Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 28, 19 April 2024
Open
Access | Article
The “Barbarian Sky”: Chinese Knowledge and Records of Zoroastrianism Prior to the Tang Dynasty
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
As a terminal for the Silk Road, China is one of the largest countries affected by Zoroastrianism, a religion that once flourished across this channel. However, there are vague points on the extent of Chinese knowledge of the faith, especially before the Tang Dynasty when a specific word was invented to describe it. In historical documents, various depictions of a similar religion were shown, from which a connection can be found that links the descriptions with the Zoroastrian deity, Ahura-Mazda. This paper evaluates such evidence and concludes that the Xianbei Northern Wei dynasty, in which Zoroastrianism held a significant position in society, contributed the most to Chinese knowledge of the religion at that time. Similar depictions of Turkish tribes were then evaluated with archaeological evidence to show that Zoroastrianism did appear in Turkish nations at the time. The limitations of Chinese knowledge were also discussed, and probable reasons were given.
Keywords
Zoroastrianism, Northern Wei, Xianbei, Religion
References
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Politics and Socio-Humanities
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-363-0
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-364-7
- Published Date
- 19 April 2024
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/28/20230091
- Copyright
- 19 April 2024
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited