What Was the Persian War Banner, the Derafsh?

A long staff, the length depending on the period and the bearer, supporting either a richly embroidered cloth or a plate of metal, bearing the image of a sun, a star, or a king on horseback. That is the Derafsh in its mature Sasanian form, and the form most Iranians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will recognise from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the Pahlavi rock reliefs, and the surviving coins. Its capture by the Arab armies at the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in 636 CE is treated, in the Iranian tradition, as the symbolic end of the Sasanian state.

The wider context is covered in the Persian Military and Warfare pillar and the Persian Immortals cluster, while the question of weapons and standards is treated in the associated long-tail article on weapons.

The name and the meaning

The word Derafsh in Middle Persian means “standard” or “banner,” and is cognate with the Old Persian drafša, which is used in the Achaemenid inscriptions to refer to a royal standard. The compound Derafsh Kaviani is a later Sasanian and post-Sasanian attribution, and it means “the banner of the Kayanids,” referring to the legendary dynasty of pre-Zoroastrian Iran. The Kayanids, in the Zoroastrian tradition, were the second great dynasty of Iranian legend, succeeding the mythical Pishdadians. The attribution of the banner to the Kayanids is a way of giving the royal standard an ancient and venerable pedigree, and the tradition of the Derafsh as the symbol of legitimate Iranian kingship has persisted in Iranian national memory for more than two millennia.

A note on the “black banner” that the popular imagination sometimes transfers onto the Derafsh: that epithet belongs to the Abbasid revolutionary tradition, not to the Sasanian. The Sasanian Derafsh was an embroidered or metal-worked royal emblem; the black banners of the Abbasid revolution were a different object, and the conflation is a modern slip.

The mythical origin: the smith Kaveh

The legendary origin of the Derafsh is told in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the great Persian national epic completed in the early eleventh century CE. According to Ferdowsi, the banner was originally a blacksmith’s apron, hung on a pole, and carried into battle by the legendary blacksmith Kaveh, who led the people of Iran in revolt against the tyrannical foreign ruler Zahhak. The banner, which was associated with the legendary Kayanid kings, became the symbol of legitimate Iranian resistance to foreign tyranny.

The story of Kaveh and the apron is a legend, but it is a legend with structural meaning. The smith or metalworker, in the ancient Iranian tradition, was a figure of religious and political significance, and the tradition of using a metalworker’s apron as a banner may reflect an older cult of the smith as a sacred figure. The Shahnameh’s telling is the foundation of the Sasanian and post-Sasanian tradition of the Derafsh as a symbol of Iranian national identity, and the Sasanian kings, who saw themselves as the heirs of the Kayanid tradition, took the legend seriously as a charter of legitimacy.

The Achaemenid and Parthian standards

The use of royal standards in the Persian army is well attested in the Achaemenid period. The reliefs of Persepolis show a complete range of standards, including a hawk or falcon on a standard used by the royal guard, and the Greek sources refer repeatedly to the Persian use of standards in battle. The standards of the Achaemenid army were carried at the head of regiments, and the loss of a standard in battle was a serious blow to the prestige of the unit. The Achaemenid drafša, however, was probably a more varied and less standardised object than the later Sasanian Derafsh, and the term itself may have referred to a range of different objects.

The Parthian army, according to the Greek and Roman sources, used a variety of standards. The famous dragon standard of the Parthians, a wind-filled device used in battle to frighten the enemy, is mentioned by several Greek and Roman authors, most famously by Plutarch in his account of the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE. The Parthian standard, like the Achaemenid, was carried at the head of the army and served as a rallying point. The dragon standard is a separate object from the Derafsh Kaviani and should not be confused with it.

The Sasanian Derafsh Kaviani

The Sasanian Derafsh Kaviani is the most famous and the most fully documented of the Persian royal standards. The Sasanian banner consisted of a long shaft, often of considerable length, supporting a richly embroidered cloth or a plate of metal bearing the image of the sun, the moon, the stars, or the king on horseback. The banner was carried into battle by a special officer, the Derafshbed, and it was the symbol of the King of Kings and of the legitimacy of the Sasanian dynasty. The Derafsh was a sacred object, and the ritual of raising it marked the opening of a campaign and the formal assumption of command.

The Sasanian Derafsh, in the surviving Pahlavi sources, was associated with a number of legendary and religious attributes. The banner was said to have been a gift of the gods to the legendary king Jamshid, and it was supposed to bring victory to the army that carried it. The Derafsh, in the Zoroastrian tradition, was one of the sacred objects of Iranian kingship, and the loss of the Derafsh in defeat was a disaster of the first order.

The Derafsh in battle

The Derafsh played a central role in Persian battle tactics. The banner was carried at the head of the army, and it served as a visual rallying point in the smoke and confusion of the battle. The Derafsh was also a tactical instrument: its presence at a particular point of the line signalled the commitment of the imperial reserves, and its movement was a way of communicating orders to the troops. The Greek and Roman sources, in describing the Persian battles of the fifth to seventh centuries, often refer to the presence of the royal standard, and the loss of the standard is a recurring theme in the accounts of Persian defeats. According to the Pahlavi sources, the banner was entrusted to the Derafshbed, one of the senior officers of the Sasanian army, and the loss of the Derafsh in battle was a disaster that could only be repaired by the appointment of a new one from the royal treasury.

The capture at al-Qadisiyyah

The Derafsh was captured by the Arab armies at the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in 636 CE and sent, with the other royal treasures, to the caliph Umar in Medina. The capture of the Derafsh was a major symbolic event in the Arab conquest, and the disposition of the Derafsh in the caliphal treasury became a measure of the legitimacy of the Arab rulers of Persia. The tradition of the Derafsh as a symbol of Iranian national identity, however, survived the Arab conquest, and the Derafsh was raised in revolt against the caliphs on a number of occasions during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods.

Abu Muslim’s revolt against the Umayyad caliphate in 747–750 CE used black banners as the symbol of the revolution; the conflation of those banners with the Sasanian Derafsh is a modern slip. The Sasanian Derafsh remained, in the Iranian tradition, the symbol of legitimate Iranian kingship, and was raised in revolt on a number of occasions, including the Sunpadh movement in Khorasan and the Buyid revival of Iranian kingship in the tenth century.

The afterlife

The Derafsh, in the form of the alam of the Shia imams, became a symbol of Shia political and religious identity, and the tradition of the Derafsh as a sacred object of Iranian kingship has been a feature of Persian national consciousness ever since. The Buyid, Samanid, Ghaznavid, Seljuk, Ilkhanid, Timurid, and Safavid dynasties all used a form of the Derafsh as a symbol of legitimacy, and the tradition of the Derafsh has persisted, in various forms, into the modern era — a thread running through two and a half millennia of Iranian political tradition, and, in my view, one of the most striking examples of the durability of a political symbol in world history.