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Zoroastrianism In Iran
Zoroastrianism is considered to be the oldest religion still practiced in Iran. It is an Iranian religions, Iranian religion that emerged around the 2nd millennium BCE, spreading through the Iranian Plateau, Iranian plateau and eventually gaining official status under the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BCE. It remained the Iranian state religion until the 7th century CE, when the Muslim conquest of Persia, Arab conquest of Persia resulted in the fall of the Sasanian Empire to the nascent Rashidun Caliphate. Over time, the persecution of Zoroastrians led to them becoming a religious minority amidst the Islamization of Iran, as many fled east to Parsis, take refuge in India. Some of Zoroastrianism's holiest sites are located in Iran, such as Yazd. Today, Iran has the second- or third-largest Zoroastrian population in the world, behind only India and possibly the Kurdistan Region, Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The official Iranian census of 2011 recorded a total of 25,271 Zoroast ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism ( ), also called Mazdayasnā () or Beh-dīn (), is an Iranian religions, Iranian religion centred on the Avesta and the teachings of Zoroaster, Zarathushtra Spitama, who is more commonly referred to by the Greek translation, Zoroaster ( ). Among the world's oldest organized faiths, its adherents exalt an Creator deity, uncreated, Omnibenevolence, benevolent, and List of knowledge deities#Persian mythology, all-wise deity known as Ahura Mazda (), who is hailed as the supreme being of the universe. Opposed to Ahura Mazda is Ahriman, Angra Mainyu (), who is personified as a List of death deities#Persian-Zoroastrian, destructive spirit and the adversary of all things that are good. As such, the Zoroastrian religion combines a Dualism in cosmology, dualistic cosmology of good and evil with an eschatological outlook predicting the Frashokereti, ultimate triumph of Ahura Mazda over evil. Opinions vary among scholars as to whether Zoroastrianism is monotheistic, polyth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Avestan
Avestan ( ) is the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism. It belongs to the Iranian languages, Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family and was First language, originally spoken during the Avestan period, Old Iranian period ( – 400 BCE) by the Arya (Iran), Iranians living in the Avestan geography, eastern portion of Greater Iran. After Avestan Language death, became extinct, its religious texts were first transmitted Oral literature, orally until being collected and Sasanian Avesta, put into writing during the Sasanian empire, Sasanian period ( – 500 CE). The Avesta, extant material falls into two Variety (linguistics), groups: Old Avestan ( – 900 BCE) and Younger Avestan ( – 400 BCE). The immediate ancestor of Old Avestan was the Proto-Iranian language, a sister language to the Proto-Indo-Aryan language, with both having developed from the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian language. As such, Old Avestan is quite close in both grammar and lexi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Persia
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the northeast, Afghanistan to the east, Pakistan to the southeast, and the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf to the south. With a Ethnicities in Iran, multi-ethnic population of over 92 million in an area of , Iran ranks 17th globally in both List of countries and dependencies by area, geographic size and List of countries and dependencies by population, population. It is the List of Asian countries by area, sixth-largest country entirely in Asia and one of the world's List of mountains in Iran, most mountainous countries. Officially an Islamic republic, Iran is divided into Regions of Iran, five regions with Provinces of Iran, 31 provinces. Tehran is the nation's Capital city, capital, List of cities in Iran by province, largest city and financial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magi
Magi (), or magus (), is the term for priests in Zoroastrianism and earlier Iranian religions. The earliest known use of the word ''magi'' is in the trilingual inscription written by Darius the Great, known as the Behistun Inscription. Old Persian texts, predating the Hellenistic period, refer to a magus as a Zurvanism, Zurvanic, and presumably Zoroastrian, priest. Pervasive throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia until late antiquity and beyond, ''mágos'' (μάγος) was influenced by (and eventually displaced) Greek ''The Lesser Key of Solomon#Ars Goetia, goēs'' (γόης), the older word for a practitioner of magic (paranormal), magic, with a meaning expanded to include astronomy, astrology, alchemy, and other forms of esoteric knowledge. This association was in turn the product of the Hellenistic fascination for Pseudo-Zoroaster, who was perceived by the Greeks to be the Chaldean founder of the Magi and inventor of both astrology and magic, a meaning that stil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medes
The Medes were an Iron Age Iranian peoples, Iranian people who spoke the Median language and who inhabited an area known as Media (region), Media between western Iran, western and northern Iran. Around the 11th century BC, they occupied the mountainous region of northwestern Iran and the northeastern and eastern region of Mesopotamia in the vicinity of Ecbatana (present-day Hamadan). Their consolidation in Iran is believed to have occurred during the 8th century BC. In the 7th century BC, all of western Iran and some other territories were under Median rule, but their precise geographic extent remains unknown. Although widely recognized as playing an important role in the history of the ancient Near East, the Medes left no written records to reconstruct their history. Knowledge of the Medes comes only from foreign sources such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Armenians and Ancient Greece, Greeks, as well as a few Iranian archaeological sites, which are believed to have been occu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Herodotus
