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What was the nature of Xerxes' religious policy, and how far does the evidence support the idea of a deliberate campaign of religious persecution?

The nature and significance of Xerxes' religious policy, including his devotion to Ahura Mazda and Achaemenid royal ideology, the daiva inscription (XPh) and the debate over whether it records a real religious campaign, his treatment of local cults at Babylon, Egypt and the Greek temples burned in 480 BC, and the royal fire cult

A focused answer to the HSC Ancient History Personalities dot point on Xerxes' religious policy. Ahura Mazda and Achaemenid royal ideology, the daiva inscription (XPh) and the Herzfeld versus Briant debate over whether it records a real campaign, tolerance versus interference at Babylon, Egypt and the temples burned at Athens in 480 BC, and the royal fire cult.

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Quick answer

Xerxes (r. 486 to 465 BC) presented himself in his inscriptions as the agent of Ahura Mazda, upholding order (arta) against the Lie (drauga). The key source, the daiva inscription (XPh, found at Persepolis), has the king destroy a sanctuary of the daivas (false gods) and ban their worship; Ernst Herzfeld read this as a real campaign, but Pierre Briant treats it as undated, formulaic royal ideology, order over chaos, that cannot by itself prove a persecution. The classical tradition (Herodotus, Ctesias) that Xerxes destroyed Marduk's temple at Babylon after the 484 BC revolts is now largely doubted (Kuhrt and Sherwin-White): the cult kept functioning, and his measures were political. The Greek temples burned in 480 BC read as strategic revenge (for Sardis, 498 BC), not theology. Alongside this, Xerxes maintained the royal fire cult of Ahura Mazda (Naqsh-e Rustam reliefs; Herodotus 1.131-132). On balance, the evidence supports selective political interference with cults tied to revolt or war, not a deliberate, empire-wide campaign of religious persecution.

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What this dot point is asking
The answer
How to read a source on this topic
Historians on Xerxes' religious policy

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to explain the nature and significance of Xerxes' religious policy: his devotion to Ahura Mazda and the Achaemenid ideology of divine kingship that made the king the god's agent upholding order (arta) against chaos; the daiva inscription (XPh) and the sharp scholarly debate over whether it records a real religious campaign or is a formulaic statement of royal ideology; his treatment of local cults, at Babylon (the disputed "destruction" of Esagila), in Egypt, and in the Greek temples burned during the invasion of 480 BC; and the royal fire cult. Above all it asks you to WEIGH the evidence, because the popular image of Xerxes the temple-destroyer comes largely from hostile Greek and later sources.

In plain English

Picture a ruler whose whole brand is "I was put in charge by the one true, good God to keep the world in order." When he crushes a rebellion or wins a war, he does not just say "I won"; he says "I defeated the forces of chaos and lies on God's behalf." Now imagine his enemies, the losing side, writing the history books afterwards. They remember him as a temple-smashing fanatic who torched their holy places. Centuries later, archaeologists dig up his OWN official plaque, which boasts that he wiped out the worship of some "false gods" somewhere. It is tempting to join the dots: enemy propaganda plus a boastful plaque equals a religious persecutor. But the plaque never says WHERE or WHEN, and it reads like a standard royal slogan ("I keep God's order"), and when you re-check the enemy stories against the local records, the "destroyed" temple turns out to have still been open for business. The lesson of this dot point is exactly that: how a reputation for religious persecution can be built out of ideology and hostile memory, and how a careful historian takes it apart.

The answer

Ahura Mazda and Achaemenid royal ideology

Xerxes' religious policy cannot be separated from the ideology of Achaemenid kingship. In his royal inscriptions, the supreme god is Ahura Mazda, "the Wise Lord," praised in a standard opening formula as the creator of the earth, the sky, humanity and human happiness, and as the god who "made Xerxes king." The king rules "by the favour of Ahura Mazda" and presents himself as the god's chosen agent on earth.

The core of this ideology is a cosmic opposition between order and disorder: arta (order, truth, rightness) against drauga (the Lie, deceit, rebellion). The king's fundamental duty is to uphold arta and destroy drauga. This is why, in the royal texts, suppressing a rebellion is never merely a political act; it is framed as restoring the god-given order against the forces of the Lie. Keep this framework in mind, because it is the single most important key to reading the daiva inscription correctly.

