The Ancients - Zoroastrianism

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

A faith born in the distant prehistoric past, rooted in ancient Iranian texts over 4,000 years old, Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest living religions. and one that shaped empires.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Almut Hintze to explore the origins, beliefs, and enduring legacy of Zoroastrianism. From the teachings of the prophet Zarathustra and the central role of Ahura Mazda, to holy fire and its influence on the Achaemenid and Sasanian worlds, join us to discover how this ancient religion helped shape ancient empires and Persian identity for millenniaMOREThe Wise MenListen of AppleListen on SpotifyPersia Reborn: Rise of the SasaniansListen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Theme music from Motion Array, all other music from Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. You might remember a few weeks back I did an introduction where I mentioned how I was going to interview a professor about Zoroastrianism. Well, that interview went really well and I'm delighted to share the episode with you now. Our guest is Professor Almut Hintzer.

She is a leading expert on Zoroastrianism. She's based at Soas, the University of London. She was so warm and welcoming when she let us into her office and we interviewed her for roughly an hour on the big picture of Zoroastrianism. Austrianism in antiquity? What do we know about its origins? What are its key beliefs? This was a really interesting chat, delving deep into what Zoroastrianism is, and I really do hope you enjoy.

It's a religion with roots deep in the prehistoric past, and that still endures down to the present day. Centered around beliefs passed down for more than 3,000 years, preserved in an archaic Iranian language. The religion of Zoroastrianism. In antiquity, Zoroastrianism was central to several great ancient Iranian empires, from the Achaemenids to the Sassanians. But what do we know about this religion? What were and still are its key beliefs? How did it emerge? Who are these central figures of Ahura Mazda and the prophet Sarathustra. And why is fire so important? This is the story of Zoroastrianism, with our guest, Professor Almond Hince. Almit, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Oh, the pleasure is all mine. I'm

delighted to have you here and to talk to you about Zoroastrianism. I mean, yes, because can we say it is the oldest or one of the oldest living religions today? I would say so. I would say one of the oldest, because there may be religions still being practiced of which we do not know. And a feature of Zoroastrianism is that the past lives on in the present, very much so. It is a very ancient religion. Its roots reach back into the second, third millennium, B.C. and even earlier. And many of the rituals and words which they recite in their ritual performances actually date from that time. I was going to ask, is there many differences between modern Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrianism in antiquity? But it sounds like, I mean, quite a lot of it is the same. We think so as far as the

language is concerned, which is a great guide to dating Zoroastrianism in their ancient rituals, the Zoroastrians, the Zoroastrian priests, but also Zoroastrian lay people in their prayers, recite texts which date back to the second millennium BCE. And these are what we call the Gatas of Zarathustra and the Yasnabthanghai, which is also composed in the same language. So the language is very archaic, the language of those texts which the Zoroastrians recite in ritual and in prayer, very archaic.

And in fact, it's the oldest witness of any Iranian language. and it belongs to the oldest in attested Indo-European languages. And what is this language? We call it Aveston. Aveston, okay. Yes, because it is the language of the Avesta. And the Avesta is the name of the sacred texts of the Zoroastians. The texts which the Zoroastrians recite aloud in prayer and in the rituals.

and Aveston has survived basically only as part of those rituals and prayers. So it's the language of the Avesta. It's amazing that it has endured to the present day, given how older language are this and that is practice still to see. So there are still many people out there in Iran who would know that language, who know that language? They know the text, they know the language in so far as they know the words, which they recite, and they learn these words by heart. And they recite these words aloud, so they need to be spoken.

And these texts and these rituals were composed orally without the use of writing, the oldest being from the second millennium BCE. We know that the dating is based on certain linguistic features in the land. of the Garters, the oldest parts of the Avista, and in particular, prehistoric sounds, which linguists call laryngeals, sounds which are pronounced in the back of the throat. Okay, the larynx, yes. You have them in Semitic languages. We don't have them in Indo-European languages, but in prehistoric times, Proto-Indo-Indo-European languages did have those sounds as consonants

and they could also turn into vowels and these sounds later disappeared in all of the Indo-European languages except in Hittite where they were then found still there as consonants and at the time the oldest texts of the Avesta were composed those laryngeals must still have been present. Because in the meter, the meter of the gartars tells us that they stopped two vowels to coalesc into one long vowel. And those two vowels, a plus a, with a laryngeal in the middle, count as two syllables. So that is the strongest indication for their existence at the time.

