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The Zend Avesta, Part I (SBE04), James Darmesteter, tr. [1880], at sacred-texts.com
This paper is also available as a PDF file HERE. The original image file is available HERE. HUNAS IN AVESTA AND PAHLAVI. Le Zend Avesta, p. Hunas in Avesta and Pahlavi, by J. The file begins with what appears to be a scanned copy of page 65 from a book and ends with page 80. Commentary I Murray: History of psychophysics by Borg (see, e.g., Borg 1978; also Borg et al. English word exists. Three books published before the Ele-mente der Psychophysik (1860), none of which has been trans. In Zend-Avesta (1851) he explained why the earth. The Zend Avesta (Sacred Books of the East) Pdf mediafire.com, rapidgator.net, 4shared.com, uploading.com, uploaded.net Download Note: If you're looking for a free download links of The Zend Avesta (Sacred Books of the East) Pdf, epub, docx and torrent then this site is not for you. Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb. Arts & Culture News & Public Affairs Non-English Audio Radio Programs. Librivox Free Audiobook. The Zend-Avesta. By James Darmesteter. Publication date 1898. Publisher Christian Literature.
CHAPTER I.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE ZEND-AVESTA.
THE Zend-Avesta is the sacred book of the Parsis, that is to say, of the few remaining followers of that religion which feigned over Persia at the time when the second successor of Mohammed overthrew the Sassanian dynasty 1, and which has been called Dualism, or Mazdeism, or Magism, or Zoroastrianism, or Fire-worship, according as its main tenet, or its supreme God 2, or its priests, or its supposed founder, or its apparent object of worship has been most kept in view. In less than a century after their defeat, nearly all the conquered people were brought over to the faith of their new rulers, either by force, or policy, or the attractive power of a simpler form of creed. But many of those who clung to the faith of their fathers, went and sought abroad for a new home, where they might freely worship their old gods, say their old prayers, and perform their old rites. That home they found at last among the tolerant Hindus, on the western coast of India and in the peninsula of Guzerat 3. There they throve and there they live still, while the ranks of their co-religionists in Persia are daily thinning and dwindling away 4.
As the Parsis are the ruins of a people, so are their
sacred books the ruins of a religion. There has been no other great belief in the world that ever left such poor and meagre monuments of its past splendour. Yet great is the value which that small book, the Avesta, and the belief of that scanty people, the Parsis, have in the eyes of the historian and theologist, as they present to us the last reflex of the ideas which prevailed in Iran during the five centuries which preceded and the seven which followed the birth of Christ, a period which gave to the world the Gospels, the Talmud, and the Qur’ân. Persia, it is known, had much influence on each of the movements which produced, or proceeded from, those three books; she lent much to the first heresiarchs, much to the Rabbis, much to Mohammed. By help of the Parsi religion and the Avesta, we are enabled to go back to the very heart of that most momentous period in the history of religious thought, which saw the blending of the Aryan mind with the Semitic, and thus opened the second stage of Aryan thought.
Inquiries into the religion of ancient Persia began long ago, and it was the old foe of Persia, the Greek, who first studied it. Aristotle 1, Hermippus 2; and many others 3 wrote of it in books of which, unfortunately, nothing more than a few fragments or merely the titles have come down to us. We find much valuable information about it, scattered in the accounts of historians and travellers, extending over ten centuries, from Herodotus down to Agathias and Procopius. It was never more eagerly studied than in the first centuries of the Christian era; but that study had no longer anything of the disinterested and almost scientific character it had in earlier times. Religious and philosophic sects, in search of new dogmas, eagerly received whatever came to them bearing the name of Zoroaster. As Xanthus the Lydian, who is said to have lived before Herodotus, had mentioned Zoroastrian Λόγια 4, there came to light, in those later times, scores of oracles, styled Λόγια τοῦ Ζωροάστρου,
or 'Oracula Chaldaïca sive Magica,' the work of Neo-Platonists who were but very remote disciples of the Median sage. As his name had become the very emblem of wisdom, they would cover with it the latest inventions of their ever-deepening theosophy. Zoroaster and Plato were treated as if they had been philosophers of the same school, and Hierocles expounded their doctrines in the same book. Proclus collected seventy Tetrads of Zoroaster and wrote commentaries on them 1; but we need hardly say that Zoroaster commented on by Proclus was nothing more or less than Proclus commented on by Proclus. Prodicus the Gnostic had secret books of Zoroaster 2; and upon the whole it may be said that in the first centuries of Christianity, the religion of Persia was more studied and less understood than it had ever been before. The real object aimed at, in studying the old religion, was to form a new one.
Throughout the Middle Ages nothing was known of Mazdeism but the name of its founder, who from a Magus was converted into a magician and master of the hidden sciences. It was not until the Renaissance that real inquiry was resumed. The first step was to collect all the information that could be gathered from Greek and Roman writers. That task was undertaken and successfully completed by Barnabé Brisson 3. A nearer approach to the original source was made in the following century by Italian, English, and French travellers in Asia. Pietro della Valle, Henry Lord, Mandelslo, Ovington, Chardin, Gabriel du Chinon, and Tavernier found Zoroaster's last followers in Persia and India, and made known their existence, their manners, and the main features of their belief to Europe. Gabriel du Chinon saw their books and recognised that they were not all written in the same language, their original holy writ being no longer understood except
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by means of translations and commentaries in another tongue.
In the year 1700, a professor at Oxford, Thomas Hyde, the greatest Orientalist of his time in Europe, made the first systematic attempt to restore the history of the old Persian religion by combining the accounts of the Mohammedan writers with 'the true and genuine monuments of ancient Persia 1.' Unfortunately the so-called genuine monuments of ancient Persia were nothing more than recent compilations referring to the last stage of Parsîism. But notwithstanding this defect, which could hardly be avoided then, and notwithstanding its still worse fault, a strange want of critical acumen 2, the book of Thomas Hyde was the first complete and true picture of modern Parsîism, and it made inquiry into its history the order of the day. A warm appeal made by him to the zeal of travellers, to seek for and procure at any price the sacred books of the Parsis, did not remain ineffectual, and from that time scholars bethought themselves of studying, Parsîism in its own home.