The daiva inscription (XPh)

The single most important source for this dot point is the daiva inscription, catalogued as XPh, copies of which were found at Persepolis in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. After the usual praise of Ahura Mazda and a list of the lands Xerxes ruled, the inscription includes a famous passage in which the king declares that, in a place where the daivas (false gods) had formerly been worshipped, he, by the favour of Ahura Mazda, destroyed their sanctuary and proclaimed that "the daivas shall not be worshipped," worshipping Ahura Mazda reverently in their place.

Two things about this passage matter enormously for the exam. First, the daivas are, in this religious tradition, false gods or demons, the divine face of chaos and the Lie, not simply "foreign gods." Second, the passage gives no date and names no country: it does not say WHERE the daiva sanctuary was, or WHEN the king acted.

Herzfeld's historicist reading versus Briant's caution

Ernst Herzfeld, who first published the inscription in the 1930s, read the daiva passage as a record of a specific historical event: the suppression of a particular rebellious people's cult, with the "daivas" being the gods of that people. On this reading XPh is direct evidence of a real religious campaign, and generations of scholars tried to identify the target, most often the rebellious Babylonians (and the god Marduk) or the Greeks.

Pierre Briant, in his standard history of the empire (From Cyrus to Alexander, 2002), is far more cautious. He argues the daiva passage is essentially a formulaic expression of Achaemenid royal ideology. The king, as Ahura Mazda's agent, maintains arta by destroying the daivas, the divine embodiment of drauga and chaos; the passage is a topos, a standard rhetorical move, not necessarily a diary entry about one dated event. Because the text is undated and names no place, Briant warns against the "concordance" method of forcing it to line up with the Greek narrative of a tyrannical, temple-burning Xerxes.

The honest position for a student is that the daiva inscription proves what Xerxes CLAIMED about himself, that he upheld Ahura Mazda's order against false gods, but it does not, by itself, prove a specific campaign of religious persecution. (The precise translation and dating of XPh remain technical and contested; treat any single "target" identification as an argument, not a fact.)

Babylon: the disputed destruction of Esagila

The most dramatic charge against Xerxes is that, after two Babylonian revolts in 484 BC (led by Bel-shimanni and Shamash-eriba), he sacked the great temple of Marduk (Esagila) and carried off, or melted down, the golden cult statue of the god Bel-Marduk. This story comes from Herodotus (Histories 1.183) and later classical writers (Ctesias, Arrian, Strabo), and it long underpinned the image of Xerxes the temple-destroyer.

Modern scholarship has substantially dismantled it. Amelie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White, in an influential study, argued that the "wholesale destruction of Babylon's temples" is largely a later, hostile tradition rather than an established fact: Babylonian administrative documents show the Esagila cult continuing to function after Xerxes, and the archaeological evidence does not support a deliberate razing. What Xerxes DID do at Babylon was political: after the revolts he dropped the traditional title "king of Babylon," reorganised the satrapy, and tightened control. The lesson is that a genuine political crackdown on a rebellious city was retold by later, unfriendly sources as an act of religious sacrilege.

Egypt and the Greek temples burned in 480 BC

Two further cases are usually cited. In Egypt, Xerxes inherited a revolt that had broken out at the end of Darius's reign and suppressed it (486 to 484 BC), governing with a firmer hand than his father. Unlike Darius, who had presented himself as a temple-building pharaoh, Xerxes appears far less in the Egyptian temple record, which some read as neglect or hostility, though claims of active temple destruction in Egypt are debated and thin.

In Greece, during the invasion of 480 to 479 BC, Xerxes' forces burned the temples of the Athenian Acropolis (480 BC), leaving the "Persian debris" layer later found by archaeologists, and destroyed other shrines such as the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. Herodotus presents these as impious acts. But most historians read them as strategic and retaliatory: temple-burning was a normal instrument of ancient warfare, and the Greeks themselves had burned the temple of Cybele at Sardis in 498 BC during the Ionian Revolt, an act the Persians cited as justification. Herodotus even records Xerxes later making offerings, which does not fit a simple picture of a god-hating fanatic.

