I. Name

The personal name Hammadatha to be found in Esther. 3.1 represents the Iranian name *Haumadata, ‘given by hauma’ (or, in the Avestan form, ‘haoma’), which is common in Achaemenid territory (Mayrhofer 1973). Iranian haoma is the equivalent of the Indian form soma, a name which simply means ‘juice’. Soma, to which the 9th book of Rigveda is devoted, is a liquor extracted from a plant which is ground in a stone mortar, then filtered and lengthily clarified through a horsehair sieve. The drink, of…