by Scott McGill
The other long inscription is that of Narsē from the fourth century CE. This begins in the same way as Šāpūr’s, although Narsē’s concern is to justify his taking of the throne from Wahrām, king of the Sakas. Narsē plays the dualism of Zoroastrianism very well in this period, portraying himself as just and the forces of Wahrām and his accomplice Wahnām, son of Tatrus, as purveyors of falsehood. He tells us his election was the result of the grandees’ election of him over his opponent, when they met him and asked him to become the King of Kings (Shayegan 2012; Skjærvø 1985, p. 54).
After Narsē in the fourth century, the economy of the inscriptions gives us very little historical information, with the exception of the time of Šāpūr II. The subject of the two inscriptions at the time of Šāpūr II is quite valuable and interesting for several reasons. Both of these inscriptions were commissioned by local kings at Persepolis, one by the king of the Sakas, Šāpūr Sagān‐šāh and the other by a Seleukos the scribe. These inscriptions reveal the territorial extent of the Sasanian Empire in the fourth centurY, the local administrative and military apparatus of the Sasanian kings, and finally the importance of Persepolis for the Sasanians.
Mihr‐Narseh, who was the grand Wazīr or minister Wuzurg‐framādār in the fifth century (Henning 1954), has left a short inscription by a bridge that he commissioned for the sake of his and his son’s souls. The inscription attests to the Zoroastrian conception of building for salvation in this period, be it a common person or a grand Wazīr (Henning 1954, p. 101). By the end of the Sasanian and the beginning of the early Islamic period several small private inscriptions exist. The most prominent include the two inscriptions at Maqsūd Abād. These deal with the owner of a piece of land, its well, and reconstruction of castles. Other inscriptions have been found in Byzantium (de Blois 1990) and east in India (West 1880) and as far as China (Harmatta 1971).
Written Pahlavi texts, meanwhile, begin to appear in the fifth century and become more common in the sixth. The first texts are the Zabūr or Psalms, which are translations of Biblical texts into Middle Persian (Andreas and Barr 1933; Gignoux 2002). The internal evidence demonstrates that they were translations from Syriac by authors whose primary language was Persian (Skjærvø 1983, pp. 47–62). In the second half of the fifth century CE, the Catholicos Aqāq translated a summary of the Christian religion from Syriac into Middle Persian for the Sasanian king of Kings, Kawād I (Sims‐Williams 2011). There is also evidence of translation of the Book of Enoch and other Christian apocryphal works, as well as other hymns that suggest the importance and number of the Christian community in Persia.
Pahlavi texts (Cereti 2001; Macuch 2009) are mainly the product of Zoroastrian priestly writing, and so they are colored by a religious outlook. Still, we do find what may be called “secular” texts that give us a view of the rich literary heritage that once existed in late antiquity (Utas 1979). We can securely believe that there was a larger amount of Middle Persian literature in various genres, but because of the hardships faced by the Zoroastrian community throughout the ages, only those books that were of utmost importance for the religion and communal solidarity were copied by the priests. Personal choice and taste were also to preserve some of the rarer texts that do survive. Different genres are represented among the surviving texts. We will divide this large corpus into the following categories: commentaries on the Avesta (zand); philosophical and debate texts; apocalyptic texts; didactic texts (Rivāyat texts or andarz); geographical and epic texts; legal texts (dādīg); cultural texts; and dictionaries (frahang).
7.1 Commentary on the Avesta
By far the largest group of texts are commentaries and elaborations on the Zoroastrian holy text, which was given final written form in the sixth century CE, probably during the reign of Khusro I and his high priest Weh‐Šāpūr (Andrés‐Toledo 2015). Here the chief priest or the Mowbedān Mowbed at the council of Khusro I established the 21 nasks (chapters/sections) of the Avesta (Vevaina 2015, p. 227). Of the 21 nasks, most are now lost, but it is the Zand or Middle Persian commentaries that give us information on the lost portion of the Avesta. However, their content and the manner in which the authors of the Pahlavi commentaries discuss them is difficult to comprehend. What seems to have taken place, according to Y. S.‐D. Vevaina, is that the exegetical narrative in the Pahlavi texts is woven into a new textual narrative. The Pahlavi authors appear to have been giving new meanings to the sacred texts, and at the same time to have been using myth, epic, and legal metaphors to make them understandable (Vevaina 2010, pp. 228–229).
