By now most Americans have probably heard of the Iranian/Persian New Year festival called Nowruz, or No Ruz.
One of the more recent claims against Easter is that this
Christian Holy Day is merely a hijacked version of the Persian
Zoroastrian new year festival called Nowruz (or Nauruz). The argument
is that because Nowruz is celebrated on the vernal equinox,
Christians must have taken this date or somehow absorbed this
Zoroastrian holiday into its own ritual year.
Very few in the West knew anything about Zoroastrianism or its
festivals until the 18th century, and almost nobody in the
West had ever heard of Nowruz before the mid-20th century.
The first ever translation of the Zoroastrian sacred texts, the
Avesta, into any European language was made by Anquetil
Duperron and published in 1771 (James
Darmesteter 1880, xv–xx). Controversy
about the genuineness of the source documents shrouded the
publication until the close of the 18th century. The term
Zoroastrianism was first used by archaeologist A.H. Sayce in
Word Division in NW Semitic
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Robert Crellin has posted his interesting new Open Access monograph on word
division in NW Semitic and Greek on the CREWS project site.
1 day ago