by Harvey Kraft
Once the Magi in the name of Marduk had placed the throne in Gautama’s hands, the wily plan would go into motion. Their next move was designed to stop Kambujiya from returning to Babylon and reclaim his right to the throne.
Kambujiya, as the son of Cyrus the Great and grandson of Ach-aemenes, the founder of the Persian dynasty, was the rightful emperor in the bloodline, but the Persian nobles had had enough of him. As emperor, pharaoh, and self-proclaimed living god he had unlimited power and a reputation for unstable behavior. His drunken and egomaniacal bouts caused his courtiers to fear his rage. He had on occasion plunged his sword into one of his advisors. The next day he would be sorry, but his erratic pattern of behavior would not change. The Persian conspirators determined that he would have to be assassinated, but needed to do so surreptitiously. To avoid being identified as traitors to their own kind, they would have to make it look like they had nothing to do with his death.
Once Kambujiya learned that the Magi Order had vacated his throne, he quickly departed Egypt for Babylon. On the way back he camped at the head of the Tigris-Euphrates in Syria where he was met by a group of Persian military leaders who came to report to him on the situation ahead. Unbeknownst to Kambujiya, the mission was composed of agents allied with Darius, and possibly included Darius himself. They rode out to intercept Kambujiya and kill him before he could return to Babylon. They cornered him alone in his royal tent and used his own sword to kill him.
The official story, according to Darius, was that Kambujiya had died of “natural causes” just as he was leaving Egypt or on his way back to Babylon. To explain his sword wounds, another story claimed that he tripped and fell on his own sword. The bleeding could not be stopped. He then died of self-inflicted wounds.
Meanwhile, Babylon under the caretaker government of the Magi saw what it would be like to be ruled by a philosopher-king.83 Siddhar-tha Gautama had been reluctant to accept the Magi’s request that he take on the responsibility of king, unless he could use the post to bring some relief to the population. As Chief Magus he had been in charge of the distribution of basic goods to the needy of Babylon. In the role of king, he could do more for the people who had suffered for so long under repressive regimes. He quickly issued edicts lowering taxes, freeing slaves, opening up farmlands, and allowing citizens to have more rights and opportunities.
But Gautama refused to physically sit on the throne in the emperor’s palace, or to announce that he was king. He remained in Esagila. But word spread in Babylon that Gautama and the Magi were behind the changes being made to benefit the populace at large.
That’s when the Persian conspirators began to spread rumors that the Magi Order had illegally usurped the throne. Although they only intended for their chief to hold the position during the absence of the emperor, now with the death of Kambujiya, the Magi had a dilemma. According to the Persian nobles, the Magi pretended that Kambujiya’s brother, Bardiya, was brought to the royal palace in Babylon to assume power. But, as he was already dead, they said, the so-called Bardiya on the throne must be an imposter posing as a figurehead while the Chief Magus continued to issue new policies and edicts that favored the Order’s compatriots.
Darius had been plotting behind the scenes. He was a shrewd student of the political methods of Cyrus. He learned how to cultivate powerful social, religious and military connections. He worked his way up through military ranks, just as Cyrus had done, putting himself in position to take control of the Persian Empire.
Under Kambujiya the empire’s hold on its vassal kingdoms had weakened. The Persian nobles foresaw that rebellions were brewing and feared that the empire might not hold. But they could not have expected that once under Gautama’s leadership those seeking more autonomy would find support at the top. The transitional period, they hoped, would be uneventful before they would take back the throne. But now it appeared that the change created an immanent threat to the empire’s future.
As Darius and his cohorts moved to execute their plan, they were already well aware of the resistance they would expect from a host of kingdoms. Taking back the throne would not be without incident, but they had planned on a bit more time to build up the size of the Persian armies. Seeing Gautama taking an active leadership role contrary to their interests, they resolved to move faster.
Under pressure they launched their campaign to shape the news reaching the public. Darius and his supporters accused the Magi of placing an imposter on the throne in a grab for power. The imposter, they called “Gaumâta,” supposedly pretended to be Kambujiya’s brother Bardiya. But this was a lie, they cried out. The Magi they charged probably killed the real Bardiya.
