Gherardo Gnoli Quotes
1937–2012 Italy
Gherardo Gnoli (6 December 1937 in Rome – 7 March 2012 in Cagli) was a historian of Italian religions and Iran expert.
Random Gherardo Gnoli quote
29 quotes
The case of Vakereta was resolved by S. Lévi, who linked it to the name of the yakṣa of Gandhāra, Vaikr̥tika, in the list of the Mahāmāyūrī. This identification is solid and widely accepted, as evidenced by the consensus it has gathered.
[The horizon of the Avesta] “is according to Burrow, wholly eastern and therefore certainly earlier than the westward migrations of the Iranian tribes.” ...
Zoroaster probably lived at the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, within the vast region known to the Greeks... The Central Asian steppes or Chorasmia are again excluded from this geographical horizon.
namely the entirely eastern character of the countries listed in the first chapter of the Vendidad, including Zoroastrian Raya, and the historical and geographical importance of that list.
...either they construct an antagonism of an essentially ethnic character... The first of these two hypotheses is not based on any sound arguments. On the contrary...
What has been said so far about the Tuiryas... persuades us once again that ther eis no good reason for seeking the primitive location of Iranian Turan in a historico-geographical horizon that is necessarily different from the one in which the Iranian Airyas lived...
Having done away with the obstacle provided by the theory of the trans-Caucasian migration..., we can see both these peoples as western branches of those same Airyas that in the Younger Avesta are described as being settled in such a large part of the eastern Iranian world....
[Gnoli identifies the sixteenth land, Raηhā, as an ―] eastern mountainous area, Indian or Indo-Iranian, hit by intense cold in winter.
Given its very Oriental horizon, this list must be pre-Achaemenid; on the other hand, the remarkable extendedness of the territories concerned recommends situating them in a period much later than the Zoroastrian origins. (…) one or several centuries later than Zarathuštra’s preaching.