities of Iranian religion, and the moral spine of the Achaemenid kings' self-presentation. Darius's great apologia at Behistun frames his whole seizure and holding of the throne as a war of the Truth against the Lie: the rebels are 'lie-followers', they 'lied', the provinces 'became faithless' — and Ahuramazda gives victory to the king because he was not a lie-follower, was not a doer of wrong. On his tomb Darius makes it a personal creed: he is friend to the right and no friend to the wrong, and it is not his wish that the weak should have harm done to him by the strong, nor that the strong should have harm done by the weak.

The concept binds religion, ethics, and politics into one: to lie is not merely a fault but a cosmic disloyalty, an alliance with disorder; the king who upholds arta is the agent of Ahura Mazdā's order on earth. Herodotus caught the social face of it when he reported that the Persians held lying to be the most disgraceful thing of all, and debt shameful chiefly because a debtor must needs tell lies. The name itself was auspicious: it is embedded in Persian personal names (Artaxerxes, Artaxšaça, 'whose reign is through arta') and it is the word chosen as the title of the game and this compendium.