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Document Details :

Title: Beyond the Frontiers of Empire
Subtitle: Iranians and their Ancestors
Author(s): BURNEY, Charles
Journal: Iranica Antiqua
Volume: 34    Date: 1999   
Pages: 1-20
DOI: 10.2143/IA.34.0.519103

Abstract :
Iranologists have understandably looked to later periods, Achaemenid to Sasanian, to illuminate the dark shadows over the later prehistory of Iran, within and beyond the modern frontiers. In the quest for origins, however, it is surely safer to rely as far as possible on contemporary and earlier rather than on later evidence. The starting point of the article is the author's search for an explanation for the origins of the Central Temple (alias Fire Temple) of Tepe Nush-i Jan and for the site of Hasanlu (and the iconography of the Hasanlu Gold Bowl). Interpreted in an Indo-Iranian context, the architectural and iconographic evidence becomes more comprehensible. This leads to a discussion of the practices of fire cults, cattle herding, the domestication of the horse and horse riding in the Andronovo cultural zone, the Indo-Iranian homeland.

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