The History of Antiquity Volume V Part 5

Hence we may a.s.sume that the doctrine of Zarathrustra had reached the West of Iran at the time when Phraortes united the tribes of the Medes (about 650 B.C.), and was known among the Medes when they were still living under their tribal chiefs and paid tribute to a.s.shur, or, in case of refusal, were attacked by the a.s.syrian armies, which, as we ascertained from the inscriptions of the kings of a.s.shur, was the case from the time of Tiglath Pilesar II. to the time of a.s.surbanipal, _i.e._ from the middle of the eighth to the middle of the seventh century B.C.

A statement in Herodotus seems to lead us still further back. He calls the Magians a race or tribe of the Medes. According to his narrative this tribe was in existence in the time of Deioces, _i.e._ about the year 700 B.C. Herodotus could only speak of the Magians as a tribe or family when they had become an hereditary order. At that time, therefore, there must have been among the Medes a priesthood who perpetuated in their families their worship by sacrifice, their doctrine and wisdom, as well as their social importance. Like all Greeks, Herodotus ascribes the discharge of the religious functions among the Persians and Medes to the Magians, and we find that what Herodotus quotes of their rites agrees with the rules of the Avesta. The rise and separation of a peculiar order of priests, their more or less sharply marked distinction from the remaining orders, can never be the work of a short s.p.a.ce of time, and such separation can only take place when the worship of the G.o.ds requires a knowledge which is not easily accessible or obtainable, when doctrine has obtained a place by the side of belief, when ritual has become developed, and particular duties and rules are prescribed for the life of the priests. When the worship of the G.o.ds requires the use of long and definite prayers, the knowledge of complicated usages, on which depends the effect of the sacrifices, and the observation of numerous rules of purification,--such knowledge is only perpetuated in families of hierophants or priests, or in schools which take the place of such families. The formation of a distinct hereditary order on such grounds can hardly have occupied less than a century from the time when the doctrine, on which it is formed, was introduced. Hence we may a.s.sume that the doctrine known as Zarathrustra's reached the Medes before the year 750 B.C., _i.e._ before the date of Tiglath Pilesar II. of a.s.syria.

Let us hold firmly to the facts that the worship of Auramazda was current among the Persians about the middle of the sixth century B.C., that the same worship was in force among the Medes at least a century earlier, about 650 B.C., and that if an hereditary priesthood was in existence about this time among the Medes who performed and conducted the worship, the doctrine which this priesthood represented must have been adopted before the year 750 B.C. In this way we obtain a proof that the doctrine of Zarathrustra was not only in existence in the East of Iran about the year 800 B.C., but was the dominant creed there, and had force enough to penetrate to the West, and win over the neighbouring tribes of the Medes and Persians.

We cannot explain more exactly how the doctrine of Zarathrustra reached the nations of the West of Iran. Pliny, it is true, exclaims: "Who knows the Medes, who were taught by Zoroaster, Apusorus, and Zaratus, even by hearsay, for no memorials of them are left?"[169] According to this the religion of Zoroaster spread even in the West by the influence of eminent men among the Medes. But the date of the persons mentioned cannot be fixed, though Porphyry represents Pythagoras as going to the Chaldaeans and Zabratus, by whom he was purified from the evil of his former life, and instructed as to the things from which the disciple should restrain himself, and about the nature and beginning of all things,[170] and this Zaratus or Zabratus may be intended for Zarathrustra himself. Hermodorus tells us that Zarathrustra had been followed by many Magians as teachers, one after the other, down to the time when Alexander marched against Persia: these teachers were Osthanes, Astrampsychus, Gobryas, and Pazates.[171] Others also a.s.sert that Zoroaster was followed "by Osthanes and Astrampsychus."[172] Pliny observes that so far as he could discover, Osthanes who accompanied Xerxes in the war against the h.e.l.lenes, was the first who had written on the doctrine of the Magians. The second Osthanes, whom Alexander had received among his followers, had caused this religion to be of great importance. From the work of one of these two persons, Philo of Byblus quotes a pa.s.sage--the work he calls the Octateuch--and Pliny notes down apparently some of the doctrines of the first Osthanes. If then there were men under the Achaemenids in the West of Iran who could write on the doctrine of Zarathrustra from the beginning of the fifth century B.C., we can without hesitation believe the statement that long before this time there were prophets and teachers of the doctrine among the Medes and the Persians.

Can we go beyond the result thus gained by our investigation?--that the doctrine of Zoroaster flourished in Eastern Iran about 800 B.C., and advanced towards the West from this period; may we a.s.sume that at this date it was already in possession of written monuments, and even that the fragments of the Avesta which still remain were in existence then?