when these texts were composed, and that cannot have been much after the middle of the second millennium BCE. So that's one of the main arguments for the early, for the date, second millennium date of the Gartas, the oldest texts. Well, we'll explore more about those texts and what they talk about in a bit. But as we're going back to the second millennium BC, I'd like to see how far back we can go. I mean, what do we know, Elmud, about the origins, the roots, of Zoroastrianism, can we go back to the word Indo-European? We can go back, to some extent, thanks to comparative historical philology and linguistics,

the Iranian languages are cognate with the Indo-Aryan languages. Indo-Aryan, these are the languages of Indo-European origin spoken in the Indian subcontinent. The Indo-Arians were immigrants into the Indian subcontinent. We know that for sure. Well, pretty sure, yes. Although there are some people who think they've always been there, especially Hindu nationalists nowadays. But from an Indo-Europeanist's point of view,

the immigration of the Indo-Arians into India is the most probable scenario. So, Iranian and Indo-Aryan are sister languages of a common prehistoric ancestor, which we call Indo-Iranian, and that prehistoric ancestor is not attested, hasn't survived. We have no oral or written documents of that prehistoric language from which those two branches derive. However, we can reconstruct that prehistoric ancestor to some extent by comparing the oldest surviving Iranian documents, which is the Avesta and especially the Garthas, but also the old Persian inscriptions of the Archimeneid kings, which date from 520 BC onwards. It's a bit later on, yes. A thousand years later than the Garter, so they are much old. So by comparing those earliest old Iranian sources with the earliest Indo-Aryan sources from

the Indian subcontinent. And the oldest surviving Indo-European documents from the Indian subcontinent are the Vedic hymns. This is the Rig Veda and the like, is it? Exactly. The Rig Veda and the other Vedas, Yajoveda and the Samar Vedar and the Atarveda but especially the Rig Veda, which is the oldest. And those are linked to the early Hinduism, aren't they, in the second millennium BC, Sanskrit and the like? Absolutely.

So the languages, the language of the Vedas, especially of the Rig Veda, and the language of the Avesta are so similar to each other that they are like two different dialects of the same language. And you can transpose expressions in Aveston, to Sanskrit. So, for example, in Aveston, we say Woh manach or Wahu manach for good thought. Wahu is good and manaf is thought.

And in Sanskrit it's Vasu Manas. So a Vedic and an Avestan speaker, they would have probably been able to understand each other. The grammar is identical. It's only some phonetic, their phonetic changes have happened in the way they pronounce. So that linguistic similarity shows how Hinduism and Zoroastrianism were linked, at least linguistically, with their ancestor, I guess. Indeed, with their common prehistoric ancestor, Indo-Iranian ancestor. And that means that these two languages are genetically related. They are two sister branches of a common parent language, which is an Indo-Iranian or Aryan language.

and they would have shared a common language, not only that, but also a common thought system and a common religion and a common social structure. And all of that, we are trying to reconstruct on the basis of the historically attested documents, which are those religious hymns, because that's all that has survived, nothing else, no other texts have survived. So the Garters on one side and the Brick Vader and the like on the other side to comparing them as you say. Really interesting. I know our audience loves as well talking about the linguistic side of things. I'm really glad that we could talk about that at the beginning of this chat.

You mentioned, of course, the Second Millennium BC with the Garters. So who is it believed that Zoroastrianism begins with at that time? Yes. So while they share this common heritage, the origins of Zoroastrianism would not reach back into the proto-Indo-Iranian period because we do not have a Zarathustra in the Vedic tradition. The religion must have started after the two branches split from one another. But exactly when and where the Zoroastrian religion developed,

that is a question which is debated amongst scholars. we can only take indications which try like detectives trying to find indications traces a smoking gun so to say which points us into a certain space geographical area and a time when that might have happened so those laryngeals for example are the smoking gun which tells us it cannot have been much later than the second, middle of the second millennium BCE, because those lorindials were still pronounced when the gartars were composed. So the composer of the gartas pronounced the laryngeals.

Otherwise, they wouldn't have prevented, because they prevented that merging of the two adjacent vowels. Then there are a number of other indicators which point to quite early date of the beginning of the Zoroastrian religion, although that is also disputed. And that is the demonization of the divas. Okay.

Now this takes us into the conceptual world of the Zoroastrian religion. And diver, diva means God in Indo-Iranian. It is the word which you also have in Latin deus, God. God, yes, yeah. And in English, divine, the divv, the divv bit, is the same as dive in diva. It's diva. And in Sanskrit, it's Deva. So once again, you see the similarities between.

