A little-known Parsi legend relates that an ancient textile fragment torn from a girl’s dress, and found centuries later embedded in the crevice of a mountainside in the Iranian province of Yazd, belonged to Banu Pars, daughter of the last Sassanian King of Persia, who was separated from her family during the Islamic invasion of 651 AD. Banu Pars fled, alone and on foot, disguised in the clothes of a commoner. Without food or water, and certain that she would perish, the Princess prayed for help, and her prayers were answered, not by Dadar Ahura Mazda, the supreme God of Zoroastrianism, but by Anahita, the goddess of fertility, who conjured a stream from the young girl’s tears to quench her thirst and parted the barren mountainside to reveal a verdant…