Godard, “Les monuments du feu,” Ā thār-é Īrān 3, 1938, p. Modern usage shows that embers from a sacred fire might be taken into such a hall to make a fire there for congregational worship but there is no evidence, literary, archeological or traditional, to suggest that a sacred fire itself, once established on its pillar-altar in the gombad, was ever moved except in its own interests (i.e., when the sanctuary needed to be cleaned or repaired, or for the fire’s safety, when danger threatened). There are also at some sites the traces of a large hall, no doubt a place where a congregation would gather to celebrate the gāhāmbārs and other feasts. These were never performed within the gombad, where no veneration might be offered except directly to the fire itself. A typical small ātaškada appears to have consisted of the fire-sanctuary itself, with this passage-way a smaller room or rooms for storing fire-wood, incense and utensils and a yazišn-gāh or “place of worship” where the priest or priests would celebrate the rituals of the faith. On a number of sites the gombad, made usually of rubble masonry with courses of stone, is all that survives, and so such ruins are popularly called in Fārs čahār-ṭāq or “four arches.” Archeological traces, and literary evidence, suggest that the gombad was regularly surrounded by a passage-way or ambulatory, for the use presumably both of the priests who tended the fire, and the worshippers. This had a square ground-plan and four corner-pillars which supported the dome (the gombad proper) on squinches. The characteristic feature of the Sasanian ātaškada was a domed sanctuary or gombad in which the fire itself was established. A relatively large number of ruins of fire-temples are known from the latter period, mostly in southwestern Iran (Fārs, Kermān, and ʿIrāq-e ʿAjamī), but the biggest and most impressive are those of Ādur Gušnasp in Azerbaijan. This temple was rebuilt later in the Parthian period, and further enlarged and remodeled in the Sasanian epoch. Only traces survive of the ground-plan of the oldest building, which has been assigned tentatively to Seleucid or early Parthian times. The oldest identified remains of a fire-temple in Iran are those on the Kūh-e Ḵᵛāja in Sīstān where a stone fire altar is present. As a descriptive one it is readily understood by Muslim Persians, who down the centuries have applied it locally to various ruins which are held to be those of fire-temples. This term is also now used by the Zoroastrians of Tehran for their chief fire-temple. In the 20th century the Faslis, a reformist group among the Parsis, revived the term ātaškada as a name for their new fire-temple in Bombay. The Parsis, on settling in India, adopted also the Gujarati term agiary (agīārī), a literal translation of ātaškada, which they use side by side with Dar-e Mehr. names ( kadag, mān, and xānag are all words used for an ordinary house) perhaps reflects a desire on the part of those who fostered the temple-cult in Pārs to keep it as close as possible in character to the age-old cult of the hearth-fire, and to discourage elaboration (see ātašdān).Īfter the Arab conquest a different name for a fire-temple came into general use among the Zoroastrians, namely Dar-e Mehr, and eventually this entirely replaced the older terms for the Irani Zoroastrians. The Parthians appear to have called such a building an * ātarōšan “place of burning fire” (the term survives as a loanword in Armenian atrušan), and there are a number of foreign literary references to fire-temples in their epoch. Western scholars usually render all three terms by “fire-temple.” The temple-cult of fire appears to have been instituted only in the latter part of the Achaemenian period (4th century B.C.), and there is no allusion to it in the Avesta, nor is any Old Pers. ātaxš-kadag, kadag ī ātaxš, a Zoroastrian term for a consecrated building in which there is an ever-burning sacred fire (see ātaš) the name is less commonly attested in the Zoroastrian Pahlavi books than the synonymous mān ī ātaxš, xānag ī ātaxš. ĀTAŠKADA (New Persian) “house of fire,” Mid.
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