Yeah, Deva in Sanskrit and Daiva in Aveston. And in Sanskrit, what happened is that the I became E. So they say in India, the Indo-Aryan say Deva, which means God. In Aveston, in the Gatas, diver are the false gods, who should not be worshipped. They are terrible and they are very vehemently rejected in the Gartars. And the demonization of the old Indo-European gods is a feature which we find in the Iranian tradition only. nowhere else. And innovations are major indicators for change, for cultural change. Archaeisms are not so much indicators because you have just retained an old tradition. There are lots of

archaism in the Zoroastrian tradition. But what helps us with the dating are innovations. So do we think then, just to clarify, do you think the origins of Zoroastrianism is very much linked to a belief at that time, you know, after the splits between the Indo-Arians and the Indo-Iranians of a rejection of the gods that have been worshipped previously and looking towards something else. That changed, as you were saying. Absolutely. So that is, so we have the Indo-Iranians, the common people, and they split into Iranians and into Indo-Arians. And the Iranians are marked by the rejection of the old gods. The dive and the dive gotties. The old gods, all of them.

a sudden, they are bad and they are rejected. And of course, these gods do not exist on their own, but there is a whole cult related to it. There is a priesthood who have a stake in it in the worship of the gods. So if you reject, if you tell your people, these are, you are all worshipping false gods, what do the priests do? They are very upset about it. Because they are livelihood depends on the worship of those gods, and they have been trained in worshipping those gods. So this is not a trivial thing to say that the divers, the gods are wrong. You should not worship them. But that's what the Gators do. And do we have any idea who is the, I guess, the prophet equivalent who is going around at that time, you know, kind of proclaiming this message

that, you know, worshipping the old gods and what these priests were doing. is wrong. The only individual who is linked to this is the figure of Zarathustra. Sarathustra are... And the Gattas are the oldest texts which we have, and they talk exactly about this. So Zarathustra figures prominently in the Gartas. His name occurs 16 times in those hymns. There are 17 hymns all together, grouped into five Gartas. Garter means song and basically a meter, the meter of a song. And these 17 hymns are grouped according to their meter into five groups of unequal length. The first group is one garter.

It consists of seven hymns. And then we have two more of four hymns each. And then we also have two of one hymn only. So these are the seven. 17 hymns grouped into those five garters. And in those hymns, we have the name of Zarasushhtra 17 times. And the other name, which occurs most prominently, is that of Ahura Mazda. Right. Okay. Who is this? That's the god. That's the, is this the god that they're saying, turn away from the old gods. This is the god you should follow. Is that the idea? This is exactly what the garters are about. Right. They talk about this. And Zarasushhtra talks to him. God, Ahura Mazda. He has a special relationship to Ahura Mazda, and Ahura Mazda talks to him.

So Zarathustra asks him questions, he says, oh, tell me, Ahura Mazda, who made this world? Who keeps the stars in the sky and prevents the clouds from coming down, from falling down? The sky from falling on our heads, I mean. Okay, right, yeah. Who has made this world? and who has arranged the day in such a way that we get up in the morning and go to sleep in the evening. And of course the answer is Ahura Mazda.

So Ahura Mazda is seen as the creator of the cosmos, but also as the one who tells people how they should lead their lives. Right. So they need to follow truth, which is Asha. and they need to worship a Hura Masta and not the divers, because the divers are wrong. And do you also get a sense, then, this might be too simplistic, but I have to ask, if it is focused on a Hura Mazda, is the logic then, is this a monotheistic religion? There is one God, only one God, which is a Hura Masta.

Interesting. Who is the maker of everything that is good? and what is good are his creations and he creates everything at a on a spiritual level in the first instance and out of that spiritual creation he creates the matter the physical world which is the world the cosmos which is visible and tangible so he is that god who is holy good and who is the creator of the world. So there is one God only. But a special feature of the Zoroastrian religion is that evil has a separate existence.

Right. So they're always kind of opposing each other. You're always fighting against evil in pursuit of good. Is that the idea? Basically, yes, in today's practice and as it then evolved, yes. But in the system, as we have it in the Avesta, Ahura Mazda has no direct counterpart on the evil side. But Ahura Mazda is the father. He produces out of himself, he has, he is creative.

Because being good means being creative and multiplying to yourself. Good is what is good is productive, it's fruitful. and it's creative. And this capability of creating and giving life, especially, life is inside Aura Mazda. That is called Spenta Mayneu in our Western. Mineu, it has a root man to think, which we have in English mental, for example, this man bit.

Mind you is a force, a spiritual force. And Spenta means life-bearing. something like that. That means it has the capacity of producing life. And it is this creative life-bearing force in Avastan Spurnta, mind you, which has a negative opposite, and that's called Angra, mind you. Okay. Angram, Angra means destructive, hostile.

