Divinity Atlas

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Cultures

Persians

Peoples

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The Persians are an Iranian people of the plateau that carries their name, whose Achaemenid and Sasanian empires at different times ruled from the Indus to the Aegean. Zoroastrianism took shape among Iranian speakers and became the religion of the Sasanian court, leaving a body of Avestan and Middle Persian scripture. Islam has been the religion of the great majority of Persians since the Arab conquest, with a Shia establishment from the sixteenth century, while Zoroastrian communities continue in Iran and as the Parsis of India.

Facts
Traditions
Principal Religious Traditions
Zoroastrianism, which took shape among Iranian speakers and became the religion of the Sasanian court, leaving the Avestan and Middle Persian literature; Manichaeism, born in the same country; and since the seventh century Islam, Twelver Shia since the Safavid period, with Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish and Bahai minorities. 3
Origins
Origin Region
The Iranian plateau, from which the Achaemenid and Sasanian empires at different times ruled from the Indus to the Aegean. 1
Language Family
Persian, Western Iranian within the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. 2
Practice
Practice Status
Living, and practised in varied local forms 3
Learn More
Ahura Mazda, Asha and the Choice Each Person Makes

Zoroastrianism took shape among Iranian speakers and became the religion of the Persian empires. Its founder, Zarathushtra, cannot be securely dated and estimates range across a millennium. What survives of his own voice is the Gathas, a small group of hymns in an archaic language embedded in the Avesta and translated by M. L. West among others.

The system Mary Boyce reconstructs sets Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, as creator, with asha, truth and right order, opposed by druj, the lie. The Amesha Spentas, the bounteous immortals, are aspects of the creator and are also attached to the elements of creation, so that care of fire, water, earth, plants and cattle is a moral duty rather than a metaphor. The distinctive claim is that each person chooses, and that the choice bears on the outcome of the whole conflict.

Fire is the visible focus, tended in temples rather than worshipped, and the highest grade of fire is assembled from many sources and never allowed to go out. The dead are exposed rather than buried or burned, because a corpse would pollute earth or fire. Ritual purity on this account is not fastidiousness but participation in the maintenance of a good creation against an active corruption of it.

Achaemenid to Sasanian, and a Diaspora

Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE, and the Achaemenid empire reached from the Indus to the Aegean, ruled with a light hand in religious matters; the Hebrew Bible calls Cyrus the anointed of the Lord for permitting the return to Jerusalem. Whether the Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrian in any strict sense is argued, since their inscriptions name Ahura Mazda but say nothing of Zarathushtra.

Alexander's conquest in 330 BCE ended the empire, and Zoroastrian tradition remembers him as the destroyer of scriptures. Under the Sasanians, from the third century of the common era, the religion became an organised state church with a priestly hierarchy, a canon, and at times the persecution of Manichaeans and Christians. Manichaeism itself arose in that setting, as did the Mazdakite movement.

The Arab conquest of the seventh century made Islam the religion of Iran over several centuries rather than immediately. A community moved to Gujarat and became the Parsis, and John Hinnells's study traces the further migrations that made Zoroastrianism a global diaspora now numbering well under two hundred thousand. Iranian religious history did not stop there. Iran became the principal home of Twelver Shia Islam, and the Babi and Bahai movements began there in the nineteenth century, the restrictions on Bahais being reported to the United Nations to this day.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Persians directly: "D.N. MacKenzie's two part article "Mani's Sabuhragan," published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, assembles and translates the surviving Middle Persian fragments of..."

Source "Mani's Sabuhragan" (D.N. MacKenzie)D.N. MacKenzie

This source names Persians directly: "W.W. How and J."

Source A Commentary on HerodotusW.W. How and J. Wells

This source names Persians directly: "James Henry Breasted's A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1905 and revised in 1906, is an early landmark of American..."

This source names Persians directly: "Wikipedia's article on the Achaemenid Empire, community-edited."

Source Achaemenid Empire (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Persians directly: "Vincent A."

