"If to these reasons we add archaeological considerations that demonstrate the entirely peripheral situation of Chorasmia in relation to the Iranian world of the first half of the 1st millennium BCE, we can exclude this northeastern region from the geographic horizon of Zoroastrian origins. Chorasmia retained this peripheral position throughout the entire 1st millennium BCE... No valid argument can make us think that it was ever decisively larger than present-day Khwarezm and that it extended to much more southern territories."