Kartir’s inscriptions and the rise of the Zoroastrian priesthood

Kartir first appears in Shapur I’s great inscription as one of the court dignitaries, a hērbed (priest) who, by his own account, followed the king’s campaigns and set up sacred fires and priests in the conquered lands. Hormizd I gave him the cap and belt of the high nobility and made him chief priest (mowbed) of Ohrmazd. Under Bahram I he and other priests turned the king against Mani, who was arrested and died in prison at Gundeshapur (between 274 and 277; the year is disputed). Bahram II (274–293) raised him to the rank of grandee, made him judge of the whole empire and gave him charge of the fire temple of Anahid at Istakhr.

Kartir left four inscriptions of his own — by Richard Payne’s account, no other Sasanian priest produced inscriptions on such a scale — and all were carved in the reign of Bahram II: beneath Shapur’s inscription on the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht (around 280), at Naqsh-e Rostam, at Naqsh-e Rajab beside a relief bust of him, and at Sar Mashhad; the longer texts also describe a vision of a journey to the Zoroastrian otherworld. He boasts that the religion and its priests gained great authority, that fire temples were founded and priests supported across the empire, and that “the Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Nazarenes, Christians, Baptizers, and Manichaeans were struck” and idols destroyed.

How far these claims describe real events is debated. Jewish and Christian sources of the time say nothing of a persecution, and persecution is clearly attested only for the Manichaeans. Richard Payne reads the inscription as a programme of subordination rather than elimination: the “doctrine of Ahriman” was to be expelled and idols destroyed, while groups that were merely “struck”, such as Jews and Christians, were to be disciplined. In the inscription of Narseh, who seized the throne in 293, Kartir appears only as mowbed of Ohrmazd, and then he disappears from the record. His inscriptions remain the main contemporary witness to the building of an organised Zoroastrian priesthood under the early Sasanians.