The royal fire cult

Achaemenid religion under Xerxes centred on Ahura Mazda and on fire. The clearest archaeological evidence is the royal tomb reliefs at Naqsh-e Rustam, which show the king standing on a raised platform before a fire altar, beneath a winged symbol (variously interpreted as Ahura Mazda himself or as the royal khvarnah, the divine glory of kingship, this identification is itself debated). Herodotus (Histories 1.131-132), writing as an outside Greek observer, reports that the Persians had no cult statues or roofed temples in the Greek sense, that they sacrificed to the sky and the elements in open, high places, and that a priestly class, the magi, presided over the rites and chanted a "theogony."

This fire-and-Ahura-Mazda cult is the positive core of Xerxes' religious policy: the daiva inscription's climax is not merely the destruction of false gods but the reverent worship of Ahura Mazda "in the right way." Whether this Achaemenid religion should be called "Zoroastrian," and how directly it connects to the prophet Zoroaster, is a long-standing scholarly debate best left open in an exam answer.

How to read a source on this topic

Section III sources on Xerxes' religious policy fall into two very different families, and the single most important skill is telling them apart.

First, distinguish royal Persian sources (the daiva inscription and the other royal texts, the Naqsh-e Rustam reliefs, Babylonian administrative tablets) from hostile Greek and later classical sources (Herodotus, Ctesias, and later Arrian and Strabo). The royal sources are ideological self-presentation: reliable for what the king CLAIMED and how he wished to be seen, unreliable as neutral event-reports. The Greek and classical sources are written by the enemy or long afterwards: invaluable as narrative, but shaped by the agenda of portraying Xerxes as an impious tyrant.

Second, for any Persian royal text, ask whether a statement is a report of an EVENT or a statement of IDEOLOGY. "I destroyed the daiva sanctuary" sits inside a formula about upholding Ahura Mazda's order, so it may be doing ideological work as much as recording history.

Third, always move from content to reliability to usefulness to perspective and reach a judgement, and use the modern historiography (Briant, Kuhrt) to control the ancient sources, not as decoration.

Historians on Xerxes' religious policy

The debate turns on how much weight to give the daiva inscription and how far to trust the hostile classical tradition. Ernst Herzfeld, who published XPh, gave it a historicist reading, treating it as evidence of a real campaign against a rebel people's cult. Pierre Briant (From Cyrus to Alexander, 2002) reframes it as formulaic royal ideology, order against chaos, and cautions against matching an undated text to specific events or to the Greek "persecutor" narrative. Amelie Kuhrt (with Susan Sherwin-White, and in her sourcebook The Persian Empire, 2007) argues the destruction of Babylon's temples is largely a later myth, reading Xerxes' Babylonian measures as political responses to revolt. Herodotus supplies the indispensable but hostile Greek narrative of the invasion and the temple-burnings, and must be handled with source criticism. Josef Wiesehofer (Ancient Persia, 1996) offers a balanced synthesis, stressing that Achaemenid kingship generally worked through local cults and elites, which makes a systematic persecution policy inherently unlikely.

Model exam responses

1. Source-analysis response (the daiva inscription). "The daiva inscription is highly useful as evidence for how Xerxes wished to present his religious role: it shows the king claiming to destroy the sanctuary of false gods and to worship Ahura Mazda in their place, by the god's favour. Its reliability as evidence of an actual campaign is limited, however, by two features: it gives neither a date nor a place, and it sits inside a standard royal formula about upholding order (arta) against the daivas of chaos. Following Briant, it is therefore most reliable as evidence of royal IDEOLOGY, what Xerxes claimed to be, and only speculatively useful, as Herzfeld hoped, as a record of a specific religious persecution."

Marker's note: markers reward candidates who separate "what the source claims" from "what it can prove," and who name the ideological formula rather than reading the text literally.

