page_title: Ancient Iranian religion
section_title: Iranian sources
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Iranian religion / Sources / Iranian sources
caption_attribution_description: English: Darius I the Great's inscription. Possibly an influence in the en:stele series for the Ptolemies, III, IV, and V-(V for the Rosetta Stone); Ptolemy II also had a Victory Stele, though not bilingual. Italiano: Iscrizione di Dario I il grande.
context_page_description: Ancient Iranian religion refers to the ancient beliefs and practices of the Iranian peoples before the rise of Zoroastrianism.
  The Iranian peoples emerged as a separate branch of the Indo-Iranians in the 2nd-millennium BC, during which they came to dominate the Eurasian Steppe and the Iranian Plateau. Their religion is derived from Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, and therefore shares many similarities with Vedic religion which may have branched from it. Although the Iranian peoples left little written or material evidence of their religious practices, their religion is possible to reconstruct from scant Iranian, Babylonian and Greek accounts, similarities with Vedic and other Indo-European religions, and material evidence. Prior to the Achamenid period, the daivas were also commonly worshipped. The kings made it a state policy to destroy their shrines and vilify them. Old Persian daiva occurs twice in Xerxes' daiva inscription. This trilingual text also includes one reference to a daivadana "house of the daivas", generally interpreted to be a reference to a shrine or sanctuary.
context_section_description: An important Iranian source is the Avesta, which are Zoroastrian sacred scriptures made in the Avestan. This is considered the principal source of knowledge on ancient Iranian religions. It is a collection of several texts that seems to have been over a large span of time by a variety of authors. These texts have been subjected to editings and redactions throughout their development. It is now the only extant fragment of what remained in the 9th century AD of the Avesta compiled in the Sasanian Empire by Khosrow I (6th century). Summaries of its content reveal that it was a huge collection containing texts not only in Avestan, but also in Pahlavi, which was the language of Zoroastrianism in the Sasanian Empire. Though the existing Avesta is dated quite recently, it contains information that is considerably older. The Gathas ("Songs") of the Prophet Zoroaster and much of the Yashts are considered among the oldest. The Gathas includes expressions of the religious vision of Zoroaster, which in many ways is a reinterpretation of the ancient Iranian religious principles. The Yashts are a collection of verses dedicated to various deities. These verses are mostly related to Zoroastrian terminology and ideas, but have little relation to anything specifically Zoroastrian. The gods invoked are basically the pre-Zoroastrian gods of the Iranian peoples. There is little agreement on when Zoroaster lived, but most scholars agree that he lived somewhere between 1200 and 600 BC. Dating the Yashts is similarly difficult, but it is likely that they were redacted (not necessarily composed) initially in the 5th-century BC.
  Another Iranian source are royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid Empire made in the Old Persian (with Akkadian, Aramaic and Elamite translations). These inscriptions, in particular those of Darius I and his son Xerxes I, contain many references to religion. The fact that these are fixed in time and place make them particularly useful.
  Except from the Achaemenid inscriptions, there is no evidence that the Iranian religious compositions were written until the late Parthian or Sassanid period. This makes ancient Iranian religion the only major religion of the Middle East which has no written texts in the ancient period. The religious information was rather oral both in composition and transmission.
caption: The Bistun Inscription of Darius the Great is an important source on the ancient Iranian religion
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