And mind you again means force. It's a destructive force, which is diametrically opposed to spenta, mind you. And you can even see it from the language, the words, they are symmetrically, symmetrical spenta, mind you, both are mine you and angramineu. And angramineu is destructive. That means he wants to destroy everything that spenta mind you produces. And angramindu is destructive. That means he wants to destroy everything that spenta mind you produces. And angramanon, is likewise a spiritual force. He wants to destroy on the spiritual level, but he can't really destroy the spiritual world, because in Zoroastrianism, the spiritual world is immortal. It exists, and so the destructive force is primordial. It has ever existed, always existed, and will always exist. And Ahura Mazda and his life-giving force will also always exist. And all the spiritual world is immortal. And this is what we call dualism in Zoroastrianism, this diametrical opposition between the life-bearing force and the destructive one. So there. But you can see from the system that Ahura Mazda is on top of the life-giving force, whereas the destructive force,

I'm going to remind you, has nobody on top. It's just a force. It's a blind force which wants to destroy. So the people who come afterwards, they're very much, it's ingrained in them through this text that they need to be mindful of this destructive force whilst also paying reverence to Ahura Mazda and the light and keeping on the right track, I guess. Absolutely. And people have to associate themselves with Ahura Mazda and not this ungramma in you, the destructive force. And human beings have a choice which of the two to choose. And they should of course choose the creative one and follow Ahura Mazda and not the destructive one. And so how does fire and the sacred flame come into all of this with the garters and with those religious songs, the religious texts, the Avesta?

Yeah. Fire plays an important role already in Indo-Iranian culture. We have it in the Vedic culture. as well, Agni, the fire, who is presented as a messenger between the human beings and the gods and probably even from Indo-European times. Fire is almost a human universal. It's so important for our life, for cooking, our food and for warmth in cold weather and also a source of light. So this is something which has very, very ancient roots. And it continues. to be treasured also in the Iranian Zoroastrian tradition and rituals developed around the fire. Already in Indo-Iranian times, a ritual which is performed for the gods, for the divine beings, is perceived as an act of hospitality. Right.

So it is basically a banquet, which the human beings prepare. in a special space, a precinct, which can be created ad hoc in the space, also in the open air, they just draw then a design a space, and there they prepare a place for the divine beings and they prepare food and the priests recite hymns to invite the divine beings to come down, be present in the ritual, enjoy the hymns and the food and the drinks, which are being prepared ritually during the ceremony

and then return to their heavenly abodes. And the link between the human beings and the divine beings is created by the fire. Right, okay. So this is certainly how it was in the Indo-Iranian culture and the Vedic hymns talk about this. Agni prepares a path between the human and the divine and the gods travel.

on that path, from their heavenly abodes down to the ritual space and the return on it again. In Zoroastrianism, in the Zoroastrian ritual, it's a little bit different there. We know that from the Yasna Habtang Haity, which is the text that is recited after the first garter. In the Zoroastrian core ritual, which is called the JASNA, the JASNA ritual, but also in the other solemn rituals which are based on the Yasna. In all of these, the fire of Ahura Mazda is addressed as the one who is at a distance, you there, so it's a heavenly fire of Ahura Mazda. In the later Avestan text, Yanka Avestan text, the fire is also addressed as the son of Ahura Mazda. Right. It's invited to come down and be present in the ritual.

precinct. And this coming down of the heavenly fire, of Ahura Mazda's fire, happens during the recitation of Yasna 36, which in the 72 chapter, Yasna is right in the middle of the ritual performance. 36 is halfway through. So are they songs or are they poems, or how should we say them? They are spoken. It's sometimes spoken passages in the Aveston, I would say it's sort of the JASNA-Habtang Haity is not metrical in the sense of that the meter, the syllables are being counted, as is the case for the garters. The older garters, yeah. Yeah. But it is probably more sort of a rhythmic type of recitation.

And the fire then comes down and is present in the ritual from then on in the ritual precinct. and the worshippers, they affirm their purity with which they approach the fire now, which has been transformed, because the heavenly being is now present within the ritual precinct. And the fire is then addressed, still in Yassna 36, as the most beautiful, visible form of Ahura Mazda. So Ahura Mazda himself is thought to be present in the form of the fire and of course the fire is light and that's why the fire is regarded as his body, his visible form and this is the foundation of the central role played by the fire in the Zoroastrian ritual and the call for purity, utmost purity of the performance.

of the ritual, but also of those who are present while this ritual is performed. So it's so interesting, once again, you have the garters and you have the Yasnors, like these spoken passages and how far back in time they go. And it feels like we've very much set the scene with the beliefs. But I must also ask, you mentioned earlier how Ahura Mazda is credited as the person who created the world, created everything. So it sounds like they have their own creation myth story. Do they also believe in an afterlife at the same time?

