Sacred Kingship in Ancient Iran: The Symbolic Language of Royalty in Achaemenid and Sasanian Ideologies

This contribution offers a synthesis of some very relevant aspects of the ancient Iranian kingship, from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian period, on which a number of new and more precise considerations have been proposed in the last twenty years of research in the field by the preset author. Prof. Panaino has already discussed some of these problems that will be revisited here, although this study develops the investigation dedicated to some particular aspects that remain unclear, or that are insufficiently defined within our current debate.