Source Akbar the Great Mogul, 1542-1605Vincent A. Smith

This source names Persians directly: "The arabesque is the scrolling vegetal ornament of Islamic art: a stylised stem that forks at rhythmic intervals, each fork carrying a leaf or palmette that may itself become a new stem, with no..."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

The Bab and Baha'u'llah were both Persian; Persian is one of the faith's two scriptural languages.

This source names Persians directly: "Carmen Astrologicum, by Dorotheus of Sidon and dated to roughly the first century, is the primary text itself, one of the earliest surviving systematic treatises on Hellenistic astrology..."

Source Carmen AstrologicumDorotheus of Sidon

This source names Persians directly: "In 297 CE the emperor Diocletian ordered Manichaeism annihilated within the empire, treating it as a subversive Persian sect at a time of open war between Rome and Persia, a suspicion of foreign..."

This source names Persians directly: "of the True Cross from the Sassanid Persians in 630."

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

This source names Persians directly: "and Neo-Assyrian art well before the Persians, often with a god set within the disc."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Persians directly: "The Fort of Shaykh Tabarsi was a rural shrine tomb in the forested Mazandaran province of northern Iran, named for a local Sufi figure, which several hundred Babis fortified in October 1848 under..."

Girih, Sacred Geometry

This source names Persians directly: "Girih, Persian for knot, names the interlacing geometric strapwork of Islamic architecture: star-and-polygon patterns whose straplines weave over and under one another like a knotted cord."

This source names Persians directly: "A herbad, from the Avestan aethrapati by way of Middle Persian, is a Zoroastrian priest ranked below a mobed in the tradition's graded priesthood, historically also carrying the sense of a religious..."

Histories, Sources

This source names Persians directly: "Herodotus's Histories is the surviving fifth century BCE Greek account often called the founding work of Western historical writing, and this Perseus Digital Library edition presents the Greek text..."

Source HistoriesHerodotus
Indica, Sources

This source names Persians directly: "Ctesias of Cnidus was a Greek physician at the Persian court in the fifth century BCE, and his Indica, surviving only in fragments and later summary, is the earliest identifiable ancestor of the..."

Source IndicaCtesias of Cnidus

This source names Persians directly: "Muslim Malay and Arab merchants had long traded through the Southeast Asian archipelago when the Sunni scholar Shaykh Makhdum Karim reached the Sulu Archipelago and Jolo in 1380 and began..."

Source Islam in the Philippines (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Persians directly: "Cyrus the Great of Persia captured Babylon in 539 BCE and, the following year, ended the exile, permitting Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple there."

Source Babylonian Captivity (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Persians directly: "The karkadann is a large, powerful, single-horned beast of Persian and wider Middle Eastern legend, generally described as roughly the size of a large ox or small elephant, extremely aggressive, and..."

This source names Persians directly: "When a local guide showed the Persians a path around the pass, Leonidas dismissed most of the allied contingents and stayed to fight a rearguard action with his Spartans, the Thespian volunteers and..."

Source HistoriesHerodotus

This source names Persians directly: "Mani, born around 216 CE in Babylonia to a family of Parthian aristocratic descent, began preaching a new revelation in his mid-twenties after a journey that included India."

Manichaean, Pantheons

This source names Persians directly: "The divine beings of Manichaeism, the third-century dualist religion founded by the Persian prophet Mani, arranged around a cosmic struggle between the Realm of Light and the Realm of Darkness..."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Persians directly: "The Maragheh Observatory was built in 1259 in northwestern Iran under the patronage of the Mongol Ilkhanid ruler Hulagu and directed by the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who had persuaded..."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names Persians directly: "An eighth century Persian Jewish astrologer who worked at the early Abbasid court in Iraq, born in Basra and originally from Khorasan."

Source Mashallah ibn Athari (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Persians directly: "The Wikipedia biographical article on Mashallah ibn Athari (circa 740 to 815 CE), the Persian Jewish astrologer who worked at the early Abbasid court, took part in the electional horoscope cast for..."

Source Mashallah ibn Athari (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Persians directly: "The comparative grammatical study of Avestan and Old Persian, opened by Eugene Burnouf's 1833 analysis of the Yasna."