2. Essay paragraph (the Babylon tradition). "The charge that Xerxes destroyed Marduk's temple at Babylon shows how a political crackdown became a religious legend. Herodotus and later writers report the sack of Esagila and the removal of the god's statue after the revolts of 484 BC, and this long anchored the image of Xerxes the temple-destroyer. Yet Kuhrt and Sherwin-White demonstrated that the Babylonian evidence tells a different story: the Esagila cult continued to operate, and Xerxes' real measures, dropping the title 'king of Babylon' and reorganising the satrapy, were political responses to rebellion, not a religious purge. The persecution, in other words, is largely an artefact of hostile tradition rather than a finding of the contemporary record."

Marker's note: this paragraph scores because it uses a named modern historian's specific argument to reinterpret an ancient source, rather than repeating the classical tradition uncritically.

Command words and how to use a source

Outline/describe wants a small number of clearly separated, accurate points. Explain wants a point, evidence and why it matters, for example WHY the daiva inscription's formulaic character weakens the persecution reading. Assess/evaluate/to what extent wants a sustained argument reaching a supported judgement, not a list of Xerxes' religious acts.

Using a source properly means working through content (what does it actually claim), reliability (who produced it, when, for what purpose), usefulness (what question can it answer, and how far), and perspective (whose viewpoint, and what it leaves out). For a Persian royal text, always flag that it is ideological self-presentation; for Herodotus, always flag the hostile Greek perspective and the generation's distance from the events.

Weaving in historiography means using a historian's named position to build your argument, for example "as Kuhrt shows, the Babylonian record undercuts the destruction tradition," rather than dropping "Kuhrt disagrees" unconnected at the end of a paragraph.

Practice questions

Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.

foundation3 marksOutline the role of the god Ahura Mazda in Xerxes' royal ideology as expressed in his inscriptions.

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A 3-mark "outline" needs the god's identity, the king's relationship to him, and what that relationship justified.

Identity: Ahura Mazda ("the Wise Lord") was the supreme god of the Achaemenid kings, presented in the royal inscriptions as the creator of earth, sky, humanity and human happiness (1 mark).
The king's relationship: Xerxes' inscriptions repeatedly state that he is king "by the favour of Ahura Mazda," presenting the god as the source of his authority and the one who made him king (1 mark).
What it justified: This ideology framed Xerxes as the god's chosen agent, whose duty was to uphold order (arta, truth) against the Lie (drauga) and chaos, so his rule and his suppression of rebellion were cast as service to Ahura Mazda (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward candidates who link the god to the king's LEGITIMACY, not just name the deity.

foundation4 marksSource A: an ExamExplained reconstruction of a royal proclamation of the daiva-inscription type. It has the king declare that, by the favour of Ahura Mazda, in a land where daivas (false gods) had formerly been worshipped he destroyed their sanctuary, forbade their worship, and worshipped Ahura Mazda in their place. Using Source A and your own knowledge, describe what the daiva inscription claims about Xerxes' treatment of daiva-worship.

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A 4-mark "describe" needs the specific claim in the source plus supporting own knowledge.

Source use. Source A claims the king suppressed the worship of daivas ("false gods"): he destroyed their sanctuary, banned their cult by proclamation, and substituted the reverent worship of Ahura Mazda (1-2 marks).

Own knowledge. This reflects the actual daiva inscription (XPh), copies of which were found at Persepolis in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. It presents the act as a triumph of Ahura Mazda's order over the daivas, who in this religious tradition are false gods or demons opposed to truth (arta) (1-2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward candidates who report what the inscription CLAIMS without asserting, as fact, that a specific historical campaign is being described - that is the point of scholarly debate.

foundation3 marksOutline TWO features of Achaemenid Persian religious practice (the royal fire cult) as evidenced by the reliefs and by Herodotus.

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2 marks for one feature fully outlined, 3 for two features.

Feature 1: fire and open-air worship. Achaemenid religion centred on fire and on Ahura Mazda; royal tomb reliefs at Naqsh-e Rustam show the king standing on a platform before a fire altar beneath a winged symbol. Herodotus (Histories 1.131-132) reports the Persians had no cult statues or roofed temples in the Greek sense and sacrificed in open, high places.

