The Achaemenid Court and the Politics of Persian Religion

The Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great after his conquest of Media in 550 BCE and his defeat of the Lydian king Croesus around 547 BCE, culminating in the capture of Babylon in 539 BCE, became the first empire to rule over the vast majority of the Iranian plateau and, at its height under Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE) and Xerxes I (r. 486–465 BCE), stretched from the Indus Valley to Thrace and Egypt. The precise religious affiliation of the earliest Achaemenid kings remains debated: Cyrus's own inscriptions, including the famous Cyrus Cylinder (539 BCE), invoke the Babylonian god Marduk rather than Ahura Mazda, reflecting either genuine religious pluralism, shrewd political accommodation of Babylonian religious sensibilities, or possibly a still-inchoate royal religious identity not yet firmly Zoroastrian in the developed sense.