Kartīr, Public Authority, and the Language of Mazda-Worship in Third-Century Sasanian Inscriptions

This article reads Kartīr’s Middle Persian inscriptions as some of the most significant surviving evidence for third-century Sasanian epigraphy and Mazda-worshipping public culture, with close attention to the public conditions under which that evidence was fashioned. The inscriptions at Naqš-e Rajab, Naqš-e Rostam, the Naqš-e Rostam tower conventionally known as the Kaʿba-ye Zardušt, and Sar Mašhad are treated as acts of priestly-political self-representation, in which administrative and doctrinal claims are staged through epigraphic form. Read beside royal inscriptional practice, especially Šāpur I’s trilingual inscription on the Naqš-e Rostam tower and, more selectively, Narseh’s Paikuli inscription, Kartīr’s texts articulate a priestly grammar of authority within the early Sasanian political order. The evidence gathers where royal proximity authorises office, office presses into institutional extension, territorial ordering carries priestly standing outward, and moral classification links public memory to the inscriptional presentation of reward and punishment. Mazda-worship functions in these texts as a public vocabulary through which priestly authority becomes visible, authorised, and remembered. At the same time, their programmatic and commemorative character fixes the archive’s limits, since the inscriptions show how Kartīr wished authority to appear while leaving the administrative reach, social consequences, and doctrinal completeness of his claims unresolved. This open-access working paper / preprint presents research in progress and has not undergone peer review. Comments and corrections are welcome. A revised and expanded version may subsequently be prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.