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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
The aim of this study is to show how Zoroastrian elements have survived into the 19th and 20th centuries around the higher reaches of the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus), a river now forming the boundary between Afghanistan and the U.S.S.R, whose basin is mostly inhabited by East Iranian Tajiks and related Pamiri groups – that is, approximately Bactria of old. Although Islam reached Balkh as early as the 7th century, such Zoroastrian survivals should not perhaps be too surprising, since Bactria was one of the ancient homelands of Zoroastrianism, and was among those regions which laid legendary claim to Zoroaster's own ministry. Unfortunately although the history of Zoroastrianism in Western Iran during Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian times is fairly well known, its fortunes in the earlier East Iranian centres like Bactria are much less clear. A few literary sources like Strabo can be supplemented by gradually emerging archaeological evidence. Nevertheless Zoroastrian remains in Bactria are meagre when compared with Buddhist ones from there, or with Zoroastrian cultic materials found further afield in Central Asia/East Iran, i.e. from ancient Sogdia, Chorasmia and Margiana.
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43 My grateful thanks to Jonathan Lee, who first pointed out in 1980 the material on the Wakhan that had been collected by Olufsen, and especially to Professor Mary Boyce, whose comments on this study have been most helpful and much appreciated.