Feature 2: the role of the magi. Herodotus records that a priestly class, the magi, officiated at sacrifices and chanted a "theogony," presiding over the correct ritual.

Marker's note: also credit the winged disc/figure above the king (variously read as Ahura Mazda or the royal khvarnah) or the absence of anthropomorphic cult images - but note Herodotus is an outsider's account.

core6 marksSource B: an ExamExplained reconstruction in the manner of a hostile Greek historian records that Xerxes, on capturing the Athenian Acropolis in 480 BC, burned its temples to the ground, and that the Greeks remembered this as sacrilege against their gods. Using Source B and your own knowledge, assess the usefulness and reliability of such a source as evidence for Xerxes' religious policy.

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A 6-mark "assess" needs content, usefulness, reliability/limitation and a judgement.

Content: Source B claims Xerxes deliberately burned the temples on the Athenian Acropolis in 480 BC and that Greeks regarded this as an act of impiety (1-2 marks).
Usefulness: It is useful evidence that Xerxes' forces did destroy Greek sacred sites during the invasion, an event corroborated by the archaeological "Persian debris" layer on the Acropolis and by the wider burning of Greek shrines (1-2 marks).
Reliability/limitation: As a Greek account written by the victims' side, it frames the burning as religious sacrilege and omits the strategic and retaliatory context: the Greeks had themselves burned the temple of Cybele at Sardis in 498 BC, and temple-burning was a normal act of ancient warfare, not necessarily a theological attack on Greek gods (1-2 marks).
Judgement: The source is reliable evidence that the burning HAPPENED and shaped Greek memory, but unreliable as evidence of Xerxes' MOTIVE; most historians read the burnings as strategic revenge rather than a religious crusade against foreign gods.

Marker's note: markers reward candidates who separate "the event occurred" from "why it occurred," and who note the hostile Greek perspective.

core6 marksExplain the scholarly debate over whether the daiva inscription (XPh) records a real religious campaign or is an ideological, formulaic statement.

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A 6-mark "explain" needs both positions, the reasoning behind each, and the significance of the disagreement.

The historicist reading: Ernst Herzfeld, who first published XPh, read the daiva passage as a record of a specific event: a real suppression of a particular rebellious people's cult, with the "daivas" being the gods of that people. On this reading the inscription is direct evidence of an actual religious campaign, and scholars have tried to match it to candidate targets (the Babylonian revolts, or the Greek temples burned in 480 BC) (2-3 marks).
The ideological reading: Pierre Briant cautions against this "concordance" approach. He argues the daiva passage is largely a formulaic expression of Achaemenid royal ideology: the king, as Ahura Mazda's agent, restores order (arta) by destroying the daivas, who represent chaos and the Lie (drauga). On this reading the passage need not describe any single dated event; it is a topos of the king upholding cosmic order (2-3 marks).
Significance: The debate matters because it decides whether Xerxes had a policy of active religious persecution or whether "persecution" is an over-literal reading of standard royal rhetoric. It also warns against forcing an undated ideological text to fit the Greek narrative of a tyrannical Xerxes (up to 1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward candidates who present BOTH readings and explain WHY the inscription's undated, formulaic character makes the historicist reading uncertain.

exam8 marksAssess the extent to which Xerxes pursued a policy of religious interference rather than tolerance of local cults.

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An 8-mark "assess the extent" needs both sides, dated evidence for each, historiography and a supported judgement.

Case for interference: The daiva inscription proclaims the destruction of a sanctuary and a ban on daiva-worship; the later Greek and classical tradition (Herodotus, Ctesias, Arrian, Strabo) claims Xerxes plundered the Esagila temple at Babylon and removed or melted the golden statue of Marduk (Bel) after the revolts of 484 BC; he dropped the traditional title "king of Babylon"; and in 480 BC his army burned the temples of the Athenian Acropolis and other Greek shrines (2-3 marks).
Case for tolerance/continuity: Much of the "destruction" tradition is now doubted: Amelie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White argued the wholesale destruction of Esagila is a later myth unsupported by the Babylonian evidence, which shows the temple functioning after Xerxes. Achaemenid kingship generally worked THROUGH local elites and cults (as Cyrus and Darius did), and the temple-burnings in Greece read as acts of war and retaliation (for Sardis, 498 BC), not a theological programme (2-3 marks).
Historiography: Herzfeld read XPh as a real campaign; Briant treats it as ideological and cautions against a persecution narrative; Kuhrt reframes the Babylon story as hostile tradition (2 marks).
Judgement: Xerxes interfered decisively where cults became foci of REVOLT or war (Babylon, Greece), but there is little evidence of a general, empire-wide campaign against local religion; "selective political interference," not systematic intolerance, best fits the evidence.

