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The Faravahar, or better known in Persian as fravahr, is one of the best-known symbols of ancient Iran (Persia). This religious-cultural symbol was adapted by the Pahlavi dynasty to represent the Iranian nation. The winged discs has a long history in the art and culture of the ancient Near and Middle East. In Neo-Assyrian times, a human bust is added to the disk, the "feather-robed archer" interpreted as symbolizing Ashur. While the symbol is currently thought to represent a ''Fravashi'' (approximately a guardian angel) and from which it derives its name (see below), what it represented in the minds of those who adapted it from earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian reliefs is unclear. Because the symbol first appears on royal inscriptions, it is also thought to represent the 'Divine Royal Glory' (''Khvarenah''), or the ''Fravashi'' of the king, or represented the divine mandate that was the foundation of a king's authority. This relationship between the name of the symbol and the class of divine entities it represents, reflects the current belief that the symbol represents a ''Fravashi''. However, there is no physical description of the ''Fravashi''s in the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, and in Avestan the entities are grammatically feminine. In present-day Zoroastrianism, the ''Faravahar'' is said to be a reminder of one's purpose in life, which is to live in such a way that the soul progresses towards ''frasho-kereti'', or union with Ahura Mazda, the supreme divinity in Zoroastrianism. Although there are a number of interpretations of the individual elements of the symbol, none of them are older than the 20th century. ==Etymology== The New Persian word is read as ''forouhar'' or ''faravahar'' (it was pronounced as ''furōhar'' in Classical Persian). The Middle Persian forms were ''frawahr'' (Book Pahlavi: plwʾhl, Manichaean: prwhr), ''frōhar'' (recorded in Pazend as ; it is a later form of the previous form), and ''fraward'' (Book Pahlavi: plwlt', Manichaean: frwrd), which was directly from Old Persian '' *fravarti-''. The Avestan language form was ''(unicode:fravaṣ̌i)'' (). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Faravahar」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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