To give credence to their accusation, the Persians brought out a witness. Prexaspes, Kambujiya trusted aide, would reveal what really happened to Bardiya.
Apparently, Prexaspes said, Kambujiya had heard that the Magi Order were planning to bring back his brother Bardiya to take his throne. Refusing to believe that Bardiya was still alive, he ordered Prexaspes, the aide whom he had instructed to assassinate Bardiya, to be brought before him. Prexaspes confessed to Kambujiya that indeed he had not killed Bardiya as Kambujiya had ordered years earlier.84 Instead, he admitted, he had turned over Bardiya to the Magi Order in Medes. They had apparently learned of Kambujiya’s plot to kill Bardiya, he said, and persuaded him that it was wiser to let them hide the young prince in Medes. They assured Prexaspes that Kambujiya would never find out. But once the decision was made to vacate the throne in Babylon, Prexaspes told Kambujiya, they brought Bardiya out of hiding to use him to control the throne on their behalf. Hearing of this conspiracy Kambujiya flew into an uncontrollable rage, and, accidently “fell on his sword,” Prexaspes testified.
But, according to the Persian conspirators, once the Magi Order learned that Kambujiya had died, rather than returning Bardiya to the throne as Prexaspes expected they would, the Magi Order substituted an imposter for him. As Bardiya was a stranger to Babylon, his face would be unfamiliar to the royal court in that city. By hiding an imposter in the emperor’s palace in Babylon, the Persian nobles contended, the Magi believed they could get away with claiming he was back without anyone being the wiser to the notion that the Chief Magus Gautama was in charge.
Otanes, one of the Persian conspirators had a daughter, Pahidime, one of Kambujiya’s wives, who lived in the royal palace. She related that she had spotted a strange man in the emperor’s throne room. She told, he said, that this man pretended to be Bardiya. She described him as a short man, an imp, with both of his ears cut off, the mark of a man who had been punished for some past criminal enterprise, and certainly not the expected appearance of a royal.85 Otanes said that his daughter was frightened by threats that she might be killed for exposing the truth about the imposter pretending to be Bardiya.
Traditionally, Mesopotamian seer-advisors protected their kings by sending a surrogate whenever they encountered detrimental astrological information. For example, if they suspected the possibility of assassination or some other danger they would place an “imposter” on the throne. If their suspicions proved correct, the imposter would bear the consequences, and the monarch would live. It may have been that the Magi deposited an imposter in the palace when the omens of danger to Gautama had surfaced.
A CONVENIENT SUICIDE
The inscriptions Darius had left for posterity named the imposter-king “Gaumâta“ in an effort to mock the good name of the Chief Magus. But he also described him as a Magi and a stargazer. Notwithstanding such disparaging stories about an earless, occultist imposter at the helm of the empire, the real Siddhartha Gautama was tall and known for his long ears.
The Persians claimed that the Magi Order tried to gain legitimacy by pretending that an Achaemenid king still sat on the throne, while in actuality their governance undermined the Persian Empire. In actuality, they charged, the Magi hid behind Bardiya’s name in order to confiscate Persian landholdings and grant them to the ruling class allied with the Magi Order based in Ecbata
na in Medes.
And to make it appear that the Persians were enemies of the people, Darius contended, the Magi ordered the burning down of certain temples and then accused the Persians of these atrocities. Such actions were wicked attempts to weaken the Persian Empire, he charged, part of a cynical conspiracy to enrich and return sovereign power to the former Median Empire whose aristocracy had held power prior to the rise of Cyrus.
To avert this shameful pretense, Darius and his noble friends declared that they must right this wrong. One fateful evening, they made their move. Darius claimed that they entered the palace in Babylon to discover that the imposter emperor had escaped, but after a long chase they caught up with him. Darius I, now the self-proclaimed new Persian Emperor (522–486 BCE), had “confessed”86 to the public that he and his noble allies personally tracked down the imposter “Gaumâta” to a castle in Medes where they stabbed him to death.
