Word: ahura
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...police station, they found the mummified body wrapped in brown cotton cloth and stretched out on a woven mat coated with a mixture of wax, resin and honey. The mummy's gold crown and breastplate were engraved with the cuneiform writing used in ancient Mesopotamia and an image of Ahura-Mazda, the god of Zoroastrianism associated with ancient Persia. Encased in a heavy wood coffin, it was placed in what initially appeared to be a stone sarcophagus (it turned out to be made of grains of opaque white glass). Astounded by the find, police loaded the mummy into...
...they are Zoroastrians, followers of a myth-enshrouded religious prophet named Zoroaster who lived some six centuries before Christ. Zoroaster's exact teaching is obscure but, as passed down by the Parsis, it is basically a vision of life as conflict between a spirit of goodness and light-Ahura Mazda -and a spirit of evil and darkness-Ahriman. The Parsis worship Ahura Mazda in the form of fire, one of three sacred elements. Because the earth is also sacred (as is water), they choose to bury only the bones of their dead-after the flesh has been stripped away...
...meaningful chiefly to crossword-puzzle addicts and readers of Nietzsche. To the 100,000 Parsis of India who last week celebrated their New Year, the most sacred feast on their calendar, Zoroaster is still the one great prophet, the man who gave them their monotheistic faith in the god Ahura Mazda...
...wealthy landowner, Zoroaster apparently rejected the prevailing polytheism of his age and taught that the one true god was Ahura Mazda, who was to be served by self-sacrifice rather than blood sacrifice. Although Ahura Mazda was the supreme lord of creation, his influence over the world was challenged nonetheless by a lesser god of evil, whom Zoroaster's followers later named Ahriman. Caught up in the unending war of these two deities, man was constantly faced with an existential choice of doing good or ill; at the end of his life, his personal balance sheet of good...
...Near East, and when faced with the problem of inventing a Buddha image, they fell back on the Greek and Roman image of Apollo dressed in a kind of Roman toga. They probably borrowed the halo from the traditional Iranian sun disk that symbolized the heavenly light of Ahura Mazdah. For Buddha's ushnisha-the bump on the top of his head that housed a sort of extra brain that grew as a result of his Enlightenment-they substituted a topknot of extra hair...