ABSTRACT
Parsis today have a vague idea about their history, almost all of which is an oral tradition, frequently distorted in the telling. Stories about the milk bowl and the good king Jadi Rana1 have survived in the community memory, but the lines between legend and fact have become so blurred that it is often difficult to tell one from the other. At best, the Parsi sense of history derives from the Qesse-ye Sanjan (see Williams in this volume), the quasi-historical text which narrates the story of the Zoroastrian migration from the Iranian homeland to the shores of Gujarat (Figure 3.1). It was with the intention of evaluating the historical veracity of the Qesse-ye Sanjan that the World Zarathushti Cultural Foundation undertook archaeological excavations at the ancient site of the supposed landing.