Yeah. So the Zoroastrians have a whole cosmology, which goes from the primordial beginnings of the cosmos right to the end. And they believe that at the beginning, there was certainly Ahura Mazda. And his creative and the destructive forces, they are. have always been there. So they are all primordial beings. They've been there from the beginning.

Absolutely. They're beginningless. And Ahura Mazda is seen as the creator of the world. But before he makes the material world, first he multiplies himself in the form of his spiritual beings, spiritual creations, which embody qualities such as truth, good thought, Wohumanah, right-mindedness, and these spiritual concepts and qualities, they have negative counterparts in the evil camp, and those are thought to come from the destructive force. So the evil can multiply itself in the form of spiritual features, such as the lie.

The lie, okay. And bad thought and arrogance and other such negative forces, greed is no end to that. All these negative forces, but they're all spiritual. They come from the mind. And that's important. So the evil for Zoroastrianism exists first and foremost on the spiritual level. And all these negative forces, they are negations of positive qualities which come from Ahura Mazda. And then as a creator, Ahura Mazda produces a material world and he does so out of his spiritual creations.

And that's why all these beings, this is pentamine you, the creative force, is life-bearing. The word spenta is of, has in the past often been translated something like bountess, which embodies through generosity.

Bountiful, yes. Because there's a lot of stuff. Yes. But what it really means is that it has the capacity of producing life. Right. Because this word spenta,

the spurt, it, if we look at linguistics and etymology, it corresponds to a word which we have in Greek, QEO, which with this KU, it corresponds to the SP in Spenta. And that means to be pregnant. Ah, so fertility idea. Yes, and that's what this word spenta means. And in the Greek word QA or I am pregnant means life-bearing and producing offspring, this is the center of the meaning of this word.

That's why I prefer to translate it as life-bearing, because it has the capacity of producing life. And that means not only on the spiritual level, but it's capable of producing a material world. And this is what Aura Mazda does through his life-bearing force that he produces a material word, the cosmos, the visible cosmos, which consists not only of what we see here on Earth, but also the entire cosmos, all the stars, the universe.

He produces this out of these spiritual beings, which he makes through this benta, mind you. and this is something which the destructive force doesn't have because it can only destroy. It is incapable of producing a material world in any way negating the... It can destroy, but not create. It can only destroy, it cannot discreate. And also just quickly, before we move on, the afterlife idea as well, is there one very much embedded in the verbal passages? Totally. That relates to the figure of our...

Mazda. So Ahura means lord. Mazda, we translated often as sort of wise lord, but this translation in no way represents what Mazda actually means. So Mazda, da means to set. And the Mazbit, it's formed from the root man to think. And the must bit contains the word man to think. And the must bit contains the word manas, manach, which is thought. So literally Mazda means the one who sets his thought, his thinking, and he is super intelligent. And he thinks it all out. He's the purpose, why he starts the creation at all, while he multiplies himself in the spiritual creation and then makes the material cosmos, the reason why he does it, what is it? He will, he wants to incapacitate evil, the destructive force. This destructive being destructive

wants to dethrone Ahura Mazda. It threatens, it poses a threat and it wants to destroy Ahura Mazda and wants to make the light dark. And in order to prevent this from happening, Ahura Mazda springs into action and he makes a plan. So his creation has a plan from the beginning right to the end. And the plan is a way of incapacitating evil once and for all, not destroying it. You cannot destroy it. You cannot destroy Angra Mind You because he is eternal. He will always be there. But what matters for Ahura Mazda is that Angramanyu is incapacitated and relegated back to the place where it had come from to destroy. And so it will never, ever come back again.

So this then takes us into what happens at the end of time and the purpose of this world. So Rastrian cosmology has a purpose, and the purpose is to incapacitate evil. And then as we go along, we can see how this is done. So Ahura Mazda then makes a material world, and Angramai, due to his lust to smite, as the text put it, he intrudes, he breaks, he attacks the material world, which consists of the earth, but also of the whole cosmos. He breaks into it from outside. So he is somehow, before he attacks, he is outside of it. He comes into it and he tries to kill and to pollute and to destroy everything.