Eighteen years later, a countryman of Hyde, George Boucher, received from the Parsis in Surat a copy of the Vendîdâd Sâdah, which was brought to England in 1723 by Richard Cobbe. But the old manuscript was a sealed book, and the most that could then be made of it was to hang it by an iron chain to the wall of the Bodleian Library, as a curiosity to be shown to foreigners. A few years later, a Scotch-man, named Fraser, went to Surat, with the view of obtaining from the Parsis, not only their books, but also a knowledge of their contents. He was not very successful in the first undertaking, and utterly failed in the second.
In 1754 a young man, twenty years old, Anquetil Duperron, a scholar of the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris, happened to see a facsimile of four leaves of the
[paragraph continues] Oxford Vendîdâd, which had been sent from England, a few years before, to Etienne Fourmont, the Orientalist. He determined at once to give to France both the books and the first European translation of them. Impatient to set off, without waiting for a mission from the government which had been promised to him, he enlisted as a private soldier in the service of the French East India company; he embarked at Lorient on the 24th of February 1755, and after three years of endless adventures and dangers through the whole breadth of Hindustan, at the very time when war was raging between France and England, he arrived at last in Surat, where he stayed among the Parsis for three years more. Here began another struggle, not less hard, but more decisive, against that mistrust and ill-will of the Parsis which had disheartened Fraser; but he came out of it victorious, and succeeded at last in winning from the Parsis both their books and their knowledge. He came back to Paris on the 14th of March 1764, and deposited on the following day at the Bibliothèque Royale the whole of the Zend-Avesta and copies of most of the traditional books. He spent ten years in studying the material he had collected, and published in 1771 the first European translation of the Zend-Avesta 1.
A violent dispute broke out at once, as half the learned world denied the authenticity of the Avesta, which it pronounced a forgery. It was the future founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, William Jones, a young Oxonian then, who opened the war. He had been wounded to the quick by the scornful tone adopted by Anquetil towards Hyde and a few other English scholars: the Zend-Avesta suffered for the fault of its introducer, Zoroaster for Anquetil. In a pamphlet written in French 2, with a verve and in a Style which showed him to be a good disciple of Voltaire, W. Jones pointed out, and dwelt upon, the oddities and
absurdities with which the so-called sacred books of Zoroaster teemed. It is true that Anquetil had given full scope to satire by the style he had adopted: he cared very little for literary elegance, and did not mind writing Zend and Persian in French; so the new and strange ideas he had to express looked stranger still in the outlandish garb he gave them. Yet it was less the style than the ideas that shocked the contemporary of Voltaire 1. His main argument was that books, full of such silly tales, of laws and rules so absurd, of descriptions of gods and demons so grotesque, could not be the work of a sage like Zoroaster, nor the code of a religion so much celebrated for its simplicity, wisdom, and purity. His conclusion was that the Avesta was a rhapsody of some modern Guebre. In fact the only thing in which Jones succeeded was to prove in a decisive manner that the ancient Persians were not equal to the lumières of the eighteenth century, and that the authors of the Avesta had not read the Encyclopédie.
Jones's censure was echoed in England by Sir John Chardin and Richardson, in Germany by Meiners. Richardson tried to give a scientific character to the attacks of Jones by founding them on philological, grounds 2. That the Avesta was a fabrication of modern times was shown, he argued, by the number of Arabic words he fancied he found both in the Zend and Pahlavi dialects, as no Arabic element was introduced into the Persian idioms earlier than the seventh century; also by the harsh texture of the Zend, contrasted with the rare euphony of the Persian; and, lastly, by the radical difference between the Zend and Persian, both in words and grammar. To these objections, drawn from the form, he added another derived from the uncommon stupidity of the matter.
In Germany, Meiners, to the charges brought against the new found books, added another of a new and unexpected kind, namely, that they spoke of ideas unheard of before, and made known new things. 'Pray, who would dare
ascribe to Zoroaster books in which are found numberless names of trees, animals, men, and demons unknown to the Ancient Persians; in which are invoked an incredible number of pure animals and other things, which, as appears in the silence of ancient writers, were never known, or at least never worshipped, in Persia? What Greek ever spoke of Hom, of Jemshîd, and, of such other personages as the fabricators of that rhapsody exalt with every kind of praise, as divine heroes 1?' Yet, in the midst of his Ciceronian nonsense, Meiners inadvertently made a remark which, if correctly interpreted, might have led to important discoveries. He noticed that many points of resemblance are to be found between the ideas of the Parsis and those of the Brahmans and Musulmans. He saw in this a proof that Parsîism is a medley of Brahmanical and Musulman tales. Modern scholarship, starting from the same point, came to that twofold conclusion, that, on the one hard, Parsîism was one of the elements out of which Mohammed formed his religion, and, on the other hand, that the old religions of India and Persia flowed from a common source. 'Not only does the author of that rubbish tell the same tales of numberless demons of either sex as the Indian priests do, but he also prescribes the same remedies in order to drive them away, and to balk their attempts.' In these words there was something like the germ of comparative mythology; seldom has a man approached the truth so closely and then departed from it so widely.
