Zoroastrian girls’ names
Names from the Zoroastrian tradition — Avestan and Persian, carried by the Parsi community of South Asia.
Zoroastrian naming is one of the oldest living traditions represented in this library and one of the smallest, which is a consequence of history rather than of the tradition itself.
The vocabulary is Avestan and Middle Persian. The Amesha Spentas — the divine attributes of Ahura Mazda — supply several names, and words for light, fire, righteousness and good thought recur throughout. Fire in particular carries a weight it does not have elsewhere: the fire temple is the centre of Zoroastrian practice, and names built on ātash and āzar belong to it, a point touched on again on the Atlas fire page.
A large part of the surviving tradition belongs to the Parsi community of western India, who arrived from Iran over a thousand years ago and preserved both the religion and a distinctive naming vocabulary. Parsi names frequently combine Persian elements with Gujarati forms, which makes them recognisable at a glance.
Several names that most people would identify as simply Persian — Roshan, Firoza, Mehr — carry Zoroastrian associations that predate the Islamic period by a very long way, and continue in use among Muslim Iranians with no religious implication at all.