Ancient myths, modern identity

The British, the Russians, the Soviets, and the Turkic rulers of Badakhshan promoted the Alexander the Great myth into the nineteenth century. Religious affiliation, which was largely hidden during the Soviet period, also was important but played a supporting role to the ethnic identities created by the Soviets. Additionally, the nationalist identity was spurned by the Soviet leaders as being counterproductive to the mission of a unified Soviet Union. The Soviet Union built administrative units around ethnicity, categorized people through it, and carved out languages, some which barely existed, to support their political and social project. During the Soviet era, Tajik scholars began to study the political implications of the Zoroastrian myth. They built on Iranian scholarship on Zoroastrian history, which was being used at the time as the backdrop for Pahlavi&s;s modernization of Iran. For pragmatic and political purposes pseudo-scientific theory would greatly help the assimilation of the Pamiri ethnic groups with the rest of the population in Tajikistan.