Anquetil and the Avesta found an eager champion in the person of Kleuker, professor in the University of Riga. As soon as the French version of the Avesta appeared, he published a German translation of it, and also of Anquetil's historical dissertations 2. Then, in a series of dissertations of his own 3, he vindicated the authenticity of the Zend books. Anquetil had already tried to show, in a memoir
on Plutarch, that the data of the Avesta fully agree with the account of the Magian religion given in the treatise on 'Isis and Osiris.' Kleuker enlarged the circle of comparison to the whole of ancient literature. He tried also to appeal to internal evidence, an attempt in which he was less successful. The strength of his defence was seldom greater than the strength of the attack. Meiners had pointed out the mythical identity of the Mount Alborg, of the Parsis with the Mount Meru of the Hindus, as a proof that the Parsis had borrowed their mythology from the Hindus: the conclusion was incorrect, but the remark itself was not so. Kleuker fancied that he could remove the difficulty by stating that Mount Alborg is a real mountain, nay, a doubly real mountain, since there are two mountains of that name, the one in Persia, the other in Armenia, whereas Mount Meru is only to be found in Fairyland. Seldom were worse arguments used in the service of a good cause. Meiners had said that the name of the Parsi demons was of Indian origin, as both languages knew them by the Latin name 'Deus.' This was an incorrect statement, and yet an important observation. The word which means 'a demon' in Persia, means quite the contrary in India, and that radical difference is just a proof of the two systems being independent of one another. Kleuker pointed out the incorrectness of the statement; but, being unable to account for the identity of the words, he flatly denied it.
Kleuker was more successful in the field of philology: he showed, as Anquetil had done, that Zend has no Arabic elements in it, and that Pahlavi itself, which is more modern than Zend, does not contain any Arabic, but only Semitic words of the Aramean dialect, which are easily accounted for by the close relations of Persia with Aramean lands in the time of the Sassanian kings. He showed, lastly, that Arabic words appear only in the very books which Parsi tradition itself considers modern.
Another stanch upholder of the Avesta was the numismatologist Tychsen, who, having begun to read the book with a prejudice against its authenticity, quitted it with a conviction to the contrary. 'There is nothing in it,' he
said, 'but what befits remote ages, and a man philosophising in the infancy of the world. Such traces of a recent period as they fancy to have found in it, are either understandings, or belong to its later portions. On the whole there is a marvellous accordance between the Zend-Avesta and the accounts of the ancients with regard to the doctrine and institutions of Zoroaster. Plutarch agrees so well with the Zend books that I think no one will deny the close resemblance of doctrines and identity of origin. Add to all this the incontrovertible argument to be drawn from the language, the antiquity of which is established by the fact that it was necessary to translate a part of the Zend books into Pahlavi, a language which was obsolete as early as the time of the Sassanides. Lastly, it cannot be denied that Zoroaster left books, which were, through centuries, the groundwork of the Magic religion, and which were preserved by the Magi, as shown by a series of documents from the time of Hermippus. Therefore I am unable to see why we should not trust the Magi of our days when they ascribe to Zoroaster those traditional books of their ancestors, in which nothing is found to indicate fraud or a modern hand 1.'
Two years afterwards, in 1793, was published in Paris a book which, without directly dealing with the Avesta, was the first step taken to make its authenticity incontrovertible. It was the masterly memoir by Sylvestre de Sacy, in which the Pahlavi inscriptions of the first Sassanides were deciphered for the first time and in a decisive manner. De Sacy, in his researches, had chiefly relied on the Pahlavi lexicon published by Anquetil, whose work vindicated itself--better than by heaping up arguments--by promoting discoveries. The Pahlavi inscriptions gave the key, as is well known, to the Persian cuneiform inscriptions, which were in return to put beyond all doubt the genuineness of the Zend language.
Tychsen, in an appendix to his Commentaries, pointed
to the importance of the new discovery: 'This,' he writes, 'is a proof that the Pahlavi was used during the reign of the Sassanides, for it was from them that these inscriptions emanated, as it was by them--nay, by the first of them, Ardeshîr Bâbagân--that the doctrine of Zoroaster was revived. One can now understand why the Zend books were translated into Pahlavi. Here, too, everything agrees, and speaks loudly for their antiquity and genuineness.'
About the same time Sir William Jones, then president of the Royal Asiatic Society, which he had just founded, resumed in a discourse delivered before that Society the same question he had solved in such an off-hand manner twenty years before. He was no longer the man to say, 'Sied-il à un homme né dans ce siècle de s’infatuer de fables indiennes?' and although he had still a spite against Anquetil, he spoke of him with more reserve than in 1771. However, his judgment on the Avesta itself was not altered on the whole, although, as he himself declared, he had not thought it necessary to study the text. But a glance at the Zend glossary published by Anquetil suggested to him a remark which makes Sir William Jones, in spite of himself, the creator of the comparative grammar of Sanskrit and Zend. 'When I perused the Zend glossary,' he writes, 'I was inexpressibly surprised to find that six or seven words in ten are pure Sanscrit, and even some of their inflexions formed by the rules of the Vyácaran 1, as yushmácam, the genitive plural of yushmad. Now M. Anquetil most certainly and the Persian compiler most probably, had no knowledge of Sanscrit, and could not, therefore, have invented a list of Sanscrit words; it is, therefore, an authentic list of Zend words, which has been preserved in books or by tradition; it follows that the language of the Zend was at least a dialect of the Sanscrit, approaching perhaps as nearly to it as the Prácrit, or other popular idioms, which we know to have been spoken in India two thousand years ago 2.' This conclusion, that Zend is a Sanskrit dialect, was incorrect, the connection assumed being too close; but it was a great
thing that the near relationship of the two languages should have been brought to light.
