The "tower of silence" or dakhma is a clay structure in the form of a bowl, which the Zoroastrians used to put the bodies of the deceased there, where they decomposed under the influence of a hot climate or were eaten by predators.
The very name "The Tower of Silence" was coined in 1832 by Robert Murphy, a translator for the British colonial government in India.
The Zooastrians considered cutting hair, cutting nails and burying dead bodies unclean.
In particular, they believed that demons could enter the bodies of the dead, which would subsequently desecrate and infect everything and everyone who came into contact with them. In the Wendidad (a set of laws aimed at repelling evil forces and demons) there are special rules for disposing of corpses without harming others.
The indispensable testament of the Zoroastrians is that in no case should the four elements be defiled with dead bodies - earth, fire, air and water. Therefore, vultures have become the best way for them to eliminate corpses.
Dakhma is a rounded tower without a roof, the center of which forms a pool. A stone staircase leads to a platform that runs along the entire inner surface of the wall. Three channels ("pavi") divide the platform into a series of boxes. On the first bed were the bodies of men, on the second - women, on the third - children. After the vultures gnawed at the corpses, the remaining bones were piled up in an ossuary (a building for storing skeletonized remains). There the bones gradually collapsed, and their remnants were carried away by rainwater into the sea.
Only special persons - "nasalars" (or gravediggers), who placed bodies on platforms, could take part in the ritual.
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The first mention of such burials dates back to the time of Herodotus, and the ceremony itself was kept in the strictest confidence.
Later, the Magu (or priests, clergy) began to practice public burial rites, until eventually the bodies were embalmed with wax and buried in trenches.
Archaeologists have found ossuaries dating back to the 5th-4th century BC, as well as burial mounds where wax-embalmed bodies were located. According to one of the legends, the grave of Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, is located in Balkh (modern Afghanistan). Presumably, such first rituals and burials arose in the Sassanid era (3-7 centuries AD), and the first written evidence of the "towers of death" was made in the 16th century.
There is one legend, according to which, already in our time, many dead bodies suddenly appeared near the dakhma, which the local residents from neighboring settlements could not identify.
Not a single deceased person fit the description of missing people in India.
The corpses were not gnawed by animals, there were no larvae or flies on them. The amazing thing about this terrifying find was that the pit located in the middle of the dakhma was filled with blood for several meters, and there was more of this blood than the bodies lying outside could contain. The stench in this nasty place was so unbearable that already on the approaches to the dakhma many began to feel sick.
The investigation was abruptly interrupted when a local resident accidentally kicked a small bone into the pit. Then, from the bottom of the pit, a powerful explosion of gas began to erupt, emanating from the decomposing blood, and spread throughout the area.
Everyone who was at the epicenter of the explosion was immediately taken to a hospital and quarantined to prevent the spread of the infection.
The patients developed fever and delirium. They furiously shouted that “they were stained with the blood of Ahriman” (the personification of evil in Zoroastrianism), despite the fact that they had nothing to do with this religion and did not even know anything about the Dakhmas. The state of delirium turned into insanity, and many of the sick began to attack the hospital staff until they were pacified. In the end, a severe fever killed several witnesses to the ill-fated burial.
When the investigators later returned to that place, dressed in protective suits, they found the following picture: all the bodies disappeared without a trace, and the pit with blood was empty.