Ǝrəxša’s Death or Self-Sacrifice: The Ancient Iranian Saga of the Archer

The figure of the archer hero Ǝrəxša (in New Persian Araš) met a strange fate in the Iranian epic: celebrated with two fleeting hints in the Avestan hymn to Sirius, in which the luminous pulsation of the arrowhead he himself shoots is compared to the brilliance of the brightest star in the firmament, is evoked in order to announce the following victory of the god Tištrya over his enemies. Unfortunately, his cycle does not find particular developments in the Middle Iranian sources, and only re-emerges through scattered testimonies, above all Arab-Islamic, in later times. Yet the myth of Ǝrəxša seems to have played a foundational role in the Parthian identity and should not have been extraneous to the Achaemenian tradition itself, at least from what we can infer from the emphasis attributed to the symbolism of the arrow, the bow and the archer in this cultural framework. The present contribution tries to develop some of the issues related to this peculiar situation, starting with the probable Sassanian “censorship” against the use of such a heroic cycle too closely tied to the Parthian sphere (and therefore inevitably compromised from a “Persian” perspective), and then discussing some recent theories relating to the death of  Araš, as variously transmitted in a number of Islamic sources. A philological appendix focuses on some aspects of the Avestan rhetoric and technical composition within an oral framework and discusses its transmission in the textual Vorlage of the Avestan corpus of the hymns.