Ancient Iran didn’t leave one “Persian view of the mind.” It left a few very different kinds of evidence: hymns called the Gathas, credited to a poet-priest named Zarathustra (the Greeks said Zoroaster) whose dates nobody knows; inscriptions of King Darius I, who ruled from 522 to 486 BCE (Shahbazi 1994); a religious law book, the Vendidad; and inscriptions of a powerful priest named Kartir from the late 200s CE. Together they care a lot about choosing: between Truth and “the Lie,” and between good and bad thoughts, words, and deeds. They picture a soul judged after death and sent toward reward or punishment, and healing by knife, plants, and sacred words. They don’t contain a psychology in today’s sense.
Who was Zarathustra, and when did he live?
Nobody knows. Iranist William Malandra writes that when and where he lived is simply not known (Malandra 2009, “Zoroaster’s date and place”). Malandra’s 2009 survey places the nearest thing to agreement around 1000 BCE, give or take a century. Serious scholars have proposed dates from about 1750 BCE to a few centuries before Alexander the Great (Disputed; “Date”).
“Persian” is also a bit off. The Avestan language of the hymns is not the dialect of Pars (Fars), the Persian homeland, and scholars have placed it almost everywhere else (Kellens 1987, “The origin of the Avestan texts”). Malandra’s best guess is somewhere in northeastern Iran (Plausible; “Place”). “Iranian” is the safer word.
Was this monotheism? Malandra says the labels mislead: depending on definitions, “monotheist,” “dualist,” and “polytheist” can all fit (Disputed). Darius’s tomb inscription hails Ahura Mazda as creator of earth, sky, and humankind (DNa 1–4), yet at Behistun he says Ahura Mazda helped him, and so did “the other gods who exist” (DB IV.60–63; both UT editions).
What is the “Zend Avesta,” and how old is it really?
“Zend Avesta” mashes two things together. The Avesta is the collection of sacred texts in the Avestan language. The Zand is their translation and commentary in Middle Persian (Kellens 1987, opening).
The transmission model described in Kellens’s 1987 survey is:
- Composed: The Gathas (Yasna 28–34, 43–51, 53), along with a few other short texts, are in an older form of Avestan and are probably several centuries older than the rest. Neither layer can be dated precisely.
- Memorized: For a very long time priests passed the texts on by memory. Writing was rare in ancient Iran.
- Written down: A special alphabet was invented to capture every sound of the recitation, probably in the 300s CE, under the Sasanian kings (“The Sasanian Avesta”).
- Surviving copies: Every known manuscript descends from one lost copy of the 800s or 900s CE. The oldest ones that survive date to the late 1200s CE. Only part of the Sasanian collection made it.
(An analogy: it’s like knowing a song only from a recording made many centuries after it was first sung. The recording is precious, but it can’t tell you exactly how the first performance sounded.)
Even the words are hard. In a 1952 book review, the Iranist Ilya Gershevitch wrote that nearly 190 of the 238 surviving Gatha stanzas were partly or completely incomprehensible. Malandra allows that research has probably shrunk that number somewhat since, but translations still differ widely (Malandra 2000, opening paragraphs).
What did the Gathas say about the mind?
The University of Texas edition of the Gathas glosses the Avestan word manah as “mind” and sometimes translates it “thought” (UT Yasna 30, glossary and translation). One of the divine beings around Ahura Mazda is Vohu Manah, “Good Mind.” The hymns call the good destination after death the “House of Good Mind” and the bad one the “House of Worst Mind” (Malandra 2009, paragraphs on the afterlife and the divine beings, citing Yasna 32.15 and 32.13).
In that edition of Yasna 30, stanza 2 asks listeners to hear the best things with their ears, look with a bright mind at the two options they must choose between, and choose, each person for himself. Stanza 3 describes two primal “spirits,” twins, one better and one bad in mind, speech, and deed (Harvey, Lehmann & Slocum, Yasna 30.2–3). That’s Documented for that edition.
The thought-word-deed trio is real and old. What the stanza means is Disputed. Malandra lines up eight translations of Yasna 30.3. Are the twin mainyu two primordial spirits? Two “fundamental efforts”? Or, in Kellens and Pirart’s version, two “states of mind”? Are they revealed “through a dream,” or are they themselves “twin dreams”? Translators don’t agree (Malandra 2000). With the words this uncertain, big labels like “the first psychology” have nothing solid to stand on.
What happened to the soul?
Was the soul simply part of the body, headed for a place of only light and joy? The texts say no.
- The Gathas hold each person answerable for their deeds. They mention a crossing called the Chinvat Bridge and two destinations: the “House of Song” or “best existence,” and the “House of the Lie,” pictured as a long stretch of darkness, bad food, and cries of woe (Shaked 1998, “Eschatology in the Gāθās”; Tafazzoli 1991). Those words are in the standard translations (Documented), though some specialists read the Gathas mainly as ritual hymns and play the afterlife down (Disputed; Shaked 1998).
- Younger Avestan texts, and later books that expand them, add that the soul (urvan) stays near the dead person’s head for three nights, then meets its daēnā, a figure shaped by the person’s own deeds, beautiful or ugly (Shaked 1998, “Eschatology in the Younger Avesta” and “Individual eschatology”). The soul was pictured leaving the body, not built into it.
- More detailed descriptions appear in Middle Persian works such as the Bundahišn and Dādestān ī dēnīg: the bridge widens for the good and narrows like a razor blade for the wicked (Tafazzoli 1991). These books give a much later picture, not a snapshot of Zarathustra’s time. The razor comparison itself is older than those books: it already appears in Kartir’s third-century inscriptions (Tafazzoli 1991).
