Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 4.djvu/55

Rh whole of the Hôm Yast, which forms a coherent whole, cannot have been written before the death of Alexander or more accurately before the fall of the Greek domination in Persia. It was about 150 that Mithridates the Great ( 1 71-137) dealt the last blow to the Kilisyâk. Therefore the Hôm Yast could hardly have been written before the middle of the second century before our era.

§ 3. If the Avesta, or part of it, were composed under the Arsacidae, an important fact, otherwise unaccounted for, is explained o: namely the fact that the Avesta seems to ignore the existence of an Iranian empire. The highest political unity is the dahyu, a name which in the inscriptions of Darius denoted the satrapies, the provincial kingdoms of Media, Bactriana, Sogdiana, Arachosia, Aria, Parthia, &c. The highest political power is the dahupaiti, the chief of a dahyu. The one universal dahupaiti, the one daupaiti of all dahyus, is Mithra. This refers to a time when there was no real dahupaiti of all dahyus, no Shâhinshâh, when the real power was in the hands of the independent local kings. This is the period of the Provincial kings, the Mulûk ut-tavâif; and this very name, Mulûk ut-tavâif, is nothing less than a literal translation of the Zend dahupaiti.

§ 4. At the time when the Avesta took its definitive form, Chaldaea was inhabited by Arab tribes, it was already a sort of Irâq Arabî. To the writer of the Avesta, Babylon (Bawri) is the residence of Azi Dahâka, and Azi Dahâka represents the Arab race. It is not only in the later Shâhnâma that he is made the son of an Arab king; both the Bundahiy, which reproduces old Avesta documents, and the Avesta book of the Genealogies itself, made him a descendant of Tâg, the eponym of the