And he does so. He destroys the first creations of Ahura Mazda on the earth and he then tries also to storm the sky and to invade the sphere where Ahura Mazda dwells. But he's successful only on the earth. But then as he tries to invade the heavenly abodes where the stars are and then the moon, and the sun and paradise is up there where Ahura Mazda dwells,

the Garo Domana, the house of welcome or of song where Ahura Mazda dwells. There he cannot get, because he is stopped at the Spentermainiawastars. This is the Western name for a group of stars, which is perceived like the Milky Way, the Milky Way, which we can see in the sky, it is perceived like a protective belt, The shield, okay. A shield and Angra, mind you, is incapable of penetrating it because Berta, mind you and

Angra Mind you, are completely incompatible with one another, and he is repelled there. And then, according to the cosmological story myth, as we have it, both, this one, both in the Avesta and in the Middle Persian texts from the Sasanian period, that means from six, 700, but all of the Christian era. So, yeah, okay, 600, 700, A.D., obviously, that way. Yes, yes, exactly. But all of that is based on ancient traditions, and some of it we have in the Abesta. And one thing which we have in the Abesta is Sarasushra was born,

and Zarasustra brought to humankind the weapon to fight evil successfully. Okay. And now we have the Mazda worshipping. religion. The religion which focuses on the cult and worship of Mazda, Ahura Mazda, of course. And this religion, which is called the Dinah Mazda Yazni. Daina is a Western word, which means the vision, literally. It then becomes a word for religion. You have it in Persian, Dane, and the Arabs borrowed it. Dean in Arabic. It is a Naves. word. And this is the weapon to fight evil, the divers, and unremayneau. This fight then progresses

and it culminates at the end of time with the ultimate defeat of evil. And in the process, Vesta calls on men and women alike to fight evil and reduce the power of evil in the world. And how do you do that by focusing your mind on Ahura Mazda and worshipping him, having rituals performed, paying the priests of our Sarasushhtra, who are in the tradition of Zarasustra, to perform those rituals, and that weakens the presence of evil. And evil is ultimately going to be removed from this world at the end of time, and there is going to be a big battle and evil is going to withdraw from the cosmos

and going to go back to the place where it had come from in the first instance to destroy Ahura Mazda's creation. And at that point, all the dead are going to resurrect, to be resurrected. Right, to be soldiers in that battle, is that the case? Yes. But also, all the dead, they have the resurrection of the body. death is seen as a victory of evil

and when evil is going to be defeated the dead automatically are going to be resurrected because death has been defeated death in the form of Angramindu has been defeated and that means the deeds of evil are going to be undone and the dead are going to be resurrected.

The body. So Zoroastrians do believe ultimately in resurrection. Yes. Okay, so that's their thoughts, but only at the end of time. That happens at the end of time. And the body is, of course, the material creation. And the spiritual creation is immortal anyway. That never dies.

So when a person dies, the spiritual part, each person has a spiritual part. It's called Urvan, one of the spiritual parts, Urvan, that's the soul. So the soul is immortal. So when a person dies, the soul of the person moves on and it faces individual judgment after death. Oh, once again, like Egypt's Book of the Dead and I guess also judgment in the Christian religion and the like, you know, it's depending on how you lived your life, you know, what will happen. Exactly. And the criterion for how you live what is good and what is bad. is, of course, from a Zoroastrian point of you, whether you supported Ahura Mazda, worshipped Ahura Mazda,

you had the rituals performed for him, praise him, and reduce the power of evil in the world. Then you have a lot of good thoughts, good words, good deeds. And each individual should amass as many good thoughts, good words, good deeds as possible. And after death, these good thoughts and words and good deeds are going to be weighed on scales. and depending on how that individual judgment ends, the soul then, it has to cross a bridge, a bridge of where the good souls and words and deeds and the bad ones are collected. It has to cross that bridge and either enters Ahura Mazda's paradise, the Garo Domana, where Ahura Mazda dwells, or it goes to the place where Angramainu dwells.

if bad thoughts, words and deeds, especially deeds, prevail, and then there they have to stay until the end of time, until the perfection of the world, when evil is going to be defeated, and at that point there is going to be a judgment of the body. So the soul, the individual souls have been judged in their individual judgments each time a person dies, but then at the end there is a universal judgment. when all the resurrected bodies, they also have to be judged and they use an image of a stream of molten metal. We have that in the Middle Persian text from the Sasanian period,

where all the metals in the earth are going to be melted and the bodies, the resurrected bodies, have to pass through that. And for those who were the evil deeds prevailed, it will be very painful and for the good ones it will feel like warm milk but they all come out at the other end and there then

the bodies, the resurrected bodies are going to be united with their respective souls and then the person will continue to exist in perpetuity and Aura Mazda will then exist with his spiritual

and material creations forever and even is going to withdraw and it has been incapacitated. It will be powerless. Achshayamno, as it says in the Avesta. So we have two types of creation in Zoroastrianism, spiritual and material,

and the spiritual precedes the material world. The material world is rooted in the spiritual world and the spiritual world descends from Ahura Mazda. and we have two judgments, an individual judgment that is for the spiritual part of a person and we have a universal judgment at the end of time. So we have two judgments. And those two judgments, they have their justification in the two types of creation in the spiritual and the material creation.