We must first answer the question whether the use of writing in Iran, especially in the East, goes back so far.

According to the statements of Herodotus, the West of Iran was not only in possession of the art of writing by the year 700 B.C., but made considerable use of it. He tells us that Deioces required complaints to be sent in to him in writing, and gave out his decisions also in writing. If processes at law were conducted in writing in Media about the year 700 B.C., it cannot be surprising that Herodotus should also inform us that letters pa.s.sed between Media and Persia about the year 560 B.C.[173] We learn from the Hebrew Scriptures that when Cyrus allowed the Jews, whom Nebuchadnezzar had removed to Babylon, to return to their homes, he gave his permission for the restoration of the temple in writing. This doc.u.ment was afterwards discovered in the archives of Ecbatana.[174] We know it for a fact that Darius I. gave his orders to the satraps in writing, and we are acquainted with the seal of Darius by which they were authenticated. The oldest inscriptions which have come down to us from the Achaemenids, not to mention a seal of Cyrus from Senkereh, belong, if not to Cyrus himself, to Darius, and begin about the last quarter of the sixth century B.C. It is the cuneiform writing of a.s.syria and Babylon which forms the basis of the writing in these inscriptions, but with considerable alterations. The highly complicated syllabarium of the Eastern Semites is reduced to a phonetic system; we might almost say to an alphabet of about 40 letters. A change of this kind can hardly have been made at one stroke. If it was after they entered into closer combination with a.s.syria, _i.e._ after their dependence on the king of a.s.shur, which began with the accession of Tiglath Pilesar II. (745 B.C.), that the Medes became acquainted with the a.s.syrian system of writing, this must have been completely mastered before it could be abbreviated and altered, as it was altered by the Medes, whose changes were adopted by the Persians. The cuneiform writing of Western Iran, as we find it in the inscriptions of Darius, can therefore hardly have been established before the year 600 B.C. However this may be, the facts mentioned prove that the writing of the a.s.syrians in the seventh century B.C. was not unknown in the West of Iran. This would therefore have pa.s.sed into the East of Iran in its original or simplified form, either at some earlier period, or when the East came under the dominion of the Achaemenids. But it did not, and this is a plain proof that the East, when the cuneiform writing of the West came in that direction, was already in possession of another kind of writing.

This Eastern mode of writing, the Arian, which rests on an entirely different basis from the cuneiform, is first known to us from coins and inscriptions of the third century B.C.; but it certainly would not have maintained its ground under the Achaemenids against the writing of the West, and of the rulers, magistrates, and dominant nation, unless it had been in vigorous use before, this period. We must therefore a.s.sume that the Arian character was in use in the East of Iran a considerable time before the date of Cyrus, and hence we have no reason to deny the existence of it in that region in the eighth century B.C., since we must allow the neighbouring Arians of India to have been in possession of their written characters from the year 800 B.C. at the least (IV. 155).

If we may a.s.sume that the Arian character was in use in the East of Iran about the year 800 B.C., the prayers and sayings of Zarathrustra might have been written down about this date, and the doctrine might have pa.s.sed on to the West supported by written doc.u.ments. But the fact that the prayers might have been written down is in no way a proof that they were so written.

It is true that at first sight it seems that the part of the law which has come down to us (the Vendidad) leads to the conclusion that it was written down long before the Persians gained the dominion over Iran, and Media became a powerful state under Cyaxares. The book does not mention the name of the Persians or the Medes, of Ecbatana or Persepolis, while Bactria is spoken of as the seat of the empire; the most westerly district mentioned in the Vendidad is Ragha in Eastern Media.[175] If we add that the book reproaches certain districts in the East, the land of the Arachoti and others, with deviations from the doctrine of Zarathrustra, and that Ragha is indeed Zoroastrian but wavering in its fidelity, we may easily conclude that the Vendidad was written when the doctrine of Zarathrustra had not as yet thoroughly penetrated the East, and was still unknown in the West, when it had just reached, but had not yet completely conquered, the district of Ragha. The Medes were still dependent on a.s.shur, living separately according to their tribes, Ecbatana was not yet the centre and metropolis of Media, and the kingdom of Bactra was still in existence in the East. This points to a date about 750 B.C. as the time when this doctrine must have spread widely over Media; at any rate to a date before the rise of the Median power, _i.e._ before 650 B.C. This conclusion is not, however, absolutely certain. The silence of the Vendidad and of the Avesta generally on Ecbatana and Persepolis, the Medes and the Persians, can be explained in another though a more artificial manner. The nations and chief cities of the West were unknown to the tradition of Eastern Iran, and the royal abodes of the Medes and Persians were not consecrated by the action of Zarathrustra. In the accounts given by the Greeks of the worship of these nations, in spite of much agreement, points are found at variance with the rules of the Avesta, and as a fact certain distinctions did prevail. The doctrine had arisen in the East, and the priesthood there was in possession of the purer and more orthodox dogma. If Persia and Media did not follow this in all respects, it was convenient to be silent about the differences in the time of the Achaemenids, or if any one desired to brand them, to mark out the Median Ragha as the seat of heresy, rather than Pasargadae or Persepolis. This explanation it is true is somewhat far fetched. The result that the religion known by the name of Zarathrustra had reached the Medes and Persians by the middle of the eighth century B.C. is in no way weakened by it, though the a.s.sumption that at this period written doc.u.ments of this doctrine were in existence, and that the book of the law of which we have fragments arose in the first half of the eighth century B.C., is rendered more doubtful if such a mode of interpretation is admitted.

