Iran

Iran is the hinge of this archive. The Zoroastrian vision of a final battle, a savior born of the prophet's seed, a resurrection of the dead, and a world purified by molten metal is, on Norman Cohn's argument, the deep root of the apocalyptic faith that runs through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Babylonians kept the cosmic battle in the past; Zoroaster moved it to the future, and the end of the world became a promise instead of a memory. Every Abrahamic apocalypse after it is, in part, an Iranian inheritance.