Mary Boyce field-work materials repository

Mary Boyce (1920-2006) was an international authority on Zoroastrianism and Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She specialized in Manichaean, Zoroastrian Middle Persian and Parthian texts. She was a frequent contributor to the Encyclopaedia Iranica and was consulting editor for Iranian religions in Zoroastrianism.

Field work 1963-64

This repository presents material from pioneering field-work carried out by Boyce in the Zoroastrian villages around Yazd and Kerman, notably in Šarifābād during 1963-64. Including sound recordings, photographs and notebooks which were essential and formative to her understanding of Zoroastrianism, this material is now held at the AIIT in Cambridge. The results of her research were presented at her Ratanbai Katrak lecture series at Oxford University in 1975 and published in her work A Persian stronghold of Zoroastrianism in 1977.

Ancient India & Iran Trust (AIIT)

The Ancient India & Iran Trust (AIIT) is an independent charity dedicated to the study of early South Asia, Iran and Central Asia; promoting both scholarly research and popular interest in the area. It is the custodian of most of Boyce’s research material, which covers a wide range of topics, including household traditions and customs, religious rituals and priestly practices, local songs and folklore, prayer recitations, and daily life of Zoroastrian families during the 1960s.

A sustainable digital corpus repository

The aim of this project is two-fold: firstly to create a sustainable digital corpus repository in which eventually all of Boyce’s material can be made accessible to the international community for the long-term. Secondly the project develops a unified approach towards this diverse material, in order to develop a richer understanding of Zoroastrianism as it was practised by its adherents during the 1960s.

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