Anahita, fully Aredvi Sura Anahita, the Moist, Mighty and Immaculate, is the ancient Iranian goddess of the waters, of fertility, healing and wisdom, and one of the great yazatas, the beings worthy of worship in Zoroastrian tradition. The fifth hymn of the Avesta, the Aban Yasht, is dedicated to her, and it imagines her as a mighty river descending from a mythic mountain, the source of all the waters of the world, from which the rains and streams and the fertility of living things flow. She is pictured as a beautiful and powerful woman, richly robed and crowned, driving a chariot drawn by four horses, the wind, the rain, the cloud and the sleet, and heroes and kings pray to her at her altar for victory and for the granting of their desires. Her worship took on particular prominence under the later Persian empires: the Achaemenid king Artaxerxes II is recorded as having promoted her cult and set up images of her, and temples in her honour spread across the Iranian world and beyond, where she was identified with other great goddesses of water and fertility. Anahita holds together the ideas of pure water, generative fertility and wisdom, and she remained one of the most beloved divine figures of pre-Islamic Iran, a giver of life and of victory whose waters cleanse and make fruitful.