Marker's note: markers reward weighing the hostile Greek/late tradition against the revisionist scholarship, not simply reciting the "temple-destroyer" image.

exam25 marksESSAY. To what extent does the surviving evidence support the view that Xerxes conducted a deliberate campaign of religious persecution? In your response, refer to relevant sources and historians.

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A Band-6 response needs a clear thesis on "to what extent," argument lines tied to specific dated evidence, named historiography used as argument, a model paragraph, and a supported judgement.

Thesis. The image of Xerxes as a religious persecutor rests on an over-literal reading of ideological royal rhetoric (the daiva inscription) and on a hostile Greek and late classical tradition; the contemporary evidence, critically handled, supports selective interference with cults tied to REVOLT or war, not a deliberate, empire-wide campaign of religious persecution.

Argument line 1: the daiva inscription is ideological, not a proven campaign. XPh (copies found at Persepolis) proclaims that the king destroyed a daiva sanctuary and banned daiva-worship "by the favour of Ahura Mazda." Ernst Herzfeld read this as a record of a real suppression of a rebel people's cult. But Pierre Briant argues it is a formulaic statement of Achaemenid ideology, the king restoring arta (order/truth) by crushing the daivas (chaos, the Lie/drauga), and that the passage is undated and names no place, so matching it to a specific event is speculation.

Argument line 2: the Babylon "temple destruction" is largely later tradition. Herodotus (1.183) and later writers (Ctesias, Arrian, Strabo) claim Xerxes plundered Esagila and removed the statue of Marduk after the revolts of 484 BC. Amelie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White argued the wholesale destruction is a myth: Babylonian documents show Esagila still functioning, and Xerxes' real measures (dropping the title "king of Babylon," splitting the satrapy) were POLITICAL responses to rebellion, not a religious purge.

Argument line 3: the Greek temple-burnings were acts of war, not theology: In 480 BC Xerxes' army burned the temples of the Athenian Acropolis (an event visible in the Acropolis "Persian debris") and shrines such as Apollo's at Didyma. Herodotus frames this as impiety, but the burnings read as strategic revenge for the Greek burning of the temple of Cybele at Sardis in 498 BC; Herodotus even has Xerxes later make offerings, complicating the "persecutor" picture.
Model paragraph: The strongest case against the persecution thesis is that its best evidence is also its least reliable. The vivid "temple-destroyer" Xerxes comes overwhelmingly from Greek and later classical writers whose purpose was to cast the invader as an impious tyrant, the antithesis of Greek piety; Herodotus wrote a generation after the events, from the victims' side. When the daiva inscription is read, with Briant, as the standard language of a king upholding Ahura Mazda's order rather than a diary of a specific purge, and when the Babylon story is reassessed, with Kuhrt, against the Babylonian record that shows the cult surviving, the remaining hard evidence points to a ruler who struck at religion only where it fused with REVOLT or war, exactly as any Achaemenid king defending his empire would. Persecution as a settled policy is a construction of hostile tradition more than a finding of the contemporary sources.
Judgement: To only a limited extent: Xerxes interfered forcefully with specific cults bound up with rebellion and warfare, but the evidence for a deliberate, general campaign of religious persecution dissolves under source criticism.

Marker's note: Band 6 rewards a sustained "to what extent" judgement, precise dated evidence (484 BC revolts, 480 BC Acropolis, 498 BC Sardis), the ancient sources (XPh, Herodotus) handled critically, at least two modern historians (Briant, Kuhrt) used to build the argument, and explicit engagement with the counter-view rather than asserting one side.