Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Ocus actually goes through a whole pogrom

of Xerxes' courtiers.

So all the old guard who used to look after Xerxes, advise him, they're all executed.

So this is a fresh start.

And I think that those incredible diver inscriptions were probably hacked off the walls under Artaxerxes' first instructions.

And there's also a very interesting thing as well, because at the center of the two staircases in the great Apadana at Persepolis,

There were once this big relief of a king and his crown prince standing together.

And that was probably meant to be Xerxes and Prince Darius.

that they were hacked off the wall too.

They weren't destroyed, but they were put away in the treasury, out of sight, out of mind.

And I think that, again, is on the order of Artaxerxes, trying to get rid of his father.

So we have a complete change around, don't we, of this idea that Xerxes was so reliant on his link with his father, but Artaxerxes wants to kind of distance himself from his father.

In his official inscriptions, Attic Xerxes will say, I am the son of Xerxes, the son of Darius, the son of Hystapses.

So he gives the line there, but he'd rather get back to, you know, being an Achaemenid and just using that title really than lingering with his father.

So he just doesn't stop at, I am the son of Xerxes.

I think there's something in that, you know, because what we find in these next lot of Achaemenid kings, Ataxerxes I, Darius II, Ataxerxes II,

is far more evidence of them worshipping other Persian gods, such as Anahita, Mithra.

So was Xerxes trying to get rid of all deities apart from Ahura Mazda?

Was there really a kind of religious revolution underway?

Was something like that going on?