The forms of language preserved in the Avesta have not survived with sufficient distinctness to a.s.sist us in fixing the time at which it was written down. As was shown above (p. 65), the ma.n.u.scripts date from the later period of the Sa.s.sanids; they are written in the later East-Pehlevi character, and at a time when the old forms must have undergone changes owing to the language which had come into use in the mean time, and can in fact be proved to have undergone them. The old sounds are obviously modified and confounded,[176] so that the language of the Avesta, when compared with that of the inscriptions of the Achaemenids, exhibits forms less ancient and fixed, and indeed in some cases it is more recent than the language of the legends of the Graeco-Bactrian coins (p. 27). Nor can any certain conclusions be drawn from the condition of political and social life shown in the Avesta. It is only the splendour of regal power in general, the old sacrificers, heroes, and kings that are extolled in it; a sacrificial prayer to Mithra speaks of the abode of the Arians, where "horse-guiding rulers govern n.o.ble troops;" for the rest we hear only of lords of villages, of tribes or cantons, and provinces, and of three orders into which the people are divided. The Vendidad, it is true, reckons by winters and nights, not by years and days; the amount of fines and punishments is computed in animals, goats, sheep, oxen, horses, or camels; and these facts point to an ancient period, but they may have been handed down by tradition. We also hear of the value of these animals and of money (_shaeta_).[177] This is the less surprising as the Vendidad speaks of palaces and pillars and various works of art, and mentions smelting-ovens and even ovens for making gla.s.s. We found that the Greek princes of Bactria struck square coins, which they would not have done if this had not been the traditional form in Bactria (p. 28). The Achaemenids did not strike coins of this kind, and this shape must therefore have come down from a period anterior to them. The frequent mention of the physician, on the other hand, ought not to be regarded as a proof of later composition, for we hear of the physician and his remedies in ancient poems of the Veda (IV. 35).

In regard to the antiquity of the Avesta, then, we can only build upon the simple facts that it cannot have been written down for the first time when the Buddhists found adherents in Bactria (IV. 542), or when the kingdom of the Greek princes arose in Bactria, or when the Seleucidae and Alexander, before them, reigned over Iran. It has been proved that the Avesta was in existence before Alexander overthrew the kingdom of the Achaemenids. The series of the successors of Zarathrustra, which western writers could trace backwards from this point--Osthanes II., Pazates, Gobryas, Osthanes I., Astrampsychus, Apusodorus--plainly shows that even under the Achaemenids the West was seriously occupied with religious questions. As Osthanes I. had written on the doctrine of Zoroaster about the time of Xerxes (p. 92), it is at least more probable than not that the Avesta was already in existence at that time. If in the West there was a series, and as the Greeks point out, a continuous series, of priestly teachers, round whom naturally pupils and schools grew up, and after the beginning of the fifth century a theological literature, similar teachers and schools must have existed long before in the East, and this greatly strengthens the conclusion drawn from the contents of the Vendidad, that it must have been written down before the rise of the Medes. But for any more precise determination of the date of the Avesta between the two limits obtained--the year 750 B.C., _i.e._ the beginning of the formation of a priesthood in the West and the contemporary use of writing in the East, and the year 350 B.C.--we are confined wholly to internal evidence.