The major text that is important for the understanding of the Zoroastrian worldview is the Bundahišn (The Book of Primal Creation), first compiled in the Sasanian period and then added to it in the early Islamic period, last compiled by Farrbay, the son of Ašwahišt, (Anklesaria 1956). In the preface to the text, the scribe mentions that he is redacting these Zoroastrian teachings in a time of hardship, when the number of adherents is dwindling in the face of conversion to Islam. Hence what we can gain from this text is a sense of urgency on the part of the priest to hand down what he thought was most important for the preservation of the good religion. The text provides a catalog of learning: material on cosmology and cosmogony; a good deal of information on deities and demons; and an encyclopedia of botany, zoology, ethnography, geography, and history.
The other copious work is the Dēnkard (Acts of Religion). This is another encyclopedic work, at times written in a difficult and cryptic language (Sanjana 1916; West 2013a). The Dēnkard originally was composed in nine books, where books one and two have been lost (Gignoux 2001). Book three is concerned with a host of issues, from the composition of human body to opinions regarding church and state in the Sasanian period (de Menasce 1973). Here one finds the famous Persian dictum of the inseparability of church and state, which still rings true in the religious circles: hād xwadāyīh dēn ud dēn xwadāyīh…pad awēšān xwadāyīh abar dēn ud dēn abar xwadāyīh winnārdagīh “Know that kingship is religion and religion is kingship…for them kingship is arranged based on religion and religion based on kingship” (Dēnkard, 470). Book four has been called the Book of Manners or Customs ēwēn‐nāmag and is perhaps the most difficult book, since it deals with not only the history of the sacred texts but also Greek and Indic science, which will be dealt with below. Book five begins with a series of questions put forth by a nonbeliever to a Zoroastrian sage, and it deals with different issues, especially the idea of xwēdodāh or consanguineous marriages (Amuzegār and Tafazzolī 2001; West 2013b). Book six may be called a Book of Counsel Andarz‐nāmag (Shaked 1979), while book seven particularly deals with the story of Zoroaster, from his birth to his death (Molé 1967; Amuzegār and Tafazzolī 2001). Book eight is important because it is a description of the contents of the 21 nasks of the Avesta. Each nask is named and its contents are briefly mentioned, while book nine concentrates on three nasks (West 1897). There are other encyclopedic works such as the Wīzīdagīhā ī Zādsparam (The Selections of Zādsparam) (Gignoux and Tafazzolī 1993; Rashid 1366 [Rašēd Mohassel 1987]). The other important body of texts is known as the Pahlavī Rivāyats, which are concerned with legal precepts as well as history, mythical creatures, and customs (Tafazzolī 1998, pp. 153–155). These legal texts give us some understanding of Zoroastrian life in late antiquity, drawn from the Avesta, which can in turn be compared with (contemporaneous?) Christian and Jewish legal texts such as that of the Syriac Law Book of Yišoboxt and the Babylonian Talmud (Mokhtarian 2015).
7.2 Philosophical and Debate Texts
Several texts in Middle Persian, mainly from the eighth and ninth centuries CE, represent the end stage of Middle Persian literature. The Draxt ī Asūrīg (The Assyrian Tree) is outstanding in its content and antiquity in its genre (Brunner 1980). The vocabulary of the text suggests its Parthian antecedents and its content Mesopotamian influence. This text presents a debate between a date tree and a goat, typical of the ancient Mesopotamian debate poetry that was read during banq
uets. The debate is about which of these two (date/goat) is more useful. Other texts are from the early Islamic period, such as the important Škand ī Gūmānīg Wīzār (Doubt Dispelling Explanation), which asserts the supremacy of Zoroastrian theology and the deficiency of such religions as those of the Fatalists (Dahris), Manichaeans, Christians, Jews, and Muslims (de Menasce 1945). The author systematically tackles the tenets of these religions and sometimes quotes verbatim from the holy texts of these religious traditions. The method of argumentation is also noteworthy in that it resembles the analytical method of debate known in Islamic Theology (‘Ilm al‐Kalam) and may have been influenced by that tradition of Islamic thought and literature, most probably as a result of contact with the Mu’tazila. Gizistag Abāliš (The Accursed Abāliš) (Chacha 1936) is a short text about the debate between Abāliš, who appears to be a heretic or atheist, the Zoroastrian high priest, and Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians at the court of the Caliph Ma’mūn in the ninth century CE. The last text has survived in its Pazand form (Middle Persian written in the Avestan script). The text known as Pus ī Dāneš Kāmag (The Youth in Desire of Knowledge) is written in the same vein as the Škand ī Gumānīg Wīzār, but there is little reference to the Islamic period. The work is concerned with Zoroastrian matters, such as the reason for wearing the sacred belt, the kustīg.