In 1798 Father Paulo de St. Barthélemy further developed Jones's remark in an essay on the antiquity of the Zend language 1. He showed its affinity with the Sanskrit by a list of such Zend and Sanskrit words as were least likely to be borrowed, viz. those that designate the degrees of relationship, the limbs of the body, and the most general and essential ideas. Another list, intended to show, on a special topic, how closely connected the two languages are, contains eighteen words taken from the liturgic language used in India and Persia. This list was not very happily drawn up, as out of the eighteen instances there is not a single one that stands inquiry; yet it was a happy idea, and one which has not even yet yielded all that it promised. His conclusions were that in a far remote antiquity Sanskrit was spoken in Persia and Media, that it gave birth to the Zend language, and that the Zend-Avesta is authentic: 'Were it but a recent compilation,' he writes, 'as Jones asserts, how is it that the oldest rites of the Parsis, that the old inscriptions of the Persians, the accounts of the Zoroastrian religion in the classical writers, the liturgic prayers of the Parsis, and, lastly, even their books do not reveal the pure Sanskrit, as written in the land wherein the Parsis live, but a mixed language, which is as different from the other dialects of India as French is from Italian?' This amounted, in fact, to saying that the Zend is not derived from the Sanskrit, but that both are derived from another and older language. The Carmelite had a dim notion of that truth, but, as he failed to express it distinctly, it was lost for years, and had to be re-discovered.
The first twenty-five years of this century were void of results, but the old and sterile discussions as to the authenticity of the texts continued in England. In 1808 John Leyden regarded Zend as a Prakrit dialect, parallel to Pali; Pali being identical with the Magadhi dialect and Zend with the
[paragraph continues] Sauraseni 1. In the eyes of Erskine Zend was a Sanskrit dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never spoken in Persia 2. His main argument was that Zend is not mentioned among the seven dialects which were current in ancient Persia according to the Farhang-i Jehangiri 3, and that Pahlavi and Persian exhibit no close relationship with Zend.
In Germany, Meiners had found no followers. The theologians appealed to the Avesta in their polemics 4, and Rhode sketched the religious history of Persia after the translations of Anquetil 5.
Erskine's essay provoked a decisive answer 6 from Emmanuel Rask, one of the most gifted minds in the new school of philology, who had the honour of being a precursor of both Grimm and Burnouf. He showed that the list of the Jehangiri referred to an epoch later than that to which Zend must have belonged, and to parts of Persia different from those where it must have been spoken; he showed further that modern Persian is not derived from Zend, but from a dialect closely connected with it; and, lastly, he showed what was still more important, that Zend was not derived from Sanskrit. As to the system of its sounds, Zend approaches Persian rather than Sanskrit; and as to its grammatical forms, if they often remind one of Sanskrit, they also often remind one of Greek and Latin, and frequently have a special character of their own. Rask also gave the paradigm of three Zend nouns, belonging to different declensions, as well as the right pronunciation of the Zend letters, several of which had been incorrectly given by Anquetil. This was the first essay on Zend grammar, and it was a masterly one.
The essay published in 1831 by Peter von Bohlen on the origin of the Zend language threw the matter forty years back. According to him, Zend is a Prakrit dialect, as it had been pronounced by Jones, Leyden, and Erskine. His mistake consisted in taking Anquetil's transcriptions of the words, which are often so incorrect as to make them look like corrupted forms when compared with Sanskrit. And, what was worse, he took the proper names in their modern Parsi forms, which often led him to comparisons that would have appalled Ménage. Thus Ahriman became a Sanskrit word ariman, which would have meant 'the fiend;' yet Bohlen might have seen in Anquetil's work itself that Ahriman is the modern form of Angra Mainyu, words which hardly remind one of the Sanskrit ariman. Again, the angel Vohu-manô, or 'good thought' was reduced, by means of the Parsi form Bahman, to the Sanskrit bâhuman, 'a long-armed god.'
At last came Burnouf. From the time when Anquetil had published his translation, that is to say, during seventy years, no real progress had been made in knowledge of the Avesta texts. The notion that Zend and Sanskrit are two kindred languages was the only new idea that had been acquired, but no practical advantage for the interpretation of the texts had resulted from it. Anquetil's translation was still the only guide, and as the doubts about the authenticity of the texts grew fainter, the authority of the translation became greater, the trust reposed in the Avesta being reflected on to the work of its interpreter. The Parsis had been the teachers of Anquetil; and who could ever understand the holy writ of the Parsis better than the Parsis themselves? There was no one who even tried to read the texts by the light of Anquetil's translation, to obtain a direct understanding of them.
About 1825 Eugène Burnouf was engaged in a course of researches on the geographical extent of the Aryan languages in India. After he had defined the limits which divide the races speaking Aryan languages from the native non-brahmanical tribes in the south, he wanted to know if a similar boundary had ever existed in the north-west; and
if it is outside of India that the origin of the Indian languages and civilisation is to be sought for. He was thus led to study the languages of Persia, and, first of all, the oldest of them, the Zend. But as he tried to read the texts by help of Anquetil's translation, he was surprised to find that this was not the clue he had expected. He saw that two causes had misled Anquetil: on the one hand, his teachers, the Parsi dasturs, either knew little themselves or taught him imperfectly, not only the Zend, but even the Pahlavi intended to explain the meaning of the Zend; so that the tradition on which his work rested, being incorrect in itself, corrupted it from the very beginning; on the other hand, as Sanskrit was unknown to him and comparative grammar did not as yet exist, he could not supply the defects of tradition by their aid. Burnouf, laying aside tradition as found in Anquetil's translation, consulted it as found in a much older and purer form, in a Sanskrit translation of the Yasna made in the fifteenth century by the Parsi Neriosengh in accordance with the old Pahlavi version. The information given by Neriosengh he tested, and either confirmed or corrected, by a comparison of parallel passages and by the help of comparative grammar, which had just been founded by Bopp, and applied by him successfully to the explanation of Zend forms. Thus he succeeded in tracing the general outlines of the Zend lexicon and in fixing its grammatical forms, and founded the only correct method of interpreting the Avesta. He also gave the first notions of a comparative mythology of the Avesta and the Veda, by showing the identity of the Vedic Yama with the Avesta Yima, and of Traitâna with Thraêtaona and Ferîdûn. Thus he made his 'Commentaire sur le Yasna' a marvellous and unparalleled model of critical insight and steady good sense, equally opposed to the narrowness of mind which clings to matters of fact without rising to their cause and connecting them with the series of associated phenomena, and to the wild and uncontrolled spirit of comparison, which, by comparing everything, confounds everything. Never sacrificing either tradition to comparison or comparison to tradition, he knew how to pass from the one
to the other, and was so enabled both to discover facts and explain them.
