Thursday, January 24, 2019

Ka'ba-ye Zartosht in the Naqsh-e Rustam




If you visit Persepolis, you will also visit Naqsh-e Rustam and there you find a structure called Ka'ba-ye Zartosht. It is situated in front of a mountain cliff and exactly in front of the mausoleum of Darius II. in the cliff. There’s a stairway outside to en entrance. It was built the Achaemenid era, but the name of the structure during this period in unknown. During the Sassanian period it was called Bon-Khanak and after the 14th century Ka'ba-ye Zartosht.


The purpose of this building is unknown. One interpretation is: a Zoroastrian fire temple, which I guess is nonsense. I think, some scholars are right in seeing in it a place for the safekeeping of important documents. Around the building there are inscriptions, which support this idea.


There are inscriptions in Greek and also in the Pahlavi script, which had been used for different languages. The texts are historic and religious documents. Shapur had written: "I apprehended Caesar Valerian myself, by my own hands." The Pahlavi script had been used as early as 250 BC. And one language, which has been written in this script had been Aramaic. Aramaic had been a lingua franca. And Aramaic had been the language of Jesus Christ. The Pahlavi script survived in Zoroastrian texts. Book Pahlavi is full of logograms and other ambiguities. “The word for "bread" would be written as Aramaic LḤMʼ (laḥmā) but understood as the sign for Iranian nān”. Therefore important Zoroastrian text were “transcribed into the phonetically unambiguous Avestan alphabet”.



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