Historical Period4c BCE
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Deities
Anahita
Aredvi Sura Anahita — Yazata of Waters and Fertility
Aredvi Sura Anahita — Yazata of Waters and Fertility
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Anahita — full Avestan name Aredvi Sura Anahita ("the Moist, the Strong, the Immaculate") — is the Zoroastrian yazata of the waters. She is the divine source of the mythical heavenly river that descends from Mount Hara and fills all the rivers and seas of the world. She presides over:
Anahita has one of the longest hymns in the Avesta, the Aban Yasht (Yasht 5), where she is described as:
She receives yasna (worship offering) from heroes of Iranian epic — Haoshyangha, Yima, Thraētaona, Keresaspa — and from Zarathustra himself, who is said to have sacrificed to her on the banks of the river Darja.
In the Achaemenid period (from the reign of Artaxerxes II, c. 405–359 BCE), royal inscriptions began invoking Anahita alongside Ahura Mazda and Mithra as a divine triad. Artaxerxes II is credited with spreading her iconographic cult — the first Zoroastrian deity to receive formal statuary — across the empire, with major temples at Kangavar, Bishapur, and Istakhr.
The Greek historians Berossus and Strabo describe her temples in Asia Minor. In Armenia, the goddess Anahit (equated with Anahita) was one of the three chief pre-Christian divinities, with a major temple at Erez (destroyed by Gregory the Illuminator in the conversion of Armenia to Christianity).
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