“With Varana and Ranha, as of course with Hapta Handu, which comes between them in the Vd. I list, we find ourselves straight away in Indian territor… - Gherardo Gnoli

[In the Avestan descriptions of Varana (in the Vendidad), Gnoli sees] “a country, where the ‘Airyas’ (Iranians) were not rulers and where there was probably a hegemony of Indo-Aryan or proto-Indoaryan peoples.”

These Aryas doubtless took with them their religious traditions as well, and this explains in what terms we must speak of the Achaemenians’ belonging to the airya tradition, i.e. to a religious and cultural heritage from a country further east. Afterwards Mazdeism grew up amongst them, and we do not know of any Mazdeism that could be defined for a certainty as non—Zoroastrian, nor, as I have tried to show elsewhere, have we any real reason, even if we take into account the name as—sa-ra ‘ma-za—as in the Assyrian tablets, to maintain that the very conception of a god such as Ahura Mazda was not the work of Zarathustra, in spite of the opinion of some leading scholars to the contrary and a hypothesis put forward recently by F.B.J. Kuiper. On the contrary, we might suppose that it was the decisive and most original feature of the message of the great prophet of ancient Iran’.

“The fact [is] that Avestan geography, particularly the list in Vd. I, is confined to the east,” ...[this list is] “remarkably important in reconstructing the early history of Zoroastrianism”. ...