At the same time the ancient Persian inscriptions at Persepolis and Behistun were deciphered by Burnouf in Paris, by Lassen in Bonn, and by Sir Henry Rawlinson in Persia. Thus was revealed the existence, at the time of the first Achæmenian kings, of a language closely connected with that of the Avesta, and the last doubts as to the authenticity of the Zend books were at length removed. It would have required more than an ordinary amount of scepticism to look still upon the Zend as an artificial language, of foreign importation, without root in the land where it was written, and in the conscience of the people for whom it was written, at the moment when a twin language, bearing a striking likeness to it in nearly every feature, was suddenly making itself heard from the mouth of Darius, and speaking from the very tomb of the first Achæmenian king. That unexpected voice silenced all controversies, and the last echoes of the loud discussion which had been opened in 1771 died away unheeded 1.
Footnotes
xi:1 At the battle of Nihâvand (642 A.C.)
xi:2 Ahura Mazda.
xi:3 They settled first at Sangân, not far from Damân; thence they spread over Surat, Nowsâri, Broach, and Kambay; and within the last two centuries they have settled at Bombay, which now contains the bulk of the Parsi people, nearly 150,000 souls.
xi:4 A century ago, it is said, they still numbered nearly 100,000 souls; but there now remain no more than 8000 or 9000 souls, scattered in Yezd and the surrounding villages (Dosabhoy Framjee, The Parsees).
xii:1 Diogenes Laertius, Prooemium 8.
xii:2 Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXX, 1, 2. Cf. infra, III, 11.
xii:3 Dinon, Theopompus, Hermodorus, Heraclides Cumanus.
xii:4 See Nicolaus Damazcenus, Didot, Fragm. Hist. III, 409.
xiii:1 Fabricius, Graeca Bibliotheca, fourth ad. p. 309 seq.
xiii:2 Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata I. Cf. infra, III, 11, and Porphyrius, de vita Plotini, § 16.
xiii:3 'De regio Persarum principatu libri tres,' Paris, 1590. The second book is devoted to the religion and manners of the ancient Persians.
xiv:1 'Veterum Persarum et Parthorum et Medorum, religionis historia,' Oxford, 1700.
xiv:2 Thus he recognised in Abraham the first lawgiver of ancient Persia, in Magism a Sabean corruption of the primeval faith, and in Zoroaster a had learnt the forgotten truth from the exiled Jews in Babylon.
xv:1 'Zend-Avesta, ouvrage de Zoroastre, contenant les Ideés Théologiques, Physiques et Morales de ce Législateur. . . . Traduit en François sur l’Original Zend.' Par M. Anquetil Du Perron, 3 vols. in 4o, Paris, 1771.
xv:2 'Lettre à M. A*** du P*** dans laquelle est compris l’examen de sa traduction des livres attribués Zoroastre.'
xvi:1 Cf. the article on Zoroaster in the Dictionnaire philosophique.
xvi:2 'A Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations,' Oxford, 1777.
xvii:1 'De Zoroastris vita, institutis, doctrina et libris,' in the Novi Comentarii Societatis Regiae, Goettingen, 1778-1779.
xvii:2 'Zend-Avesta . . . nach dem Franzoesischen des Herm Anquetil Du Perron,' vols. in 40, 1776.
xvii:3 'Anhang zum Zend-Avesta,' 2 vols. in 4o, 1781.
xix:1 'Commentatio prior observationes historico-criticas de Zoroastre ejusque et placitis exhibens.' Goettingen, in the Novi Comment. Soc. Reg. 1791.
xx:1 The Sanskrit Grammar.
xx:2 Asiatic Researches, II, § 3.
xxi:1 'De antiquitate et affinitate linguae samscredamicae et germanicae,' Rome, 1798.
xxii:1 Asiatic Researches, X.
xxii:2 Ibid. X.
xxii:3 A large Persian dictionary compiled in India in the reign of Jehangir.
xxii:4 'Erläuterungen zum Neuen Testament aus einer neueröffneten Morgenländischen Quelle, Ἰδοὺ μάγοι ἀπὸ ἀνατολῶν,' Riga, 1775.
Zend Avesta English Pdf Free
xxii:5 'Die Heilige Sage . . . des Zend-Volks,' Francfort, 1820.
xxii:6 'Ueber das Alter und die Echtheit der Zend-Sprache und des Zend Avesta' (übersetzt von F. H. von der Hagen), Berlin, 1826. Remarks on the Zend Language and the Zend-Avesta (Transactions of the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, III, 524).
xxv:1 The attacks of John Romer ('Zend: Is it an Original Language?' London, 1855) called forth a refutation only in Bombay (Dhanjibai Framji, 'On the Origin and the Authenticity of the Aryan Family of Languages, the Zend-Avesta and the Huzvarash,' 1861).
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The Avesta/əˈvɛstə/ is the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the otherwise unrecorded Avestan language.[1]
The Avesta texts fall into several different categories, arranged either by dialect, or by usage. The principal text in the liturgical group is the Yasna, which takes its name from the Yasna ceremony, Zoroastrianism's primary act of worship, and at which the Yasna text is recited. The most important portion of the Yasna texts are the five Gathas, consisting of seventeen hymns attributed to Zoroaster himself. These hymns, together with five other short Old Avestan texts that are also part of the Yasna, are in the Old (or 'Gathic') Avestan language. The remainder of the Yasna's texts are in Younger Avestan, which is not only from a later stage of the language, but also from a different geographic region.