Whom did they kill? Was it the imposter-imp they named “Gaumâta?” Or could it have been Bardiya himself, whom the Magi supposedly had placed on the throne or perhaps kept him there in hiding? Or, could it be that the whole story of the chase to kill the imposter was a complete fabrication?
To suppose that they chased the imposter from Babylon to Medes in a single night lacks credibility since the distance they would have had to travel to the castle in Medes was much too far to travel in such a short time. In addition, the witnesses whom Darius cited to corroborate his story of the stabbing were all his own noble conspirators.
Based on this elaborate misdirection, Darius justified his taking of the throne as a rescue of the Persian Empire from a conspiracy hatched by the Magi Order in league with Medes nobles. He accused the Magi Order of vacating Kambujiya’s throne in the first place as part of a diabolical plan to instigate popular rebellions against Persian rule, land ownership, and administration.
An addendum to the cover stories justifying the Persian “reclamation” of the Achaemenid throne included the convenient suicide of Prexaspes, upon whose word the veracity of the entire episode rested. The Persian nobles reported that he had climbed atop a rooftop in the Persian capital of Susa to address a crowd that he expected to be largely sympathetic with the Persian version. He shouted his story from the rooftop, recounting that Kambujiya had ordered him to kill Bardiya. He revealed how the Magi had convinced him to let them hide the prince. But recently, he declared, he had learned from Persian nobles in the know that the Magi had fooled him. Rather than bringing back Bardiya, who became the rightful Persian heir to the throne upon the death of Kambujiya, the Magi had instead placed an imposter on the throne. Prexaspes cried out in disillusionment and despair that the Magi had deceived him into believing that they had protected Bardiya and offered him safe harbor.
“What did they do with Bardiya?” he shouted down.
From his rooftop platform Prexaspes saw that those gathered below waived their clenched fists in the air and called for revenge. Prexaspes mistakenly thought that they did not believe his story and were calling for him to be arrested for Bardiya’s murder.
According to the Persian nobles who told this story the crowd was actually incensed with the Magi Order. But Prexaspes misunderstood their reaction. Scared and despondent, he jumped to his death.
Was this story true? Did he commit suicide, or was Prexaspes eliminated to silence him after he served his purpose?
Indeed, if Prexaspes admitted to murdering Bardiya years earlier as ordered by Kambujiya, the charges against the Magi would not be credible. The entire basis for the coup would come apart. His denial of the murder as told to Kambujiya and then his tale of disappointment at being fooled by the Magi appeared to be a convenient story that would benefit the Persian conspirators. Moreover, if the missing Bardiya did survive, certainly Darius and his conspirators would have needed to eliminate him as well. In any case, as the veracity of the entire episode hung on the word of Prexaspes, his “leap” from a rooftop would assure the conspirators that he could no longer speak of Bardiya’s fate.
As winners usually write history in their best interest, the only information available about this episode comes from Darius, his Persian collaborators, and from hearsay that spread from Persia to other kingdoms long after the reign of Darius. What was missing from their version of history was the real story.
They had concocted and successfully executed an elaborate plot that included a dethroning, assassination, military coup, execution, and fake suicide. They facilitated the removal of Kambujiya from the throne in Babylon, murdered him, accused the Magi of usurping the throne, seized the throne for Darius, killed the imposter, and eliminated the one person who might expose them, and yet, there was more to it.
While they covered their tracks, the story contained a number of inconsistencies. Darius and his cohorts made several preposterous assertions: (1) the Magi Order hid Bardiya, thus taking sides against the Emperor Kambujiya in favor of his Achaemenid brother; (2) the Magi Order connived to put a criminal imp on the throne by pretending he was Bardiya while their Chief Magus ruled; (3) the Magi Order threatened Persian nobles living in the palace with death if they told the truth; (4) the Magi Order burned down temples and framed the Persians for it; and (5) Siddhartha Gautama, the Chief Magus, orchestrated this power grab to make the nobles in Medes richer.