Each of them is going to be judged. So having said all of that, Almut, with what they believed and what would ultimately happen to the bodies, what do we know about how Zoroastrians, whether it's in the second millennium BC or in the time of the Achaemenid Persians or the Parthians or the Sassanians later, What do we know about how they buried their dead? So for the Zoroastrians, death was not meant to be for Ahudamaster's creations. He wanted his material world to live forever. But he created the material world as an instrument to defeat evil. So when evil, Angramalew, inflicts death on a living being that looks like a victory,

and death is considered as a bad thing by the Zoroastrians. And everything that comes from Angra, mind you, is bad, polluted, and needs to be removed as quickly as possible. So anything that is detached from a living being, be it just a hair from our head, or be it a dead body where a light, life is no longer in it, is considered to be extremely polluting. And it needs to be removed from the living world as quickly as possible. So no burial idea? No, because the earth is thought to be Aura Mazda's creation and it was pure and perfect. It should not be polluted with a dead body, nor should the water be polluted. If you throw a dead body into a water, it's considered to be polluting. It's bad for the water. And you should certainly not throw a dead

body into fire, because fire is a son of Ahura Mazda. And out of the question as well. So, the best way to dispose of a dead body is to expose it to vultures. And vultures. Excaration. exclamation, vultures are excellent for that. They do a great job and they are highly regarded by the Zoroastrians and they do it very quickly and they don't fly. You know, they eat it on the ground, whatever they eat. And so they are almost like a hygiene police. And this practice of exposure is probably also rooted in ancient, very ancient practices. of the culture in certain areas where the photo-Iranians came from

where it was opportune to expose dead bodies and they would have taken them up to the hills and lay them down on stone platform and just leave the bodies there to be excreted by the birds and then they would collect the bones. then they would have had something what we call secondary burial. They collect the bones

and then they sometimes they would have created a little casket and then bury that, put that into the earth. But the bones would be dry, just dry bones so there would be nothing polluting

in the bones anymore. And we have got such bone containers or osuries have been found in central Asia, especially of the Sogdians, the Sogdians were a people in the first millennium of the Christian era, but they must have been around also their predecessors in earlier times.

They're in Uzbekistan area. Uzbekistan area, yes, exactly, and Tajikistan. And they, in the first millennium, during the Akimini period and later still, they were traders along the Silk Road. They traded with China. And in Central Asia there, Osiris have been found which depict Zoroastrian scenes with priests and there is also a tomb, a stone tomb, where probably the bones would have been put in, which depict the crossing of that bridge of the soul when it has to cross the bridge. So these are illustrations of imagery of Zoroastrian eschatological ideas, ideas about what happens to the soul after death. So if these beliefs stem all the way back to, say, the second millennium BC, is that what we presume then?

I think so, yeah. If that is all kind of laid out by that time already in the late Bronze Age period, do we know how quickly it becomes a very, popular religion to follow, particularly in places like Iran, because we do normally think of the Persians and the Parthians as the ones who really did follow this religion. But do we have any idea just how quickly these beliefs were seized upon us the wrong word? But people really started to find them appealing and start following them. It seems to me that Zoroastrianism started really early. And for me, the most probable scenario, is that it started in proto-Iranian times.

That means at the time when the Iranians were still one people and that they all shared in the demonization of the divas of the old gods and the worship of Ahura Mazda. So that was with them right from the beginning before they dispersed and split, especially in eastern and western Iranians, that they already had the religion with them. They carried it with them, the Zoroastrian religion. So when we get to the time, let's say, the medians,

so just before the Persians, would they have been Zoroastrian as well? Yes, yes. It would have been interesting. And of course, then in historical periods, it might well have taken different manifestations in different areas, just as the different Iranian dialects then developed. So also there might have been modifications of different, of the practice, the religious practice,

but they would have carried the worship of Ahura Mazda and the demonization of the diverse wisdom already and with it, also the Avesta. Yes. And then, of course, if you're going west, then you get into the world of the Jews and, you know, the other Mesopotamian religions as well, and ultimately, you know, the Greeks and the Romans. So this is another episode in its own right.