Extensions to the Yasna ceremony include the texts of the Vendidad and the Visperad.[2] The Visperad extensions consist mainly of additional invocations of the divinities (yazatas),[3] while the Vendidad is a mixed collection of prose texts mostly dealing with purity laws.[3] Even today, the Vendidad is the only liturgical text that is not recited entirely from memory.[3] Some of the materials of the extended Yasna are from the Yashts,[3] which are hymns to the individual yazatas. Unlike the Yasna, Visperad and Vendidad, the Yashts and the other lesser texts of the Avesta are no longer used liturgically in high rituals. Aside from the Yashts, these other lesser texts include the Nyayesh texts, the Gah texts, the Siroza, and various other fragments. Together, these lesser texts are conventionally called Khordeh Avesta or 'Little Avesta' texts. When the first Khordeh Avesta editions were printed in the 19th century, these texts (together with some non-Avestan language prayers) became a book of common prayer for lay people.[2]
The term Avesta is from the 9th/10th-century works of Zoroastrian tradition in which the word appears as Zoroastrian Middle Persianabestāg,[4][5]Book Pahlaviʾp(y)stʾkʼ. In that context, abestāg texts are portrayed as received knowledge, and are distinguished from the exegetical commentaries (the zand) thereof. The literal meaning of the word abestāg is uncertain; it is generally acknowledged to be a learned borrowing from Avestan, but none of the suggested etymologies have been universally accepted. The widely repeated derivation from *upa-stavaka is from Christian Bartholomae (Altiranisches Wörterbuch, 1904), who interpreted abestāg as a contraction of a hypothetical reconstructed Old Iranian word for 'praise-song' (Bartholomae: Lobgesang); that word is not actually attested in any text.
- 2Structure and content
Historiography[edit]
The surviving texts of the Avesta, as they exist today, derive from a single master copy produced by collation and recension in the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE). That master copy, now lost, is known as the 'Sassanian archetype'. The oldest surviving manuscript (K1)[n 1] of an Avestan language text is dated 1323 CE.[1] Summaries of the various Avesta texts found in the 9th/10th century texts of Zoroastrian tradition suggest that a significant portion of the literature in the Avestan language has been lost.[2] Only about one-quarter of the Avestan sentences or verses referred to by the 9th/10th century commentators can be found in the surviving texts. This suggests that three-quarters of Avestan material, including an indeterminable number of juridical, historical and legendary texts, have been lost since then. On the other hand, it appears that the most valuable portions of the canon, including all of the oldest texts, have survived. The likely reason for this is that the surviving materials represent those portions of the Avesta that were in regular liturgical use, and therefore known by heart by the priests and not dependent for their preservation on the survival of particular manuscripts.
A pre-Sasanian history of the Avesta, if it had one, is in the realm of legend and myth. The oldest surviving versions of these tales are found in the ninth to 11th century texts of Zoroastrian tradition (i.e. in the so-called 'Pahlavi books'). The legends run as follows: The twenty-one nasks ('books') of the Avesta were created by Ahura Mazda and brought by Zoroaster to his patron Vishtaspa (Denkard 4A, 3A).[6] Supposedly, Vishtaspa (Dk 3A) or another Kayanian, Daray (Dk 4B), then had two copies made, one of which was stored in the treasury, and the other in the royal archives (Dk 4B, 5).[7] Following Alexander's conquest, the Avesta was then supposedly destroyed or dispersed by the Greeks after they translated the scientific passages that they could make use of (AVN 7–9, Dk 3B, 8).[8] Several centuries later, one of the Parthian emperors named Valaksh (one of the Vologases) supposedly then had the fragments collected, not only of those that had previously been written down, but also of those that had only been orally transmitted (Dk 4C).[8]
The Denkard also transmits another legend related to the transmission of the Avesta. In that story, credit for collation and recension is given to the early Sasanian-era priest Tansar (high priest under Ardashir I, r. 224–242, and Shapur I, r 240/242–272), who had the scattered works collected, and of which he approved only a part as authoritative (Dk 3C, 4D, 4E).[9] Tansar's work was then supposedly completed by Adurbad Mahraspandan (high priest of Shapur II, r. 309–379) who made a general revision of the canon and continued to ensure its orthodoxy (Dk 4F, AVN 1.12–1.16).[10] A final revision was supposedly undertaken in the 6th century under Khosrow I (Dk 4G).[11]
In the early 20th century, the legend of the Parthian-era collation engendered a search for a 'Parthian archetype' of the Avesta. In the theory of Friedrich Carl Andreas (1902), the archaic nature of the Avestan texts was assumed to be due to preservation via written transmission, and unusual or unexpected spellings in the surviving texts were assumed to be reflections of errors introduced by Sasanian-era transcription from the Aramaic alphabet-derived Pahlavi scripts.[n 2] The search for the 'Arsacid archetype' was increasingly criticized in the 1940s and was eventually abandoned in the 1950s after Karl Hoffmann demonstrated that the inconsistencies noted by Andreas were actually due to unconscious alterations introduced by oral transmission.[12] Hoffmann identifies[13] these changes to be due[14] in part to modifications introduced through recitation;[n 3] in part to influences from other Iranian languages picked up on the route of transmission from somewhere in eastern Iran (i.e. Central Asia) via Arachosia and Sistan through to Persia;[n 4] and in part due to the influence of phonetic developments in the Avestan language itself.[n 5]
The legends of an Arsacid-era collation and recension are no longer taken seriously.[18] It is now certain that for most of their long history the Avesta's various texts were handed down orally,[18] and independently of one another, and that it was not until around the 5th or 6th century that they were committed to written form.[1] However, during their long history, only the Gathic texts seem to have been memorized (more or less) exactly.[3] The other less sacred works appear to have been handed down in a more fluid oral tradition, and were partly composed afresh with each generation of poet-priests, sometimes with the addition of new material.[3] The Younger Avestan texts are therefore composite works, with contributions from several different authors over the course of several hundred years.
