Many Zoroastrians today bury their dead beneath concrete slabs, though some Parsi in India still practice sky burials.

Then they were collected and placed in lime pits called ossuaries.ĭakhmas have been illegal in Iran since the 1970s. There corpses were exposed to the elements-and local vultures-until the bones were picked clean and bleached. Zoroastrians gave their dead “sky burials.” They built circular, flat-topped towers called dakhmas, or towers of silence. He ruled by the Zoroastrian law of asha (truth and righteousness) but didn’t impose Zoroastrianism on the people of Persia’s conquered territories. By most accounts, Cyrus was a tolerant ruler who allowed his non-Iranian subjects to practice their own religions. It was the state religion of three major Persian dynasties.Ĭyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, was a devout Zoroastrian. Zoroastrianism shaped one of the ancient world’s largest empires-the mighty Persia Empire. The temple dates to the second millennium B.C., making it the earliest known site associated with Zoroastrianism.

In the 1990s, Russian archaeologists at Gonur Tepe, a Bronze Age site in Turkmenistan, discovered the remains of what they believed to be an early Zoroastrian fire temple. Zoroaster began teaching followers to worship a single god called Ahura Mazda. According to Zoroastrian tradition, Zoroaster had a divine vision of a supreme being while partaking in a pagan purification rite at age 30.

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