Editing Openai/690e264c-c9e4-800c-ae44-f3cf949de7b4 (section)

==== Everything changed when the Sasanian dynasty (224–651 CE) came to power. ====
They wanted a unified religion to legitimize their rule, just as the Abbasids later did with Islam.

Under kings like Ardashir I and Khosrow I:
* Zoroastrianism became a state religion.
* The priestly hierarchy was formalized, headed by the mowbedān-mowbed (“chief of chief priests”).
* The Avesta (scripture) was edited, standardized, and translated into Middle Persian with commentaries (Zend).
* A full legal system (the dādwarān) was established to apply religious law to social life.
* The state built a network of fire temples with ranks and revenues, somewhat like dioceses.

This was when Zoroastrianism became bureaucratic and orthodox:
* Priests had ranks, duties, and stipends.
* Purity laws were minutely detailed — what to do if a corpse touches water, how to cleanse fire, etc.
* Heresies and foreign ideas (Manichaeism, Christianity, “heretical Magi”) were suppressed.

It was, in short, a theocratic bureaucracy — remarkably similar in structure to what Islam would later develop.