Practice of worship in the Achaemenid heartland

Thanks to the Persepolis Fortification Archive the practice of worship in the Achaemenid heartland is now much better documented than previously. The texts are not very informative when it comes to the contents of various rites, but they yield important data on frequence, commodities, relative importance, geographical spread, and cultic personnel. Temples occur, as well as worship on mountains and at rivers, and rites at a range of locales. The last group seems, by and large, to relate to the agricultural cycle, hence the connection with facilities for storage of harvested produce. It is abundantly clear that the new data can be understood only when properly analyzed within a much wider cultural framework, including the Elamite past as well as the wider Indo-Iranian (rather than the Zoroastrian or Avestan) horizon. Other key factors are the king (funerary sacrifices) and royal ideology (larger feasts at which the king displayed his largesse and piety).

Practice of worship in the Achaemenid heartland

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