“A tower built not for the living but to keep death from touching the earth.”
The Avestan word dakhma appears in the Vendidad, a Zoroastrian legal text composed around the 5th century BCE, where it designates a place for exposing the dead to birds and weather. The root is likely related to an Avestan verb meaning to cover or to shelter, though the exact etymology has been debated for over a century without consensus. In Zoroastrian theology, death is the most polluting substance in existence, and the four sacred elements, fire, water, earth, and air, must not receive a corpse. The dakhma solved this by lifting the dead above the earth on a circular stone platform so that vultures could consume the flesh before the bones were collected.
The oldest surviving dakhmas are carved into rock faces near Yazd, in central Iran, where the Zoroastrian community has been concentrated since the Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century CE. The towers most people recognize, the tall cylindrical structures known in English as Towers of Silence, were built by the Parsi community in Mumbai between the 17th and 19th centuries. The term 'Tower of Silence' itself is an invention of Robert Murphy, a British colonial official in Bombay, who coined it around 1832. The word dakhma never traveled into English in any official way; it entered through missionary accounts, traveler's memoirs, and Orientalist scholarship.
The practice of sky burial faces a practical crisis in the 21st century because vulture populations across South Asia collapsed by more than 95 percent after the 1990s, when veterinary use of the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac poisoned carrion-eating birds across the subcontinent. Mumbai's five dakhmas, still operating on Malabar Hill, now use solar concentrators to speed decomposition in the absence of sufficient scavengers. The theological debate within the Parsi community about whether to abandon the dakhma or preserve it has run for three decades without resolution. A form of burial thousands of years old now waits on the vulture recovery program.
The word entered English scholarly writing through Anquetil-Duperron, the French Orientalist who visited the Parsis of Surat in 1758 and published transliterations of Avestan religious texts in 1771. His rendering of dakhma stayed close to the Avestan original, and subsequent comparative philologists, including Max Müller at Oxford, preserved the spelling. By the time Mary Boyce published her monumental 'A History of Zoroastrianism' in 1975, dakhma had a fixed place in the vocabulary of religious studies. The word now functions as a technical term in funerary anthropology, archaeology, and comparative religion.
Related Words
Today
The dakhma is one of the oldest solutions to a theological problem that every religion faces: what happens to the body after the soul departs. Zoroastrianism answered it by deciding that the body is already foreign matter the moment life leaves it, and that the most respectful act is to remove it from the earth as quickly as possible. That answer has survived over two and a half millennia, outlasting every empire that has occupied the Iranian plateau. The word itself, unchanged from Avestan, carries the full weight of that continuity.
In Mumbai today, a narrow road climbs Malabar Hill toward a garden where the dakhmas stand, invisible from the street and protected by a community that has kept this rite alive in a city of twenty million. The Parsis are one of the world's smallest religious communities and one of its most ancient. They have not changed the word and have not changed the practice. What the earth refuses to take, the sky accepts.
Explore more words