Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

3.2
was buried could not be irrigated or sown for a year. But how were they to go about
it then? How were the dead to be buried? Zoroastrian priests worked out a strict
sequence of complex burial rites, outlined in the Vendidad (a section of the Avesta).
It stipulated that a corpse should first be placed in a kata, a small building, and then
taken to a dakhma (a natural elevation or a special structure) where birds, predators
or specially trained dogs could devour the corpse. And only after the bones had
been cleaned in this way could they be placed in a designated ossuary, built of stone,
clay or lime, or rock-cut. In the Vendidad, these ossuaries are called uzdana, and in
later Pahlavi texts astodan. The exact translation of these terms remains ambiguous:
some scholars believe that the term astodan stood for the clay ossuary receptacles,
which were very common in Central Asia, while others, in particular the well-known
German Iranist W. Henning, have translated the word as referring to a crypt or
tomb made of earth. The burial was carried out by dedicated people, the so-called
ristokasha, who were considered unclean. They were forbidden to be closer than 30
paces from fire, water, or a baresman (a cult object made up of a bundle of rods), or to
approach people closer than three paces.
In addition to Avestan terms, the term naus was widespread, derived from the
Greek word naos – a temple that was used by the Zoroastrians of the Sassanian period
and the first centuries of Islam to designate a burial structure for keeping the purified
bones of the dead.
Zoroastrian funerary monuments, such as the uzdana, dakhma kata and temples,
as well as ossuaries have been discovered and studied in many places in Central Asia,
including Bactria, Margiana, Parthia and Khorezm.
Khorezm and Bactria had a particular role in the formation of Zoroastrianism.
The recent discovery of various Buddhist monuments in Bactria, with their
magnificent works of art, has eclipsed the indisputable fact that Zoroastrianism was
the main religion of this region. Buddhism in Bactria was based in urban areas and
was sustained by immigrants, who settled widely in the territory at the time of the
Kushan state; while Zoroastrianism was the religion of the indigenous population of
Bactria, and its traces remain in several archaeological sites.
The spread and persistence of this religion here has been verified by a whole
range of sources, written testimonies, epic traditions, archaeological, epigraphic and
numismatic data.
In the Vendidad, which was codified in the 1st century BC, Bactria (Bahdi) is
listed among the righteous Zoroastrian countries, and described as the beautiful
country ‘crowned with flags’. The secular historical tradition, based on the Sassanian
Khudaynama (Book of Kings), preserved an earlier notion of the Bactrian king, Kavi
Vishtaspa, the patron of Zarathushtra, at whose court the prophet began to preach
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