Burned at Persepolis, According to Later Memory

Middle Persian Zoroastrian sources, written down centuries after the events they describe, preserve a tradition that a complete written copy of the Avesta, inscribed on ox hides and kept at the Achaemenid royal treasury in Persepolis, was destroyed when Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire around 330 BCE. According to this account, Alexander not only burned the physical text but also killed or scattered the priests who had preserved its recitation, compounding the loss of the written copy with a rupture in the oral tradition that had always accompanied it.

The tradition treats this episode as one of the great catastrophes of Zoroastrian religious history, ranking alongside later disruptions under Arab Muslim rule as a moment when the faith's textual and institutional continuity was severely, if not completely, broken. Later Sasanian era compilers who worked to reconstitute and organize the Avesta explicitly framed their own efforts as a restoration project, recovering and reassembling a tradition understood to have suffered exactly this kind of earlier catastrophic loss.

The Alexander narrative accordingly does more than report an event: it supplies later Zoroastrian tradition with an explanation for why its own scripture, even after Sasanian era compilation, remained less complete than believers held it to have been in its original form.