Roof
The term dachma ( Persian دخمه, DMG daḫme ) means grave (mal) in Persian, but mainly designates structures that are also called towers of silence and serve the Zoroastrians as places for heavenly burials.
Burial form
With the Parsees and other Zoroastrians it is customary to lay corpses in round towers where the meat and soft parts of birds, e.g. B. vultures or ravens , are eaten .
Originally, the corpses were placed individually as "sun burial" in raised areas without water or plants on rocks that were surrounded by small walls. These walls were supposed to prevent the dead from being eaten by land predators, because only birds were allowed to eat them. The round tower roof - it serves the entire community - has only been documented since Islamic times. Mountain dachmas are walling of rocky peaks without further decorations. The bones exposed by the birds, but also by wind and weather, were then collected in rock pits or in stone boxes, so-called astodans . Dachmas can still be found in Iran and India today. For example, in Mumbai on Malabar Hill ( 18 ° 57 '34.4 " N , 72 ° 48' 18.1" O ), there are several Dachmas.
Many authors explain this form of burial by stating that in addition to air and water, earth and fire are sacred to the Parsees, i.e. they must not be contaminated by the unclean corpse, so that burial and cremation are prohibited. If no roofs are available, the Parsees prefer cremation. In contrast, the Persian followers of Zoroaster, since a ban in the 1970s, made it impossible for them to use their towers of silence for the "vulture ceremony" - for example in the area of Yazd - in order not to contaminate the earth with body parts dropped by birds, buried in concrete coffins or in concrete-lined graves.
See also
literature
- Günter C. Vieten (Author), George Shelley (Photos): Parsing. The Aryans of God . In: Geo-Magazin. No. 9, Hamburg 1978, pp. 86-108. (Informative experience report, especially including the Zoroastrian cult of the dead) ISSN 0342-8311 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sina Vodjani, Gabriele von Kröcher: Zarathustra. Membrane International, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-86562-739-1 , pp. 70 f. and 195.