But is it also interesting, with the rise of Persia and then, you know, the Parthians afterwards, is it also interesting to study how these foreign groups, who I guess Zoroastrians would see as people who are following the divers or the false gods, how they interacted with this religion from Iran that was so prominent there. Yeah, indeed, yes. The oldest evidence we have is from Babylonia, from the times of the Archimaniids, when we have the reports in the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Isaiah, who, talks about Cyrus, who did not know Yahweh, because Cyrus, of course, would have worshipped another God. He would, I think, why not?

He should have worshipped the Hura Mazda. But that he released the Jews from captivity and restored the temple treasures to the Jews and facilitated the return of the Jews, of the Israelites, better, to say, to Palestine, where they had come from, to their promised land, and to rebuild their temple. And then many Jews, many Israelites, remained, stayed on in Mesopotamia, in Babylonia, because they had settled by then, and they seemed to have been quite happy to live under the Persian rule, under Archimeneid rule, and exchanges, intellectual, religious exchanges must have taken place. they had a common language, which was the Aramaic language, that was the language of administration

of the Archimeneid Empire and the Israelites. They would have spoken Aramaic. And we can see from within the Israelite texts, the Hebrew Bible, we can see how they slowly, very slowly develop and ascotology ideas about life after death. And gradually within the Israelite religion, death all of a sudden becomes something bad, which it wasn't before. And that culminates then in Christianity in the letter of Paul, in the Corinthian, one of the letters to the Corinthians where Paul writes, the ultimate enemy to be defeated is death. And do you think that is an influence from Zoroastrians? Interesting.

I mean, I could ask so much more. And of course, well, I will ask then, come on, it's another episode. But the wise men in the nativity story, is it very likely that they were Zoroastrians? It's very likely, yes. And the most, the strongest indicator for that is not only that they came from the east. That's what it says in Matthew, but that they are called Magoy. Not wise men. We call them wise men or the kings. They are called Magoi. And nobody else is called Magush, except as a Russian priest. So major magicians and all that kind of stuff. I guess that's where our

word magician comes from. Right. Magush is the word for a priest, especially in Western Iran. We have the word also in the Avesta, but only once. It's not very prominent in the Avesta itself, But then in Western Iran, they use that word, Magush. But the word maga, from which it is derived, plays an important role in the Zoroastrian ritual and in the Gattas already, in the oldest texts. It probably means that the whole ritual is a maga, because in the ritual, in the performance of a ritual, of a Zoroastrian ritual, a gift exchange is enacted between the humans, the priest, and the divine. It puts an exchange of gifts into motion. So probably that's where

Maga, the mug bit, comes from. And it is a technical term for a priest. This has been fascinating. I know we've largely focused on the origins of Zoroastrianism and the core beliefs that stay there. But it was quite nice to do it this way because otherwise we could have done a narrative and go through, just kind of scratch the surface of the Achaemenids, the Parthians, Sasanians, as I've mentioned. But I guess those beliefs are the things that stay there throughout, isn't it? And you can see down to the present day. And what's also so interesting is the fact that, as we've touched upon there,

like links with Christianity and other religions as well, that Zoroastrians would have, I guess, seen as, you know, the lie and not the truth. And yet the interactions there and the influence of Zoroastrianism is there, almost, I guess, is their belief in they are bringing the truth to these other groups at the same time. Yes. Yes. Interestingly, Zoroastrianism has always remained the religion of the Iranian people. That might well be because the Zoroastrians pray continue to prey in the Avestan language. It's very much tied to the Iranian Avestan language. So it has remained the religion of the Iranian people.

but at the same time they have also co-existed with followers of other religions. Ahmed, these beliefs they've endured for so many centuries, so many millennia. They are in the Persian period, the Parthians, the Sassanians, and down to the present day, and it's amazing just how old those beliefs are and how they endure. Yes, indeed. And for the Zoroastrians up to the present day, the motto is good thoughts, good words, good deeds. and not bad thoughts, bad words, but deeds. And that is linked to their concept of evil as a separate force

who needs to be fought against. And that lives on up to the present day. Absolutely fascinating. What a way to end it on. Almond, it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It has been my pleasure and honour. Thank you.

Well, there you go. There was leading expert, Professor Almut Hintzer, giving you a wonderful introduction to what Zoro is its key beliefs and its origins far back in prehistoric at times. I hope you enjoyed the episode just as much as we did recording it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you're doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well we'd really appreciate that. Now don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of

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