This source names Persians directly: "The Panj Sha'n (Five Grades, or Five Modes) is a major compilation work of the Bab, written in Arabic and Persian and combining several distinct literary and doctrinal genres in one collection..."

This source names Persians directly: "Wikipedia's article on Persian miniature painting, consulted 2026-08-11."

Source Persian Miniature (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Persians directly: "Classical Persian manuscripts collated against each other to establish which variant reading is most likely original."

This source names Persians directly: "This rule fixes Purim on the fourteenth of Adar in an ordinary Hebrew year, commemorating the deliverance of Persian Jewry from a plot to destroy them, told in the Book of Esther."

Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)

This source names Persians directly: "Qazvini, Mohammad, the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry by Mahmoud Omidsalar published in 2016, is a scholarly reference article on Mohammad Qazvini, the influential early twentieth century Iranian..."

This source names Persians directly: "S. A. A. Rizvi was a historian of Mughal India, and this book, published by Munshiram Manoharlal, is his academic study of the religious and intellectual life of Muslims during the reign of the..."

This source names Persians directly: "Franklin Lewis is a scholar of Persian literature, and this book is an academic biography and literary study of Rumi, published by Oneworld, that works through the full range of primary sources in..."

Source Rumi: Past and Present, East and WestFranklin D. Lewis

This source names Persians directly: "The Samaritan Book of Joshua is a medieval Arabic chronicle, distinct from and considerably expanding on the biblical book of the same name, that carries Samaritan history from Joshua's conquest of..."

Source The Samaritans: A ProfileReinhard Pummer

This source names Persians directly: "Touraj Daryaee is a historian of ancient Iran, and this I.B."

This source names Persians directly: "The Shabuhragan is a summary of Manichaean cosmology and eschatology composed by Mani himself and dedicated to the Sasanian king Shapur I, making it unusual among Mani's core scriptures for being..."

Source "Mani's Sabuhragan" (D.N. MacKenzie)D.N. MacKenzie

This source names Persians directly: "The Shahnameh (Book of Kings) is a Persian epic poem by the poet Ferdowsi, begun around 977 CE and completed in its final form on March 8, 1010."

This source names Persians directly: "Abolqasem Ferdowsi's eleventh century Persian epic of the mythical and historical kings of Iran, including the tyrant Zahhak and his overthrow by the smith Kaveh and the hero Feridun, in Dick..."

Sogdian, Languages

This source names Persians directly: "Sogdian is an Eastern Iranian language of the Middle Iranian period, native to Sogdiana, the region around Samarkand and Bukhara in Central Asia, and the working lingua franca of the eastern Silk..."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Persians directly: "The medieval Indian subcontinent studied from its own Persian and Arabic chronicles, first assembled into one continuous English record by Henry Miers Elliot and John Dowson beginning in 1867."

This source names Persians directly: "Franz Cumont's Textes et monuments figures relatifs aux mysteres de Mithra, published by H."

This source names Persians directly: "Arab Muslim armies attacked Sasanian territory beginning in 633, broke permanent Sasanian resistance west of Iran at the Battle of Qadisiyyah in 636, and completed the conquest of the empire in 651..."

Source Zoroastrianism In Iran (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Persians directly: "Bernard Lewis's The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1967, is a scholarly history of the medieval Nizari Ismaili movement by a historian long established..."

Source The Assassins: A Radical Sect in IslamBernard Lewis

This source names Persians directly: "The naval battle fought in the straits between the island of Salamis and the Attic coast in September 480 BCE, in which the combined Greek fleet, with Athens supplying the largest contingent under..."

Source HistoriesHerodotus

This source names Persians directly: "After a local guide showed the Persians a path around the pass, Leonidas dismissed most of the allied troops and held the position with a rearguard of about three hundred Spartans, roughly seven..."

Source HistoriesHerodotus

This source names Persians directly: "The Bundahishn is the Zoroastrian book of creation, a Middle Persian text setting out the tradition's own cosmology and cosmogony, and this Oxford University Press volume is Domenico Agostini and..."

