Worship, Offerings and Burial in Achaemenid Lands

Under the Achaemenid Persian Empire, about 550–330 BC, worship took place in royal centers and local communities from Persia to Egypt. Royal inscriptions invoked the Persian god Ahuramazda to present the king’s rule as divinely supported. In Babylonia and Egypt, temple records and petitions show how local religious communities organized resources and maintained worship.

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Offerings supplied from Persepolis

At Persepolis in southwestern Iran, officials issued grain, wine and livestock for worship as part of the same system that provisioned workers and state personnel. One record from 500 BC assigns a priest an 80-bar grain allotment; a bar was a volume measure of about 10 liters. Forty bar went to Ahuramazda and 40 to Mišduši, another Iranian deity. Other entries assign grain to Ahuramazda, offerings to the Elamite god Humban, and wine for libations, or ritual pours, to three rivers. Royal officials tracked food for ceremonies alongside provisions for workers and travelers.

The Fortification archive, whose main records date from 509 to 494 BC, preserves transactions in food, flock management and provisioning from sites throughout Persis and eastern Elam, regions of Iran. Records drawn up at those sites were sent to the central office at Persepolis.

Temples and local communities

In Babylonia, in present-day Iraq, temples held land and managed substantial supplies. Achaemenid kings required them to pay taxes in livestock and grain and to perform duties for the state. In the second year of Cambyses, shepherds of Eanna, the temple at Uruk, delivered 200 young lambs and kids for the royal table at Amanu; Eanna also supplied 80 large sheep and spices. Royal agents worked within temple administrations to oversee taxes and obligations, placing temple resources within the administration of the empire.

In Egypt’s Kharga Oasis, a chain of underground water channels supported settlement around local temples. At Ain Manawir, archaeologists found a mudbrick temple with a forecourt, pillared hall, sanctuary and three chapels, as well as a nearby room, probably a scribe’s office. Demotic, the Egyptian script used for everyday documents, appears on ostraca, pieces of pottery or stone used as writing surfaces. Hundreds of these records include leases for water rights in exchange for part of a harvest, linking temple life with the oasis’s irrigation system.

At Elephantine, an island fortress in southern Egypt, a Jewish community maintained a temple to Yahweh. After it was destroyed in 410 BC, the priests wrote in 407 BC to Bagavahya, governor of Judah, asking him to recommend its rebuilding and the resumption of sacrifice. The governors’ support for the request was limited to incense and grain offerings, not the animal sacrifice requested by the community.

A sacrifice described by Herodotus

The Greek historian Herodotus describes a Persian sacrifice in which the sacrificer leads an animal to a ritually clean place, invokes the god, and prays for the king and Persian people. After the animal is killed and its meat cooked, it is placed on fresh grass. A Magus, a member of the Persian priestly group, stands nearby and chants a theogony, a telling of the gods’ origins. The sacrificer then takes away the meat.

Royal tombs and regional burial

The tomb identified with Cyrus at Pasargadae in Iran’s Fars province was a freestanding stone chamber raised on six stepped levels, with a narrow entrance leading into a small room. Later Achaemenid kings were buried in rock-cut tombs near Persepolis. At Naqsh-e Rustam, about six kilometres northwest of Persepolis, Darius I’s façade shows the king before a fire altar, while the platform beneath him is supported by figures representing the peoples of the empire. Inside, three chambers contained stone troughs probably intended for wooden coffins; the original burials have not survived. The carved front presents royal order and ceremony, while the inner chambers were built to receive the dead.

Burial forms also varied across the empire. At the cemetery about a kilometre northwest of Persepolis, archaeologists recorded 31 burials, including 24 ceramic bathtub coffins. A bathtub coffin is a large pottery container shaped to hold a body; the Persepolis examples were used for men and women and were accompanied by few grave goods, mostly pottery. The ceramics place the cemetery in the late Achaemenid period or possibly the earliest Hellenistic era, the period following Alexander’s conquests. Along the Phoenician coast, communities used rock-hewn tombs, a different regional form of burial.