7.3 Apocalyptic and Visionary Texts
This genre of Middle Persian literature is the most interesting of the Pahlavi corpus. These texts predict the way in which the world will come to an end and the fate of the people and that of Ērānšahr, the empire of the Sasanians. First, however, there is an important visionary text, the Ardā Wirāz Nāmag (The Book of Righteous Wirāz), which is about the journey of a righteous man, Wirāz, to heaven and hell; it may be compared with Dante’s famous work, the Divina Commedia. Not only is the journey itself interesting, but the preparation for the journey into paradise and hell by Wirāz also gives us a sense of ritual initiation in late antique Iran. Having been properly cleansed and laid on a bed, he is given a concoction of hemp called mang ī wištāsp “hemp of Wištāsp,” which enables him to make the journey (Vahman 1986). Ardā Wirāz Nāmag was seemingly a didactic as well as a visionary text, as Zoroastrians read the text to understand and learn how and by which acts one ends up in heaven, hell, or what is known in Pahlavi as hamīstagān (limbo or purgatory). The reference to Alexander of Macedon as an Egyptian is unique in the corpus of Middle Persian literature; it suggests a late antique, perhaps a Sasanian, vision of the past.
In the apocalyptic text Zand ī Wahman Yasn (The Commentary of the Wahman Yasn), Zoroaster is given the xrad ī harwisp āgāhīh (Wisdom of complete knowledge) by means of Ohrmazd, which is poured as water into his hands for him to drink; the water induces seven days and nights of dreaming, as in the case of Wirāz. Zoroaster is able to see the future in a mysterious form (a tree with seven trunks), which is explained to him to be seven eras (in another part of the text, there are four eras that sound very much like Hesiod’s division in the Theogony). These eras span the beginning of Zoroastrianism to the time of the Turkic conquest of Persia (Cereti 1995).
These texts predict the fate of the Zoroastrians: They will face hardships and will only achieve supremacy at the end of the world, when sinners will be punished and those Zoroastrians who have endured hardship will go to heaven, which Wirāz had seen and had described to believers. The apocalyptic nature of the text is clear, as the majority of the text discusses calamities both natural and man‐made. The sun becomes motionless, while a host of evil forces attack, and it is through the intervention of the deities and Iranian heroes that the suffering stops. Interestingly, the Romans (Byzantines) appear in the apocalyptic vision as invaders, as do the Huns from the other side of the Iranian world. The fifth‐century Sasanian king Wahrām Gur stands as a vanquisher of heresy, while Wahrām ī Warzāwand (The Miraculous Wahrām), who may be the son of Yazdgerd III, comes to save the day (Cereti 1996). There are few personages who are given the power to look into the future by means of hallucinogens, such as Zoroaster, King Wištāsp, his minister Jāmāsp, and Wirāz. One must also mention Kerdīr, whose inscription suggests his campaign be included into the host of righteous personages who were able to make the journey (Daryaee 2001).
The Jāmāsp Nāmag is another one of these texts (Agostini 2013). Again, Jāmāsp is endowed with a vision of what is to come. As in the Zand ī Wahman Yasn, the text describes a great deal of natural and political disasters until the saviors appear, and men and women arise from the dead to be judged. There is a strong historical dimension to the text: Iranian history according to the Zoroastrian tradition is given; the Sasanians receive a full genealogy; and an account of their rule extends to the arrival of the Arabs, who come from the lineage of the demon of Wrath (Xēšm) (Agostini 2013, pp. 108–109).
7.4 Didactic Texts
A large amount of Pahlavi texts attempts to elucidate matters relating to the Zoroastrian tradition. They either are known as Rivāyat texts or andarz (wise sayings). A noteworthy example of a Rivayat text is the Dādestān ī Dēnīg (Jaafari‐Dehaghi 1998), an important encyclopedic text full of history, myth, and practical advice on how to live. The Epistles of Manūšchīhr (Dhabhar 1912), meanwhile, present a series of questions and answers on how and what priests and people should do in life. The Rivāyats, however, are the most enduring type of literature in the Zoroastrian tradition, written not only in Pahlavi but also later in Persian. They include the Pahlavi Rivāyats Accompanying the Dādestān ī Dēnīg (Williams 1990) and the Rivāyat ī Emēd ī Ašawahištān (Safa‐Isfahani 1980), as well as the Pahlavi Rivāyat of Adurfranbay (Anklesaria 1969; Rezā’ī Bāgh‐Bīdī 2005). Wīzādagīha ī Zadspram is an interesting text in the same genre. This contains important wisdom material but also deals with medicine and the body (Gignoux and Tafazzolī 1993; Rašēd Mohassel 1987). Mēnog ī Xrad, is another notable text, with a series of questions and answers that provide us with much information about Zoroastrian history and tradition. It was most likely written before the Islamic period (Tafazzolī 1986).