The texts became available to European scholarship comparatively late, thus the study of Zoroastrianism in Western countries dates back to only the 18th century.[19]Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron travelled to India in 1755, and discovered the texts among Indian Zoroastrian (Parsi) communities. He published a set of French translations in 1771, based on translations provided by a Parsi priest. Anquetil-Duperron's translations were at first dismissed as a forgery in poor Sanskrit, but he was vindicated in the 1820s following Rasmus Rask's examination of the Avestan language (A Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Zend Language, Bombay, 1821). Rask also established that Anquetil-Duperron's manuscripts were a fragment of a much larger literature of sacred texts. Anquetil-Duperron's manuscripts are at the Bibliothèque nationale de France ('P'-series manuscripts), while Rask's collection now lies in the Royal Library, Denmark ('K'-series). Other large Avestan language manuscript collections are those of the British Museum ('L'-series), the K. R. Cama Oriental Library in Mumbai, the Meherji Rana library in Navsari, and at various university and national libraries in Europe.
Structure and content[edit]
In its present form, the Avesta is a compilation from various sources, and its different parts date from different periods and vary widely in character. Only texts in the Avestan language are considered part of the Avesta.
According to the Denkard, the 21 nasks (books) mirror the structure of the 21-word-long Ahuna Vairya prayer: each of the three lines of the prayer consists of seven words. Correspondingly, the nasks are divided into three groups, of seven volumes per group. Originally, each volume had a word of the prayer as its name, which so marked a volume's position relative to the other volumes. Only about a quarter of the text from the nasks has survived until today.
The contents of the Avesta are divided topically (even though the organization of the nasks is not), but these are not fixed or canonical. Some scholars prefer to place the categories in two groups, the one liturgical, and the other general. The following categorization is as described by Jean Kellens (see bibliography, below).
The Yasna[edit]
Yasna 28.1 (Bodleian MS J2)
The Yasna (from yazišn 'worship, oblations', cognate with Sanskrit yajña), is the primary liturgical collection, named after the ceremony at which it is recited. It consists of 72 sections called the Ha-iti or Ha. The 72 threads of lamb's wool in the Kushti, the sacred thread worn by Zoroastrians, represent these sections. The central portion of the Yasna is the Gathas, the oldest and most sacred portion of the Avesta, believed to have been composed by Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) himself. The Gathas are structurally interrupted by the Yasna Haptanghaiti ('seven-chapter Yasna'), which makes up chapters 35–42 of the Yasna and is almost as old as the Gathas, consists of prayers and hymns in honour of Ahura Mazda, the Yazatas, the Fravashi, Fire, Water, and Earth. The younger Yasna, though handed down in prose, may once have been metrical, as the Gathas still are.
The Visperad[edit]
The Visperad (from vîspe ratavo, '(prayer to) all patrons') is a collection of supplements to the Yasna. The Visparad is subdivided into 23 or 24 kardo (sections) that are interleaved into the Yasna during a Visperad service (which is an extended Yasna service).
The Visperad collection has no unity of its own, and is never recited separately from the Yasna.
The Vendidad[edit]
The Vendidad (or Vidēvdāt, a corruption of Avestan Vī-Daēvō-Dāta, 'Given Against the Demons') is an enumeration of various manifestations of evil spirits, and ways to confound them. The Vendidad includes all of the 19th nask, which is the only nask that has survived in its entirety. The text consists of 22 Fargards, fragments arranged as discussions between Ahura Mazda and Zoroaster. The first fargard is a dualistic creation myth, followed by the description of a destructive winter on the lines of the Flood myth. The second fargard recounts the legend of Yima. The remaining fargards deal primarily with hygiene (care of the dead in particular) [fargard 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 19] as well as disease and spells to fight it [7, 10, 11, 13, 20, 21, 22]. Fargards 4 and 15 discuss the dignity of wealth and charity, of marriage and of physical effort, and the indignity of unacceptable social behaviour such as assault and breach of contract, and specify the penances required to atone for violations thereof. The Vendidad is an ecclesiastical code, not a liturgical manual, and there is a degree of moral relativism apparent in the codes of conduct. The Vendidad's different parts vary widely in character and in age. Some parts may be comparatively recent in origin although the greater part is very old.
The Vendidad, unlike the Yasna and the Visparad, is a book of moral laws rather than the record of a liturgical ceremony. However, there is a ceremony called the Vendidad, in which the Yasna is recited with all the chapters of both the Visparad and the Vendidad inserted at appropriate points. This ceremony is only performed at night.
The Yashts[edit]
Faravahar, believed to be a depiction of a Fravashi, as mentioned in the Yasna, Yashts and Vendidad
The Yashts (from yešti, 'worship by praise') are a collection of 21 hymns, each dedicated to a particular divinity or divine concept. Three hymns of the Yasna liturgy that 'worship by praise' are—in tradition—also nominally called yashts, but are not counted among the Yasht collection since the three are a part of the primary liturgy. The Yashts vary greatly in style, quality and extent. In their present form, they are all in prose but analysis suggests that they may at one time have been in verse.
The Siroza[edit]
The Siroza ('thirty days') is an enumeration and invocation of the 30 divinities presiding over the days of the month. (cf. Zoroastrian calendar). The Siroza exists in two forms, the shorter ('little Siroza') is a brief enumeration of the divinities with their epithets in the genitive. The longer ('great Siroza') has complete sentences and sections, with the yazatas being addressed in the accusative.
The Siroza is never recited as a whole, but is a source for individual sentences devoted to particular divinities, to be inserted at appropriate points in the liturgy depending on the day and the month.
