The Towers of Silence, Yazd

The purpose is not to display the dead. It is to keep them from contaminating the earth.

A dakhma, called a Tower of Silence in English, is a circular raised structure built by Zoroastrians for excarnation: the exposure of a body to the elements so that it decomposes without polluting soil, water or fire, all of which are sacred. Carrion birds, usually vultures, and other scavengers consume the flesh. The bones are then gathered into a central pit, where weathering continues the process.

Understanding that ordering is the whole thing. What can look like abandonment is a carefully reasoned solution to a theological problem: how to dispose of a body without defiling any of the pure elements.

The practice is old and the towers are younger than the practice. Zoroastrian ritual exposure of the dead is first attested in the Histories of Herodotus in the mid-5th century BCE, who observed the custom among Iranian expatriates in Asia Minor. He recorded that the rites were secret, and that the body was first dragged about by a bird or a dog, then embalmed with wax and laid in a trench. Towers themselves are not documented until the early 9th century CE.

The fullest account in English of how the ceremonies actually work is a paper by Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, The Funeral Ceremonies of the Parsees, read before the Anthropological Society of Bombay on 30 September 1891 and reprinted through several editions to 1928. It remains the standard explanation of the origin and meaning of each stage.

In the Iranian tradition the towers were built atop hills or low mountains, deliberately far from where people lived. Yazd is the place to understand how recently this was living practice rather than history: Yazdi Zoroastrians went on using their Tower of Silence until the city asked them to close it in 1974. Iranian Zoroastrians had been moving gradually towards burial or cremation since the early 20th century.

Go with the ritual in mind, not the imagery.