Herodotus (; BC) was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum, Turkey), under Persian control in the 5th century BC, and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He wrote the '' Histories'', a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars, among other subjects such as the rise of the Achaemenid dynasty of Cyrus. He has been described as " The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero, and the " Father of Lies" by others. The ''Histories'' primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, ethnographical, geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential part of the narrative and provides readers with a wellspring of additional information. Herodotus was criticized in his times for his inclusion of "legends an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mary Boyce
Nora Elisabeth Mary Boyce (2 August 1920 – 4 April 2006) was a British scholar of Iranian languages and an authority on Zoroastrianism. She was Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. The Royal Asiatic Society's annual Boyce Prize for outstanding contributions to the study of religion is named after her. Early years She was born in Darjeeling in British India where her parents were vacationing to escape the heat of the plains during the summer. Her father, William H. Boyce, was a Judge at the Calcutta high-court, then an institution of the British imperial government. Her mother Nora (née Gardiner) was a granddaughter of the historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner.John R. Hinnells, 'Boyce, (Nora Elisabeth) Mary (1920–2006)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Jan 2010; online edn, Sept 201accessed 8 Jan 2017/ref> Boyce was educated at Wimbledon High School and then Chelt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iron Age
The Iron Age () is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progressing to protohistory (before written history). In this usage, it is preceded by the Stone Age (subdivided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic) and Bronze Age. These concepts originated for describing Iron Age Europe and the ancient Near East. In the archaeology of the Americas, a five-period system is conventionally used instead; indigenous cultures there did not develop an iron economy in the pre-Columbian era, though some did work copper and bronze. Indigenous metalworking arrived in Australia with European contact. Although meteoric iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is defined locally around the world by archaeological convention when the production of Smelting, smelted iron (espe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age () was a historical period characterised principally by the use of bronze tools and the development of complex urban societies, as well as the adoption of writing in some areas. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of the three-age system, following the Stone Age and preceding the Iron Age. Conceived as a global era, the Bronze Age follows the Neolithic, with a transition period between the two known as the Chalcolithic. The final decades of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean basin are often characterised as a period of widespread societal collapse known as the Late Bronze Age collapse (), although its severity and scope are debated among scholars. An ancient civilisation is deemed to be part of the Bronze Age if it either produced bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying it with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or traded other items for bronze from producing areas elsewhere. Bronze Age cultures were the first to History of writing, develop writin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iranian Peoples
Iranian peoples, or Iranic peoples, are the collective ethnolinguistic groups who are identified chiefly by their native usage of any of the Iranian languages, which are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages within the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. The Proto-Iranian language, Proto-Iranians are believed to have emerged as a separate branch of the Indo-Iranians in Central Asia around the mid-2nd millennium BC. At their peak of expansion in the mid-1st millennium BC, the territory of the Iranian peoples stretched across the entire Eurasian Steppe; from the Danube, Danubian Plains in the west to the Ordos Plateau in the east and the Iranian Plateau in the south.: "From the first millennium b.c., we have abundant historical, archaeological and linguistic sources for the location of the territory inhabited by the Iranian peoples. In this period the territory of the northern Iranians, they being equestrian nomads, extended over the whole zone of the ste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zarathushtra
Zarathushtra Spitama, more commonly known as Zoroaster or Zarathustra, was an Iranian religious reformer who challenged the tenets of the contemporary Ancient Iranian religion, becoming the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. Variously described as a sage or a wonderworker; in the oldest Zoroastrian scriptures, the Gathas, which he is believed to have authored, he is described as a preacher and a poet-prophet. He also had an impact on Heraclitus, Plato, Pythagoras, and the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He spoke an Eastern Iranian language, named Avestan by scholars after the corpus of Zoroastrian religious texts written in that language. Based on this, it is tentative to place his homeland somewhere in the eastern regions of Greater Iran (perhaps in modern-day Afghanistan or Tajikistan), but his exact birthplace is uncertain. His life is traditionally dated to sometime around the 7th and 6th centuries BC, making him a contemporary of C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monotheism
Monotheism is the belief that one God is the only, or at least the dominant deity.F. L. Cross, Cross, F.L.; Livingstone, E.A., eds. (1974). "Monotheism". The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. A distinction may be made between exclusive monotheism, in which the one God is a singular existence, and both inclusive and pluriform monotheism, in which multiple gods or godly forms are recognized, but each are postulated as extensions of the same God. Monotheism is distinguished from henotheism, a religious system in which the believer worships one god without denying that others may worship different gods with equal validity, and monolatry, monolatrism, the recognition of the existence of many gods but with the consistent worship of only one deity. The term ''monolatry'' was perhaps first used by Julius Wellhausen. Monotheism characterizes the traditions of Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic religions such as Judaism, Samaritanism, Christi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