Source The Bundahishn: The Zoroastrian Book of CreationDomenico Agostini and Samuel Thrope

This source names Persians directly: "Christianity reached Persian territory early, carried along trade routes out of Syriac-speaking Mesopotamia into the Sasanian Empire, with communities attested at Arbela in Adiabene and elsewhere..."

This source names Persians directly: "Farid al-Din Attar's The Conference of the Birds, Mantiq al-Tayr, is a primary foundational Persian Sufi allegorical poem; the atlas records no publisher and no exact publication year because it..."

Source The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr)Farid al-Din Attar

This source names Persians directly: "The series of conflicts fought between the Greek city-states and the Achaemenid Persian Empire from the Ionian Revolt of 499 BCE through the failed Persian invasions of the Greek mainland led by..."

Source HistoriesHerodotus
The Mathnawi, Sources

This source names Persians directly: "Jalal al-Din Rumi's Mathnawi is a primary source of the first order, the thirteenth century Persian Sufi mystic's major poetic work, often called the Quran in Persian within the tradition for its..."

Source The MathnawiJalal al-Din Rumi

This source names Persians directly: "David Ulansey is a scholar of ancient religion, and this Oxford University Press book is his academic study proposing that the Roman cult of Mithras originated from ancient astronomical observation..."

Source The Origins of the Mithraic MysteriesDavid Ulansey

This source names Persians directly: "Vali Nasr's account of the modern Sunni-Shia divide and its political consequences across the Middle East, published by W.W."

This source names Persians directly: "The Thousand and One Nights, Alf Layla wa-Layla, is the primary text itself, a frame narrative collection assembled and expanded by multiple anonymous compilers across centuries and regions, drawing..."

Source The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla)Anonymous (multiple compilers)

This source names Persians directly: "Nearly five centuries after Bahram I ended the faith's Persian patronage, the Uyghur ruler accepted Manichaeism as the official religion of his Central Asian empire in 762 CE, after meeting..."

This source names Persians directly: "A combined citation covering Wikipedia's article on the Zafarnama and SikhiWiki, a community reference maintained by Sikh editors."

Source The Zafarnama (Wikipedia and SikhiWiki)Wikipedia contributors; SikhiWiki editors

This source names Persians directly: "Themistocles was an Athenian statesman and general, born around 524 BCE to a family of only modest standing, who rose to dominate Athenian politics in the years after the Battle of Marathon."

Source HistoriesHerodotus

This source names Persians directly: "The crowd sourced encyclopedia's article on the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi's Persian epic, read directly for this entry."

This source names Persians directly: "The Zafarnama, the Epistle of Victory, is a 111 verse Persian letter Guru Gobind Singh addressed to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1705, following the Battle of Chamkaur and the loss of Anandpur."

Source The Zafarnama (Wikipedia and SikhiWiki)Wikipedia contributors; SikhiWiki editors

This source names Persians directly: "Under Artaxerxes I, who ruled the Achaemenid Persian Empire from 465 to 424 BCE, more than eight decades after Cyrus the Great founded the empire, Zoroastrianism became the empire's de facto religion."

Source Achaemenid Empire (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Originated In

Iran, Countries
Persia, Regions

Originates in Language

Worship Of

Atar, Deities

Atar, fire, is tended by masked priests among the ancient Persians lest human breath pollute the ever burning temple flames.

Source A History of ZoroastrianismMary Boyce
Sraosha, Deities

Sraosha is a yazata of Zoroastrianism honored among the ancient Persians, guarding the world against the demons especially in the vulnerable hours of night.

Source A History of ZoroastrianismMary Boyce
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
David M. Eberhard, Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.), SIL International, 2024View the Source
3. A History of Zoroastrianism
Mary Boyce, Brill, 1989View the Source
The Hymns of Zoroaster
M. L. West, I.B. Tauris, 2010View the Source
The Avesta
Anonymous (Zoroastrian tradition)View the Source
The Zoroastrian Diaspora: Religion and Migration
John R. Hinnells, Oxford University Press, 2005View the Source
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran
United Nations Human Rights Council, 2025View the Source
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