in the works of medieval authors who wrote in Arabic, the name for non-Muslim burial structures. The structures were common in antiquity and in the Middle Ages among some tribes of Central and Southwest Asia whose religion forbade the burying of the dead in the earth. In Russian and Soviet Orientalist and archaeological literature, it is customary to use the word “naus” to designate the clay, adobe, or stone crypts built by the Zoroastrians as depositories for ossuaries or for aboveground burials.