The Nyayeshes[edit]
The five Nyayeshes, abbreviated Ny., are prayers for regular recitation by both priests and laity.[2] They are addressed to the Sun and Mithra (recited together thrice a day), to the Moon (recited thrice a month), and to the Waters and to Fire.[2] The Nyayeshes are composite texts containing selections from the Gathas and the Yashts, as well as later material.[2]
The Gahs[edit]
The five gāhs are invocations to the five divinities that watch over the five divisions (gāhs) of the day.[2]Gāhs are similar in structure and content to the five Nyayeshes.
The Afrinagans[edit]
The Afrinagans are four 'blessing' texts recited on a particular occasion: the first in honor of the dead, the second on the five epagomenal days that end the year, the third is recited at the six seasonal feasts, and the fourth at the beginning and end of summer.
Fragments[edit]
All material in the Avesta that is not already present in one of the other categories falls into a 'fragments' category, which – as the name suggests – includes incomplete texts. There are altogether more than 20 fragment collections, many of which have no name (and are then named after their owner/collator) or only a Middle Persian name. The more important of the fragment collections are the Nirangistan fragments (18 of which constitute the Ehrbadistan); the Pursishniha 'questions,' also known as 'Fragments Tahmuras'; and the Hadokht Nask 'volume of the scriptures' with two fragments of eschatological significance.
Other Zoroastrian religious texts[edit]
Only texts preserved in the Avestan language count as scripture and are part of the Avesta. Several other secondary works are nonetheless crucial to Zoroastrian theology and scholarship.
The most notable among the Middle Persian texts are the Dēnkard ('Acts of Religion'), dating from the ninth century; the Bundahishn ('Primordial Creation'), finished in the eleventh or twelfth century, but containing older material; the Mainog-i-Khirad ('Spirit of Wisdom'), a religious conference on questions of faith; and the Book of Arda Viraf, which is especially important for its views on death, salvation and life in the hereafter. Of the post-14th century works (all in New Persian), only the Sad-dar ('Hundred Doors, or Chapters'), and rivayats (traditional treatises) are of doctrinal importance. Other texts such as Zartushtnamah ('Book of Zoroaster') are only notable for their preservation of legend and folklore. The Aogemadaeca 'we accept,' a treatise on death is based on quotations from the Avesta.
References[edit]
- Notes
- ^K1 represents 248 leaves of a 340-leaf Vendidad Sade manuscript, i.e. a variant of a Yasna text into which sections of the Visperad and Vendidad are interleaved. The colophon of K1 (K=Copenhagen) identifies its place and year of completion to Cambay, 692Y (= 1323–1324 CE). The date of K1 is occasionally mistakenly given as 1184. This mistake is due to a 19th-century confusion of the date of K1 with the date of K1's source: in the postscript to K1, the copyist – a certain Mehrban Kai Khusrow of Navsari – gives the date of his source as 552Y (= 1184 CE). That text from 1184 has not survived.
- ^For a summary of Andreas' theory, see Schlerath (1987), pp. 29–30.
- ^For example, prefix repetition as in e.g. paitī .. paitiientī vs. paiti .. aiienī (Y. 49.11 vs. 50.9), or sandhi processes on word and syllable boundaries, e.g. adāiš for *at̰.āiš (48.1), ahiiāsā for ahiiā yāsā, gat̰.tōi for *gatōi (43.1), ratūš š́iiaoϑanā for *ratū š́iiaoϑanā (33.1).[15]
- ^e.g. irregular internal hw > xv as found in e.g. haraxvati- 'Arachosia' and sāxvan- 'instruction', rather than regular internal hw > ŋvh as found in e.g. aojōŋvhant- 'strong'.[16]
- ^e.g. YAv. -ō instead of expected OAv. -ə̄ for Ir. -ah in almost all polysyllables.[17]
- Citations
- ^ abcBoyce 1984, p. 1.
- ^ abcdefgBoyce 1984, p. 3.
- ^ abcdefBoyce 1984, p. 2.
- ^Kellens 1987, p. 239.
- ^Cantera 2015.
- ^Humbach 1991, pp. 50–51.
- ^Humbach 1991, pp. 51–52.
- ^ abHumbach 1991, pp. 52–53.
- ^Humbach 1991, pp. 53–54.
- ^Humbach 1991, p. 54.
- ^Humbach 1991, p. 55.
- ^Humbach 1991, p. 57.
- ^Hoffmann 1958, pp. 7ff.
- ^Humbach 1991, pp. 56–63.
- ^Humbach 1991, pp. 59–61.
- ^Humbach 1991, p. 58.
- ^Humbach 1991, p. 61.
- ^ abHumbach 1991, p. 56.
- ^Boyce 1984, p. x.
- Works cited
Avesta English Translation
- Boyce, Mary (1984), Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, Manchester UP.
- Cantera, Alberto (2015), 'Avesta II: Middle Persian Translations', Encyclopedia Iranica, New York: Encyclopedia Iranica online.
- Hoffmann, Karl (1958), 'Altiranisch', Handbuch der Orientalistik, I 4,1, Leiden: Brill.
- Humbach, Helmut (1991), The Gathas of Zarathushtra and the Other Old Avestan Texts, Part I, Heidelberg: Winter.
- Kellens, Jean (1983), 'Avesta', Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 3, New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 35–44.
- Kellens, Jean (1987), 'Characters of Ancient Mazdaism', History and Anthropology, vol. 3, Great Britain: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 239–262.
- Schlerath, Bernfried (1987), 'Andreas, Friedrich Carl: The Andreas Theory', Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 2, New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 29–30.
Further reading[edit]
- Talageri, S. G. (2010). The Rigveda and the Avesta: The final evidence. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
- Jal, M., & Centre for Studies in Civilizations (Delhi, India). (2012). Zoroastrianism: From antiquity to the modern period.
Avesta In English
External links[edit]
Look up Avesta in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- avesta.org: translation by James Darmesteter and L. H. Mills forms part of the Sacred Books of the East series, but is now regarded as obsolete.
- 'Zend-Avesta' . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
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