Around, Inside and Beyond the Walls: Names, Ideas and Images of Paradise in Pre-Islamic Iran. With an Appendix on Old Persian

Any discussion about ‘paradise’ in the Iranian framework must focus on two aspects: the first one concerns the well-known fact that our modern designations of this wonderful place descend (mostly via Latin paradīsus)1 from a Greek word, παράδεισος (parádeisos),2 which, in its turn, was clearly a loanword from an Iranian formation, a fact well recognized also by some Greek grammarians. The second subject regards the image and the conception of what ideologically and religiously can actually be compared with such a special place, located somewhere, where the souls of the pious Mazdeans were, and are still, supposed to go in the afterlife. In fact, the Western reception of such an iconographic representation of a beautiful garden, which was used in order to indicate the terrestrial paradise, is undoubtedly different from the Mazdean one. The latter, in its turn, used different expressions that fittingly designated the final place of resting and of beatification for the followers of the so-called ‘good religion’ (Mazdeism or Zoroastrianism).