The Towers of Silence were built with concentric rings inside them, a deliberate physical sorting of the dead that reflected who they had been in life.
A structure organised by category
Inside each circular tower, the deceased were traditionally arranged in three concentric rings, one each for men, women and children, with vultures left to reduce the remains through excarnation before the residual bones were collected into a central pit, a specific spatial arrangement built directly into the towers' physical design rather than an informal custom.
Why earth and fire were kept apart from death
Zoroastrian theology treats a corpse as a source of ritual pollution, associated with Nasu, a demon of decay and impurity, and holds that burying or cremating a body would contaminate the sacred elements of earth and fire respectively, reasoning that made exposure on an elevated structure, open to the sky and scavenging birds, the least polluting option available under strict traditional interpretation.
As this entry's companion article covers
The practical decline of the practice, driven by vulture population collapse, urban expansion around the towers and legal restrictions, along with the community's shift toward concrete-lined burial as this entry's companion article describes, marks the end of active use of these specific structures even as their physical form remains preserved as a historical site.