Ka'ba-ye Zartosht


Kaaba-ye Zartosht, also called the Kaaba or Cube of Zarathustra, is a rectangular stepped stone structure in the Naqsh-e Rustam compound beside Zangiabad village in Marvdasht county in Fars, Iran. The Naqsh-e Rustam compound also incorporates memorials of the Elamites, the Achaemenids and the Sasanians. Architecturally, it is one of several Kaabas.
The Ka'ba-ye Zartosht is from the mountain, situated exactly opposite Darius II's mausoleum. It is rectangular and has only one entrance door. The material of the structure is white limestone. It is about high, or if including the triple stairs, and each side of its base is about long. Its entrance door leads to the chamber inside via a thirty-stair stone stairway. The stone pieces are rectangular and are simply placed on top of each other, without the use of mortar; the sizes of the stones varies from to, and they are connected to each other by dovetail joints.

Etymology

The structure was built in the Achaemenid era and there is no information of the name of the structure in that era. It was called Bon-Khanak in the Sassanian era; the local name of the structure was Naggarekhaneh. The phrase Ka'ba-ye Zartosht has been used for the structure from the fourteenth century into the contemporary era.
Various views and interpretations have been proposed for the purpose of the chamber, but none of them can be accepted with certainty. Some consider the tower a fire temple and a fireplace, and believe that it was used for igniting and worshiping the holy fire. Another theory is that it is the mausoleum of one of the Achaemenid Shahs or grandees, due to its similarity to the Tomb of Cyrus and some mausoleums of Lycia and Caria. Other Iranian scholars believe the stone chamber to be a structure for the safekeeping of royal documents and holy or religious books, but the chamber of Ka'ba-ye Zartosht is too small for this purpose. Other less noticed theories, such as its being a temple for the goddess Anahita or a solar calendar, have also been mentioned.
In the Sassanian era, three inscriptions were written in the three languages Sassanian Middle Persian, Arsacid Middle Persian and Greek on the northern, southern and eastern walls of the tower. One of them belongs to Shapur I the Sassanian, and another to the priest Kartir. According to Walter Henning, "These inscriptions are the most important historical documents from the Sassanian era." The Ka'ba-ye Zartosht is a beautiful structure: its proportions, lines and external beauty are based on well-executed architectural principles.
Currently, the structure is part of the Naqsh-e Rustam compound and owned by the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization of Iran.

Name

believes that the phrase Ka'ba-ye Zartosht is relatively new and inaccurate, originating around the fourteenth century. When the structure was discovered by the Europeans, its local name was Karnaykhaneh or Naggarekhaneh; the Europeans considered it a special site for worshiping fire, since the inside of the structure was blackened by smoke, and because they mistook the Zoroastrians for fire-worshipers, they attributed the place to them and named it the Zoroastrians' fire temple. As the shape of the structure was cuboid and the black stones that were placed on the white background of its walls resembled the Black Stone, the Muslims' Kaaba, it became famous as Ka'ba-ye Zartosht, the Kaaba of Zoroaster.
The Encyclopedia Iranica explains about the name of the structure: "Ka'ba-ye Zartosht has probably acquired its name in the fourteenth century, the time that the ruined ancient sites in the whole Iran were attributed to characters in the Quran or Shahnameh. This does not mean that the place has been Zoroaster's mausoleum and there is also no report of the pilgrims' travels there for pilgrimage."
Due to the discovery of Kartir's inscription on its walls, it is revealed that the name of the structure in the Sasanian era was Bon Khaanak, meaning the Cold Foundation, as the inscription reads: "This Cold Foundation will belong to you. Act as the best way you see suitable that will delight our gods and purpose." There is no knowledge of the name of the structure in any earlier periods.
Ibn al-Balkhi has mentioned the name of the area of Naqsh-e Rustam and its mountain as Kuhnebesht, and has considered that the reason behind its naming was that the book Avesta was held there. The word Dezhnebesht or Dezhkatibehs might have also been used for the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht.