Andarz texts or wisdom literature are abundant and are usually attributed to wise sages or people of authority in the Zoroastrian tradition. These texts give didactic ordinances about the religion, social order, good and bad conduct, and proper rules. One notable example deals with children and youth, enumerating their daily duties and discussing their education (Junker 1912). Priests, kings, important personages, and wise men all are given credit for these andarz.
7.5 Geographical and Epic Texts
There is good evidence to show that as early as the time of Kawād I, the Sasanian court was in possession of a geographical text (Zakeri 2011, pp. 221–222). This text would partly be in the tradition of the Avesta, where a chapter in the Wīdēwdād gives us information on the different regions and people who inhabited them. A short text known as Abādīh ud Sāhagīhā ī Sīstān (Utas 1980) is concerned with the Province of Sīstān, which had special importance for Zoroastrianism in the Sasanian period: It was thought to be the center of Zoroaster activity and the homeland of the Kayanid king, Wištāsp (Gnoli 1980, 2000) The text may be seen as a progenitor of the later Islamic geographical texts and local histories such as the Persian Tārīx‐e Sīstān (History of Sīstān) as well as other local histories and geographical texts.
The longest text is known as the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr (The Provincial Capitals of Ērānšahr); it discusses different capital cities in different regions. All the cities are mentioned as part of the Sasanian Empire; they include Mecca, Medina, and parts of Africa. The author identifies the builder and rebuilder of a specific city and the important events that took place there. The text is not an exact geographical‐administrative history, but has epic features, is imperialistic in outlook, and reflects Zoroastrian dogma (Daryaee 2002a).
A Pahlavi epic is the Ayādgār ī Zarērān (Memoir of Zarēr) (Monchi‐Zadeh 1981; Russell 1996), which focuses on the court of King Wištāsp,
the patron of Zoroaster, and the bloody war with their enemies, the Tūrānians. The epic relates that victory will come to the Zoroastrians only after many heroes and princes have fallen in battle. The epic of Ayādgār ī Zarērān is tragic because the minister of Wištāsp, Jāmāsp, who is endowed with the knowledge of future, is able to foretell to the king the death of many heroes in battle. The other epic deals with the career of the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, Ardaxšīr ī Pābagān. The sixth‐century Kārnāmag ī Ardaxšīr ī Pābagān (The Book of the Deeds of Ardaxšīr, the Son of Pābag) describes Ardaxšīr’s origins as a descendant of King Dārā, i.e. Achaemenid Darius. The epic treats Ardaxšīr’ as a great hero who is good at all he does, from polo to board games, and who successfully challenges the last Parthian king, Ardawān (Artabanus) (Grenet 2003). This story also found its way into Medieval Persian epic.
7.6 Legal Texts
The Wīdēwdād, part of the Avesta, is mainly concerned with the laws of purity and pollution; the Pahlavi translation of this text adds commentaries as glosses in the text (Moazami 2014). There is also a more copious Zand of the Wīdēwdād that has not been translated. If we are to accept the contents of Dēnkard (book eight) as having been the topics of the lost portions of the Avesta, we realize that much of this text was concerned with legal matters as well. There is also a prodigious amount of legal commentary in Middle Persian. The most important legal text of the Sasanian period is the Madīyān ī Hazār Dādestān (The Exposition of One Thousand Judgments) (Macuch 1981, 1993; Perikhanian 1973, 2000). This work deals with legal cases brought to the Sasanian court. The Šāyest nē Šāyest (Licit and Illicit) (Kotwal 1969) is another significant text; it covers judgments of the Zoroastrian judges and theologians who sometimes disagree with one another over legal injunction. These texts provide insights into the legal world of the Zoroastrian tradition and the concern with purity and pollution as well as with the rights of men, women, and children.
