Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/826

Rh 76 ZEND-AVESTA with reference to purification and ecclesiastical penance. It may with propriety be called the &quot;priestly code&quot; of the Parsees. The Yasna, Vispered, and Vendidad together constitute the Avesta in the stricter sense of that word, and the reading of them appertains to the priest alone. For liturgical purposes the sepa rate chapters of the Vendidad and the Vispered are sometimes in serted amongst those of the Yasna so as to form what is known as the Vendidad Sade, which then, accompanied by certain liturgical actions, is publicly read in the Parsee worship. The reading of the Gathas and Vendidad in this case may, when viewed according to the original intention, be taken as corresponding in some sense to the sermon, while that of the Vispered and the rest of the Yasna may be taken as corresponding to the hymns and prayers of Chris tian worship. 4. In marked contrast to the three already mentioned is the Khordah Avesta, or Little Avesta, which is designed equally for priesthood and laity, and serves rather as a book of private devo tion. Besides some short prayers, such as the Nyfiishes, the favourite daily prayers of the Parsees, it contains the Yashts or songs of praise, twenty-one in number, addressed to the Yazatas (Izads), the deities and angels of the Ormuzd creed. Over and above the four books just enumerated there are a con siderable number of fragments from other books, as well as quota tions, glosses, and glossaries. In its present form, however, the Avesta is only a frag mentary remnant of the old priestly literature of Zoroas- trianism, a fact confessed by the learned tradition of the Parsees themselves, according to which the number of Yashts was originally thirty. The truth is that we possess but a trifling portion of a very much larger original Avesta, if we are to believe native tradition, carrying us back to the Sasanian period, which tells of an original Avesta in twenty-one books called naslcs or nosks, as to the names, contents, and chapters of which we have several more or less detailed accounts, particularly in the Pahlavi Dinkard and in the Rivayats. From the same sources we learn that even then a considerable portion of the original Avesta had been lost : we are told that of a number of nosks only a small portion was found to be extant &quot;after Alexander.&quot; For example, of the seventh nosk, which &quot; before Alexander &quot; had as many as fifty chapters, there then remained only thirteen ; and similar things are alleged about the eighth, ninth, tenth, and other nosks. But even of the remains of the original Avesta, as these lay before the authors referred to, only a small portion has survived to our time. Of all the nosks one only, the nineteenth, has come down to us unimpaired and intact, the Vendidad, All the others, with the exception of slight traces, have disappeared in the course of centuries. It would be rash to treat in an offhand way this old tradition about the twenty-one nosks as pure invention. The number twenty-one indeed points to an artificial arrangement of the material ; for twenty-one is a sacred number, and the most sacred prayer of the Parsees, the so- called Ahuno Vairyo (Honovar) contains twenty-one words ; and it is also true that in the enumeration of the nosks we miss the names of the books we know Yasna, Vispered, as well as the Yashts and the Khordah Avesta. But either we must regard them as having been included among the nosks, though under other names, or, what is even more probable, we must assume that even &quot;at that early date special liturgical manuals the Yasna especially distinct from the nosks had already been compiled for the practical use of the priests. Further, the statements of the Dinkard and other writings leave on one a very distinct impression that the authors actually had before them the text of the nosks, or at all events of a large part of them. And, besides, in other directions there are numerous indications that such books had once really existed. In the Khordah Avesta as we now have it we find two Srosh Yashts ; with regard to the first, it is expressly stated in old MSS. that it was taken from the Hadokht nosk (the twentieth, accord ing to the Dinkard). From the same nosk also a consider able fragment (Yt., 21 and 22 in Westergaard) has been taken. So also the extensive quotations from Avesta texts in the Niringistdn, a Pahlavi book, are probably the disjecta membra of the seventeenth (or Husparam) nosk. Lastly, the numerous other fragments, the quotations in the Pahlavi translation, the many references in the Bunda- hish to passages of this Avesta not now known to us, all presuppose the existence in the Sasanian period of a much more extensive Avesta literature than the mere prayer book now in our hands. The existence of an original Avesta is far from being a mere myth. But, even granting that a certain obscurity still hangs undispelled over the problem of the old Avesta, with its twenty-one nosks, we may well believe the Parsees themselves, when they tell us that their sacred literature has passed through successive stages of decay, the last of which is represented by the present Avesta. There is evidence of this in the patchwork and fragmentary character of some portions of the present Avesta ; and, moreover, in the MS. evidence of recent centuries we are able to observe with our own eyes the actual process of abridgment gradually going on, and to trace the manner in which certain portions of the present Avesta slowly passed out of currency. This holds good, in particular, of the greater Yashts. The transcribers of the Khordah Avesta satisfied themselves for the most part with those prayers which were currently in use, such as the Nyaishes and one or two of the smaller and inter mediate Yashts. The great Yashts are not of very frequent occurrence : some of them indeed are already met with but seldom, and MSS. containing all the Yashts are of great rarity. Of the fifteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth Yashts we might even venture to predict that some centuries hence they may perhaps be found defying the tooth of time in not more than a single manuscript copy. Origin and History. While all that Herodotus (i. 132) has got to say is that the Magi sang &quot; the theogony &quot; at their sacrifices, Pausanias is able to add (v. 27, 3) that they read from a book. Hermippus in the 3d century B.C. affirmed that Zoroaster, the founder of the doctrine of the Magi, was the author of twenty books, each containing 100,000 verses. According to the Arab historian Tabari, these were written on 1200 cowhides, a statement confirmed by Masudi, who writes, &quot; Zartusht gave to the Persians the book called Avesta. It consisted of twenty-one parts, each containing 200 leaves. This book, in the writing which Zartusht invented and which the Magi called the writing of religion, was written on 12,000 cowhides, bound together by golden bands. Its language was the Old Persian, which no one now understands.&quot; These statements suffi ciently establish the existence and great bulk of the sacred writings. Parsee tradition adds a number of interesting statements as to their history. According to the Arda- Viraf-Ndma, stated to have been written during the Sasanian period, the religion revealed through Zoroaster had subsisted in its purity for 300 years when Iskander Ilumi (Alexander the Great) invaded and devastated Iran, and burnt the Avesta which, written on cowhides with golden ink, was preserved in the archives at Persepolis. According to the Dinkard, there were two copies, of which one was burnt, while the second perished at the hands of the Greeks in some other way. The Rivayats have it that Alexander burnt the greater part of the twenty-one nosks, and go on to say that after his death the Zoroastrian priests met, gathered the scattered fragments which had escaped the ravages of war, and put together the present collection, which is but a small portion of the original book. With regard to this editing the Dinkard gives various details. It tells us that the collecting of the Avesta fragments, so far as these were still extant, whether in writing or in oral tradition, began under the last of the Arsacids at the command of King Vologeses. The first of the Sasanians,