New Reflections on the Representation of the Planets in Ancient Iran and their Demonization

The history of the scientific development of ancient Iranian peoples is an intriguing matter, because the Old Iranian tribes were conservative in retaining memories of an earlier ancestral tradition stretching back to their Indo-Iranian background. But particularly in Western Iran they benefitted from the direct impact of a more developed knowledge of astral sciences that distinguished the advanced intellectual evolution of the Mesopotamian area. In this respect, the Medes and Persians had easier access to many new scientific (and esoteric) doctrines thanks to their direct contacts with peoples such as the Elamites, Assyrians and Babylonians. Other Iranian tribes, mostly living on the eastern side of the Iranian plateau, certainly experienced a somewhat distant echo of prestigious Mesopotamian astral lore, but their acquaintance with more developed forms of astronomy, mathematics, calendrical computations, and astral divination was in principle more limited than on the western side of the Iranian plateau. If already the Achaemenid Empire created a sort of open space for the circulation of ideas and traditions, and its internal stability underpinned the general framework in which Babylonian astronomy knew a very high technical evolution, its dramatic fall after Alexander’s conquest exposed the Eastern world to Hellenistic influences, but this also favoured the transmission of Iranian and generally Oriental ideas to the West. While the mutual evolution of astrology and astronomy achieved a very fine level during the 2nd century CE., paradigmatically represented by the works of Ptolemy, the Eastern lands were also progressively involved in the evolution of the astral sciences. The dissemination of this knowledge took different paths: partly it entered Iran directly from the West during the Seleucid and Parthian periods, and parts of knowledge arrived from India with some changes and adaptations. More intricate was the mixture produced in the Central Asian oases, where different traditions, languages, religions and categorizations of the heavens met and exercised mutual influences.