Earlier on the evening of the coup Siddhartha Gautama had departed Esagila for parts unknown. He had slipped away into the dead of night. Within days of his disappearance, as word circulated about the coup that placed Darius at the helm, several kingdoms mounted insurgencies against the Persians. The new emperor immediately marshaled his military to suppress the resistance.
Darius said he was forced to crush nineteen rebellions in the wake of his ascendency to the throne. He destroyed rebel communities, mutilated their captured leaders, and burned down temples. Most likely, Darius’s forces fostered and directed enraged Persian mobs seeking vengeance on the demonized Magi to destroy the Vedic temples. And yet his pronouncements presented him as a benevolent ruler who rescued the temples. Just as Cyrus shrewdly blamed Nabonidus for defiling sacred idols, Darius had used a similar tactic to accuse “Gaumâta” and the Magi Order of destroying temples, which he quickly rushed to rebuild by using government funds and rations to help victims.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Emperor Darius thanked the Persian deity, the Supreme God Assura Mazda, for choosing him as the rightful heir to the throne of the King of Kings. His declaration that Assura Mazda (alt spelling Ahura Mazda) was his Lord God confirmed his undeniable alliance with god’s messenger, Zoroaster.
Darius endorsed the Zoroastrian faith as his state religion, just as his mentor initiated a purge of the interfaith Magi. With the departure of Gautama, Zoroaster would remake the order into a Zoroastrian-only organization. For generations to come, the Persian Empire and the Zoroastrian faith would be partners.
Zarathustra Spitamas, the Zoroaster of Achaemenid Persia, may have been the son of a wealthy Persian noble, and brother-in-law to both Kambujiya and Darius. His half-sister, a widow of Kambujiya, remarried Darius shortly after he came to power.
Zarathustra had been a teacher and advisor to Darius from his youth. He was also a benefactor of Prexaspes who certainly would have confessed to him when Kambujiya ordered him to murder Bardiya. A brilliant tactician, and a member of the interfaith Magi community under Gautama, Spitamas surely had to be the mastermind behind the multifaceted plan to replace Kambujiya with Darius, gain control of the Magi Order, and strengthen Persian military control of the empire.
Darius and Zoroaster had to have met many times as the plot hatched.87
Zoroaster appealed to Mazda for the power to vanquish his foes. The influence of his “Religion of the Future” spread when a wealthy patron, Vishtaspa, who may or may not have been the father of Darius, helped him establish the first “Zoroastrian community”88 in Persia. He opposed the overthrow of Gautama, but may have been assuaged when Zoroaster predicted that Darius would become empero
r of the world.
Zoroaster was most keen on replacing what he regarded as the “evil” Magi Order with a community of his own. In particular, he may have feared that the philosopher-seer Gautama was planning to create what he regarded as a “blasphemous new religion.”
He wrote a hymn calling for Assura Mazda to bring death and bloody punishment to his opponents. Within these lines (names in parenthesis are added), Gautama and the Magi appear to be advocates of evil who deserve to be killed:
So they whose deeds are evil (Gautama/Magi), let them be deceived, and let them all howl, and be abandoned to ruin. Through good rulers (Darius) let Him (Ahuramazda) bring death and bloodshed upon them (Gautama/Magi), and [restore] unto happy villagers peace from them (Gautama/Magi). [May] He (Ahuramazda) who is greatest with the lord of death, bring grief onto them [i.e., kill them] and let it be soon.’89
Although the emperor repeatedly lauded Assura Mazda without mentioning his messenger Zoroaster, it is unlikely that the popular Persian deity90 could be viewed as independent of Zoroastrianism. Darius’ worship of this god serves as clear proof of the important role Zoroaster held within the Achaemenid power elite.
But Zoroaster’s name was conspicuously missing from Darius’ Bisu-tun Inscriptions at Persepolis.91 Was a substitute name used, did Zoroaster stay out of governmental affairs and records, or did a low profile serve his purpose to remain behind the scenes? For political purposes, Darius needed deniability regarding any involvement in the death of Kambujiya. Similarly, it was politically expedient for Zoroaster to keep his true role hidden in regards to the conspiracy and the purge of the Magi Order.
