Shapur Zol Aktaf
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2013
- Messages
- 3,711
- Reaction score
- -6
- Country
- Location
The most important thing is how Iranian people and society (including shia muslims) views zoroastrianism today? I can say since 100 years ago till now there is only progress in positive view towards zoroastrianism. This is what counts, not what the rulers think. Even bloody mongols could not hold power in Iran. Most important aspect is how the society thinks.
About the issue of death and what should happen with the corpse, I think Zoroastrian religion is a flexible religion which has values which are surprisingly very advanced/modern, for example not polluting waters. The same can be said about burials, they're actually bad for environment and new methods are still created, for example:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.th...-dried-death-promession-cremation-burial/amp/
Inthe past zoroastrians had kind of above the ground tombs/Graves/coffins:
In the Parthian period, according to Isidore of Charax, kings were buried in royal tombs (Gk. basilikai taphai, at Parthaunisa; Caracalla is recorded to have sacked the tombs of later Parthian kings at Arbela), and burial in slipper-shaped ceramic coffins was also common. In pre-Christian Armenia, whose religion was particularly strongly influenced by the Zoroastrianism of the Parthians, similar forms of interment were common, the word for a coffin, tapan, being a loan from Middle Iranian. Such practices undoubtedly continued in Armenia into the Sasanian period, when in Iran itself methods of interment less conformable with orthodoxy were probably suppressed; hence the Bundahišn decries the particular virulence of the Ahrimanic practice of burial among the Armenians (see, with refs., Russell, chap. 10).
In the Sasanian period, the bones of the exposed deceased were often interred in stone or ceramic ossuaries, called uzdāna- in Avestan and astōdān in Pahlavi; some stone examples bear Pahlavi inscriptions. Literary sources suggest the Sasanian kings were interred in tombs, but there is as yet no archeological confirmation of this. Following the fall of the Sasanians, however, local rulers in northern Iran who adhered to pre-Islamic customs were interred in tomb towers, of which a notable example is the early 5th/11th-century Gonbad-e Qābūs (illustrated in Camb. Hist. Iran IV, pl. 5): the body of Qābūs is said to have been suspended at the top of the tower in a glass coffin on which the rays of the rising sun could fall through a small opening on the east side of the roof (see Matheson, p. 69). This would have allowed the xwaršēd nigerišn “sight (of the body) by the sun” on the čahāromto take place. Many ceramic ossuaries have been excavated on the territory of pre-Islamic Central Asia: Choresmia, Bactria, and Sogdia. Some are decorated with scenes of worship before a sacred fire, indicating that, of those interred, a number were Zoroastrians (see Grenet; on Sogdia, see Gershevitch). Boyce regards the Nuristani (Kafiri) practice of “post-excarnation” burial, i.e., exposure of the corpse in a wooden coffin on a mountain-top, as a “local derivative of Zoroastrian observance” (Zoroastrianism I, p. 113 with n. 24), though the Nuristanis, who do not speak an Iranian language, are unlikely to have been Zoroastrians in the past. Until fairly recent times, it was common custom in southern Ḵᵛārazm to place the dead in a sarcophagus (sagona) or box (sandyk), which was kept above ground. One reason given by informants for not interring corpses in the earth was šafaqat, “compassion” for the deceased (Snesarev, 1969, pp. 148-51; 1963, pp. 127-40). This seems to be a survival of the Zoroastrian belief, noted above, that the soul of one buried in the earth cannot ascend on the čahārom.
About the issue of death and what should happen with the corpse, I think Zoroastrian religion is a flexible religion which has values which are surprisingly very advanced/modern, for example not polluting waters. The same can be said about burials, they're actually bad for environment and new methods are still created, for example:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.th...-dried-death-promession-cremation-burial/amp/
Inthe past zoroastrians had kind of above the ground tombs/Graves/coffins:
In the Parthian period, according to Isidore of Charax, kings were buried in royal tombs (Gk. basilikai taphai, at Parthaunisa; Caracalla is recorded to have sacked the tombs of later Parthian kings at Arbela), and burial in slipper-shaped ceramic coffins was also common. In pre-Christian Armenia, whose religion was particularly strongly influenced by the Zoroastrianism of the Parthians, similar forms of interment were common, the word for a coffin, tapan, being a loan from Middle Iranian. Such practices undoubtedly continued in Armenia into the Sasanian period, when in Iran itself methods of interment less conformable with orthodoxy were probably suppressed; hence the Bundahišn decries the particular virulence of the Ahrimanic practice of burial among the Armenians (see, with refs., Russell, chap. 10).
In the Sasanian period, the bones of the exposed deceased were often interred in stone or ceramic ossuaries, called uzdāna- in Avestan and astōdān in Pahlavi; some stone examples bear Pahlavi inscriptions. Literary sources suggest the Sasanian kings were interred in tombs, but there is as yet no archeological confirmation of this. Following the fall of the Sasanians, however, local rulers in northern Iran who adhered to pre-Islamic customs were interred in tomb towers, of which a notable example is the early 5th/11th-century Gonbad-e Qābūs (illustrated in Camb. Hist. Iran IV, pl. 5): the body of Qābūs is said to have been suspended at the top of the tower in a glass coffin on which the rays of the rising sun could fall through a small opening on the east side of the roof (see Matheson, p. 69). This would have allowed the xwaršēd nigerišn “sight (of the body) by the sun” on the čahāromto take place. Many ceramic ossuaries have been excavated on the territory of pre-Islamic Central Asia: Choresmia, Bactria, and Sogdia. Some are decorated with scenes of worship before a sacred fire, indicating that, of those interred, a number were Zoroastrians (see Grenet; on Sogdia, see Gershevitch). Boyce regards the Nuristani (Kafiri) practice of “post-excarnation” burial, i.e., exposure of the corpse in a wooden coffin on a mountain-top, as a “local derivative of Zoroastrian observance” (Zoroastrianism I, p. 113 with n. 24), though the Nuristanis, who do not speak an Iranian language, are unlikely to have been Zoroastrians in the past. Until fairly recent times, it was common custom in southern Ḵᵛārazm to place the dead in a sarcophagus (sagona) or box (sandyk), which was kept above ground. One reason given by informants for not interring corpses in the earth was šafaqat, “compassion” for the deceased (Snesarev, 1969, pp. 148-51; 1963, pp. 127-40). This seems to be a survival of the Zoroastrian belief, noted above, that the soul of one buried in the earth cannot ascend on the čahārom.
