Non-Iranian historical lands in Pahlavi literature

Although Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature preserves fewgeographical and ethnographic descriptions of non-Iranian historical regions, the popular book Ayadgar i Jamaspig devotes several chapters to an extensive account of the landscape, social customs and religious practices of India, China, Arabia, Barbary, Ceylon (or the region of Slavs), Mazandaran and Turkestan. These descriptions sharemany similarities with the accounts ofMuslimgeographers between the ninth and twelfth centuries CE, though they also contain many Late Sasanian elements. In providing an English translation of these passages, this article aims to identify the inhabitants of these regions aswell as to provide amore precise chronology of the chapters. It argues that Zoroastrian authors in the first centuries of the Islamic era, taking as amodel the new Islamic science of geography, wrote or reworked these chapters with the intention of redefining and mapping the new world around them.