The Myth of Yima in the Religious Imagery of Pre-Islamic Afghanistan: An Enquiry Into the Epistemic Space of the Unwritten

The paper explores the symbolic use of walls in pre-Islamic Central and South Asia, which finds expressions in a variety of forms, some of them, however, suggesting a well-defined set of underlying notions. Whatever the original source may have been, this conceptual substructure ranges over different cultural spaces for a long period of time, in a cross-fertilising process which made an echo of the ancient Iranian myth of Yima reach a Buddhist sacred area in the Afghanistan of the mid-first millennium CE.