Yazdan is a Persian name meaning God or divine being.
Yazdan is an ancient Persian name of Avestan origin, derived from the word "yazata," meaning a divine being worthy of worship or a holy entity. In Zoroastrianism — the world's oldest monotheistic religion, founded in ancient Persia around the second millennium BCE — the yazatas are celestial beings created by Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity, to assist in the governance of the cosmos. Yazdan itself came to mean simply "God" in classical Persian and is closely related to the word "yazdaan," the plural form still used in Zoroastrian prayers and literature.
The name carries extraordinary historical depth. Persian poets and mystics invoked "Yazdan" across centuries of classical literature: it appears in the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi's tenth-century epic history of Persian kings, and in the ghazals of poets who used it interchangeably with divine love. The Zoroastrian diaspora — concentrated today in India (where Zoroastrians are called Parsis), Iran, and diaspora communities in North America and Europe — has kept the name alive as part of a deliberate effort to preserve pre-Islamic Persian heritage and identity.
In modern Iran, Yazdan remains in use among both Muslim and Zoroastrian families, appreciated for its pre-Islamic roots and its crisp, dignified sound. Among Persian diaspora communities globally, it has seen a modest revival as families seek names that connect children to a specifically Persian cultural heritage — distinct from and older than the Arabic-Islamic naming tradition that predominates in much of the region. Yazdan is, in a very real sense, a name that carries a civilization.