Zoroastrianism
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A collective religion in an individualistic age
Razib Khan argues that Kurds embracing Zoroastrianism show why people leaving Islam may reasonably return to ancestral faiths, treats the objection that ancestors weren’t really Hindu as pedantic, and notes…
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Westernmost India
Razib Khan cites Isidorus of Charax’s Parthian Stations, which calls the Helmand region White India, to argue that Buddhism carried Indian cultural influence into the Iranian world’s eastern fringe, and…
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Live Blogging-Endangered Zoroastrian Heritage of Iran
Live notes on Saloumeh Gholami’s talk on endangered Zoroastrian heritage in Kerman and Yazd, especially Zoroastrian Dari (Gavri), a critically endangered language closer to Kurdish than Persian, losing speakers to…
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From Sintashta to Samarkand
Live notes from Professor Richard Foltz’s Cambridge lecture on Sintashta and Samarkand. They record his claims that Sintashta remains underlie Vedic ritual, that Indo-Iranians called themselves Arya, and that Bactria-Margiana…
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The Kalash of Iran
Prompted by a family story of Zoroastrians becoming Baha’is, the author argues that the Baha’i Faith has reduced Iran’s Zoroastrian and Jewish minorities, while its converts keep Persian identity, and…
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Iran as a modern Zoroastrian nation
A speculative satire imagining Iranians returning to Zoroastrianism after a counter-revolution: Isfahan’s square torn down, Persepolis rebuilt, Muslim heritage neglected, the Persian language purged of Arabic words, and the Muslim…
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Semitised Iran, Aryanised India
X.T.M argues that modern Persian identity owes more to Safavid and Islamic-era figures such as Sa’adi, Ferdowsi and Hafez than to Achaemenid or Sasanian pride, and that Persian has wrapped…
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Will the last Parsi to die please blow out the sacred fire?
Defending the Jiyo Parsi campaign to lift the Parsi birth rate against a liberal article likening it to a khap panchayat, the author argues descendants of Persia’s persecuted Zoroastrians should…