Kartir’s inscriptions, carved in the late 200s CE, tie good behavior to bodily prosperity and the soul’s reward. In one, he says he asked the gods for a sign so he could be confident that paradise and hell exist, and wanted readers to share that confidence (Documented as his public claim; Skjærvø 2011, “The purpose of the heavenly journey”). Whether he describes a trance can’t be told, and what he privately felt is Unknown.
The living cared for the dead, too. In Iranist Mary Boyce’s reconstruction, souls of the dead were believed to come home once a year, at a feast with an Avestan name, to receive prayers and offerings from their descendants (Plausible; Boyce 2000). More securely, a third-century royal inscription lists daily offerings of lamb, bread, and wine for souls (Skjærvø 2011, notes to §§33–34).
Did they preserve bodies, like the Egyptians?
There was no single practice. The Vendidad treats a corpse as deeply polluting. It punishes burial and says bodies should be laid out for corpse-eating dogs and birds (Grenet, “Burial ii”; Darmesteter’s translation of Vendidad 3.36–39 and 6.44–46).
Practice varied (Strongly supported):
- Kings were laid in freestanding or rock-cut tombs (Grenet). Darius’s is cut into a cliff at Naqsh-e Rostam, near Persepolis (UT, DNa introduction; Shahbazi 1994).
- Herodotus, a Greek outsider writing in the 400s BCE, repeats a secretive, unclear story that Persian bodies weren’t buried until birds or dogs had torn them. He was sure the Magi (priests) did this, and said Persians coated a body in wax before burial (Herodotus 1.140).
- Western Iran has little burial archaeology. In eastern Iran, ossuaries for bones go back to the 400s–300s BCE in Chorasmia. Grenet reads the milder penalties for burial in the texts as a sign that many people kept burying anyway (Plausible; Grenet).
How did healing work?
In James Darmesteter’s 19th-century English translation, the Vendidad names three kinds of healer: one who heals with the knife, one with plants, and one with sacred words (Avestan manthra). It ranks the sacred-word healer best (Vendidad 7.44; Gignoux 2003). Gignoux notes illness was blamed on supernatural forces, especially demons, and calls the Avestan medical evidence weak and mostly mythological.
The same chapter has a rule worth stating plainly: a new knife-healer had to prove himself first on daeva-worshippers, meaning people outside the faith. If three of them died, he was barred for life from treating fellow believers (Vendidad 7.36–40). The rule treats outsiders’ lives as the cheaper risk. Whether anyone followed it is Unknown: a law book tells us what its authors prescribed, not what happened. Fees were set by rank: a blessing for healing a priest, a low-value ox for a household head (7.41–43).
Did these ideas shape Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
Disputed. Shaul Shaked lays out the case: judgment after death, heaven and hell, and resurrection appear suddenly in Jewish writings of the last two centuries BCE, after long Persian rule and a large Jewish community in Mesopotamia and Persia. Many scholars see Zoroastrian influence, passed on to Christianity and Islam. Not all agree, because the fully developed Zoroastrian versions are known mostly from Middle Persian books far later than the earliest Jewish texts (Shaked 1998, “Zoroastrian influence”).
How we know
What evidence exists: hymns and laws passed on by memory, in manuscripts from the late 1200s CE on; royal and priestly inscriptions; outsiders like Herodotus; ninth-century Middle Persian books.
Whose voices are missing: nearly everyone who wasn’t a king or priest. The research for this page found no letter or diary from someone sick, grieving, or afraid. That’s a gap in the record, not proof they had nothing to say. The daeva-worshippers in the healer rule never speak. Kartir claims he attacked other religions: Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Manichaeans, and others (as Skjærvø identifies the groups). Skjærvø notes that the Middle Persian verb Kartir uses is a traditional word for defeating evil and doesn’t necessarily mean “killed,” so how far Kartir’s actions went is Disputed (Skjærvø 2011, section v). Their side isn’t carved in his stone.
How power shaped the record: Darius used “the Lie” to brand rebels and told future kings to punish its followers (DB I; DB IV). Europe learned the Avesta through Parsi priests: in Surat, India, the priests Kaus, Darab, and Mancherji supplied manuscripts to the Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron, and the first two taught him what Avestan they knew; his translation appeared in 1771 (Duchesne-Guillemin 1985). The 1902 English version of Delphine Menant’s Les Parsis is largely the work of Ratanbai Ardeshir Vakil, a young Parsi woman in Bombay who died in 1895 (Menant/Vakil, introduction). Today’s digital manuscript archive was built with help from libraries in India and from scholars and private collectors in Iran (Avestan Digital Archive).
A living religion: Zoroastrian communities in India and Iran still keep these texts (Kellens 1987). This page describes ancient sources, not what Zoroastrians believe today.
Then vs. now
| What the sources say (then) | How it compares with current evidence (now) |
|---|---|
| In one translation of Yasna 30, people look at their two options with their mind and choose; “Good Mind” is also a divine being. | Brain science links planning and reasoning to brain regions such as the frontal lobes (NINDS). The Gathas teach ethics of choice, not how thinking works. |
| Thought, word, and deed are judged together. | A reader can distinguish thinking, speaking and acting as an analogy; that does not show a line of descent to a modern theory. |
| Illness is linked to demons; the sacred-word healer is ranked best. | This is a historical religious explanation, not a medical claim endorsed here. |
| The soul is judged after death at a bridge. | A religious teaching; the historical evidence reviewed here establishes what texts describe, not what happens after death. |
| Did people hold these beliefs because they feared death? | Unknown. The sources examined here do not establish why ordinary people believed. Guessing their feelings would be invention. |
Ancient Iranian texts cared deeply about the mind as the place where you choose. Their question was “how should I choose?” not “how does the brain work?”