[dav_Oz]

>The sacred fire at Udvada Atash Behram, for example, kindled in 721 CE in Sanjan, burns continually to this day, now in Udvada since 1741, and housed in a magnificent Persian style temple building since 1742.

That it some impressive cultural feat. It combines the human ability to take on the extraordinarily long term view [0] - planning ahead - (our prefrontal cortex is only fully developed at 25 years of age) and the control of fire which goes back at least 1 million (!) years [1].

Some of the Proto-Indo-Europeans [2] seemed to be very keen at ritualizing the control of fire which can be attested through various examples in Indo-European practices [3].

If one traces back the Indo-European origin of the word fire there are 2 main terms:

(1) *h₁n̥gʷnis

(2) *péh₂wr̥

The first one refers to the animate feature of fire (e.g. as "Spirit"/"God", "active") while the second one to the inanimate ("substance", "passive") [4], interestingly Proto-Indo-European is thought to have animacy gender as a distinct grammatical feature [5] which was later replaced by the masculine/feminine gender.

The germanic root for fire comes from the inanimate one while the Persian atash, the latin ignis or Agni (Vedic deity of fire) from the animate form.

[0]https://longnow.org/ideas/the-fire-that-never-goes-out/

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_hum...

[2]https://www.science.org/content/article/new-language-databas...

[3]https://books.google.at/books?id=cI-bEAAAQBAJ

[4]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...

[5]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy