Shapur I's Ka'ba-ye Zartosht Inscription Founds Five Sasanian Fire Temples

Thirty eight years after the Sasanian dynasty made Zoroastrianism Persia's state religion in 224, already recorded here, and three hundred seventy one years before the Arab conquest ended Zoroastrian rule in Persia beginning in 633, also recorded here, the Sasanian king Shapur I carved the empire's clearest surviving record of how that state religion was built into stone and endowment. Around 262 CE, following his victories over three Roman emperors, Shapur inscribed his own trilingual account of his reign, in Middle Persian, Parthian and Greek, on the walls of the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht at Naqsh-e Rostam, near Persepolis. Alongside his genealogy, his provinces and his Roman campaigns, the inscription lists five fire temples he founded and endowed for the souls of himself and named members of his royal family, each with fixed daily offerings of bread, wine and sheep, naming the priests responsible for maintaining the cult in perpetuity. Encyclopaedia Iranica's dedicated entry on the monument reads the endowments as the clearest datable evidence of how the early Sasanian state materially built the fire cult into its own royal household rather than leaving Zoroastrian worship to informal practice. Richard N. Frye's academic history of ancient Iran, which supplies a full English translation of the inscription, situates it as the fullest surviving royal statement of Sasanian religious policy before the dynasty's later, more doctrinally assertive kings.