Attributes

Ka'ba-ye Zartosht is cuboid in shape, and has only one entrance door, which leads inside its chamber by means of a stone stairway. There are four blind windows on each of its sides. The stone used is white marbly limestone, and there are dentate shelves of black stone on its walls. The limestone blocks were brought from Mount Sivand, where they were quarried in a place called Na'l Shekan, to Naqsh-e Rustam to build the Ka'ba. These blocks were chiselled into large, mostly rectangular pieces and are put in place atop each other without using mortar; in some places, such as the rooftop, the stones are connected to each other by dovetail joints. The size of the stones varies from to ; however in the west wall, there is a flat stone that is long.
Four large rectangular pieces of stone form the ceiling/roof, placed along an east–west axis. Each of those stones are long, connected to each other by dovetail joints, and the chipping method used to form them has given the roof the shape of a short pyramid. The anathyrosis style is used here in placing the stones atop each other, but no accurate order is retained in the 'ranking' of the stones. In some places, 20 rows, and in others 22 rows of stones are placed, and this continues to the ceiling. Wherever the original builders discovered any flaw in the main stone, the flawed area was removed and filled in with delicate joints, some of which still remain.
To prevent the finished building from becoming too simple or monochrome, its creators added two architectural diversities: firstly, forming double-edged shelves from one or two flat plates of grey-black stone and placing them on the walls; secondly, carving small rectangular pits into the upper and middle sections of the outer walls that give a more delicate appearance to the tower's faces. The black stones were probably brought from Mount Mehr in Persepolis, and installed on the walls in three rows:
  • High on the walls just below the ceiling, a small rectangular shelf in the northern side, and two similar shelves on each of the other sides
  • below the ceiling, two large square shelves on three sides and one small rectangular shelf on the northern side
  • below the ceiling, two medium-sized rectangular shelves on three sides and one large rectangular on the northern side

    Stairway

A thirty-stair stairway is placed in the middle of the northern wall, reaching the threshold of the entrance doorway. Thus, the intention was for the Ka'ba to look like a three-floor tower that has seven doors or hatches on each floor; but only one hatch has been made into a true door, while the others are left as holeless blind windows.
The structure stands on a three-tiered platform. The first tier is above the ground, and the tower is high including the triple tiers or stairs of its platform. The base is square-shaped, with each side approximately long. The ceiling of the structure is smooth and flat on the inside, but its roof has a bilateral slope that begins from the line in the middle of the rooftop on the outside, creating the pyramid-like appearance previously mentioned. The doorway is high and wide and at one point had a very heavy two-panel door which is now missing. There are carved-out notches for the upper and lower heels of each door panel in the stone frame which are visible to modern observers. Some have assumed that the door would have been made of wood, but a stone door, very similar to the remains of the one found in Ka'ba-ye Zartosht, exists in Solomon's Prison in Pasargadae, which indicates that both doors were made of stone. The doorway leads to a single interior room. This space is quadrangular, has an area of, and is high, with the thickness of its walls being between.

History

The Ka'ba-ye Zartosht is undoubtedly from the Achaemenid era. Much of the available evidence shows that it was built in the early Achaemenid era; the most important evidence for this dating is as follows:
  • Using black stone on a white background is one of the features of Pasargadian architecture.
  • The dovetail joints are found mostly in the periods of Darius I and Xerxes I, and the way the stones are aligned is similar to the primary structures of Persepolis.
  • The doorway and door of the structure is similar to those of the Achaemenid Shahs' mausoleums, all of which have used the design of Darius I's mausoleum.
  • The masonry, which lacks mortar or ordering, resembles the first parts of the platform of Persepolis that were constructed in Darius I's period. Especially, the inscription on the lower part of the southern wall of Persepolis is almost the same size as the stones forming the ceiling of Ka'ba-ye Zartosht.
File:Ka'ba-ye_Zartosht_35.jpg|thumb|Photograph of the excavations performed by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
Carsten Niebuhr, who had visited the structure in 1765, writes: "Opposite the mountain that has the mausoleums and petroglyphs of Rostam's braveries, a small structure is built of white stone that is covered by only two pieces of large stones." Jane Dieulafoy, who visited Iran in 1881, also reports in her travel journal: "...and then we saw a quadrilateral structure that was placed opposite the walls of the cliff. Each of its surfaces was like those of the ruined structure that we had seen in the Palvar desert..."
The first illustrations of the structure were made in the seventeenth century by European tourists like Jean Chardin, Engelbert Kaempfer and Cornelis de Bruijn in their travel books; but the first scientific description and excavation reports of the structure were done by Erich Friedrich Schmidt that had pictures and illustrated blueprints.
The Naqsh-e Rustam compound was first investigated and probed along with the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht structure by Ernst Herzfeld in 1923. Additionally, the compound was probed by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago under the leadership of Erich Schmidt in several seasons between 1936 and 1939, finding important works like the Middle Persian version of the Great Inscription of Shapur I, which was written on the wall of the structure.