Scriptures of such extent as the Avesta is shown to have been, by the accounts of the Greeks and Arabs, and the list of contents (p. 51), and the existing fragments, could not have been written down at once or within a brief s.p.a.ce of time. We saw (p. 33) that it set up a religious canon, which not only regulated the doctrine and the worship, the duties of priests and laity, but also comprised the law, and in a word all the relations of life. A codification of this kind is only possible when belief and doctrine, culture and ritual, have arrived at fixed and complete formulae, have been arranged in a system and developed, and the consequences bearing on life, morality, and law have been drawn from them by an active and influential priesthood. Hence before the Avesta was written down and collected there must have been a priestly order in the East, in the circles of which the doctrine and practice went through this developing, revising, and fixing process. Various sketches, lists of prayers for certain offerings, collections of rules belonging to this or that priesthood or school, must have been in existence, and combinations of the traditional material must have been made, before a canon comprising the whole wisdom of the priests, and far exceeding in extent the law of Manu, could have been compiled.

Among the existing invocations of the Avesta we find sacrificial prayers of a primitive character; but the greater part of the prayers and thanksgivings are without religious feeling or poetical power, and very far removed from the richness and abundance, the beauty and freshness of conception, which streams through the majority of the hymns of the Veda. There are not wanting _nave_ and poetical pieces which have obviously been handed down and preserved by their use at sacrifices, but these are frequently spoiled by later interpolations, and the form of the whole is generally dry and prosaic. We find but scanty relics of any vigorous conception of the G.o.ds, of a living mythology; on the whole the mythical element is faded, and the sacrifice of animals thrown into the background. The greater part of the prayers receive their value from a certain system and completeness; the object is to bring forward all the characteristics of the deity to which they are addressed, and to invoke him by all his names. Thus laudations and epithets are repeated without end. A good many of the prayers are mere nomenclatures, and repeat the same forms in varying order. Besides this tendency, which is far removed from the original simplicity of religious meditation, a value is ascribed to the repet.i.tion of certain prayers.

Some are to be said a hundred, or a thousand times. In the same way the liturgies are long and full of detail, and sometimes take the form of responses between the celebrant and the ministering priest; they are extremely careful to neglect none of the heavenly spirits or genii, or to injure them by omission, or treat them with less respect than others.

Beside the faded colours of the mythology, the decreasing importance of animal sacrifice, and the formalism of the prayers, we observe in the five Gathas, the invocations which alone have preserved the verse-measure, and present older forms of language than the rest, a tendency to speculation. Not only are the good and evil spirits combined under one head, as is always the case in the Avesta, but the Gathas attempt to resolve the contrast of the beneficial and harmful sides of nature, of the good and evil spirits, into the reciprocal play of two fundamental forces; they identify the prosperity and destruction of nature with moral good and evil, and combine the one with truth, the other with falsehood. The good spirits are the truth, the evil are the lie. The life of appearance and of falsehood is distinguished from the true life, and the service of truth promises life not in this world only but in the next. It is in harmony with these tendencies to abstraction that, according to other pa.s.sages of the Avesta, heaven is filled with a mult.i.tude of the most lifeless personifications of ideas and realities.

Could the doctrine of a new religion in an early period come forward with such a spiritualised system, with such elevated moral demands, such abstract conceptions? Could prayers of such a kind have been composed or written down in a primitive age?

The existing fragment of the book of the law is composed in the form of a dialogue, and is for the most part filled with conversations which Zarathrustra carries on with Auramazda. Zarathrustra inquires what is to be done in certain cases against the evil spirits, the Daevas, on the commission of certain sins and impurities. What must be done when a woman is in labour, etc., or when any one has made himself impure by touching a corpse, or has slain a water-dog (otter)? Is the rain impure which has fallen on a corpse and then runs off from it, etc.? These questions Auramazda answers very precisely, and when it is a matter for expiation and purification, he fixes the number of stripes with the horse-whip or the whip of the sacred craosha (craosha-charana) which the penitent is to receive. It is a theory and practice of purity, on a level with the a.n.a.logous rules in the laws of Manu, and in some points even more subtle and casuistical. The offences have already been brought under definite categories, and in like manner the purifications and punishments fall into a number of distinct cla.s.ses. Not only are expiations required for all sins and prescribed down to the minutest details, but the offences must also be repented of; certain formulae of confession and repentance are prescribed.

We need not stop to prove that a book of laws in this form could not have been written down _a priori_. The rules for punishment and purification must have grown up in long practice, before they could be put in the mouth of the deity; difficulties and doubts must have been weighed before solutions could be proposed. The book contains the dialogues and inquiries which were held in the schools of the priests on questions of this kind, the practice which prevailed in the schools and the catechisation of the pupils. The answer is naturally placed in the mouth of Auramazda, for it was the answer which he once gave to the question when asked by Zarathrustra. The fragments of the Vendidad are a catechism, the result of the labour of the priestly schools, a system of rules and regulations which marks and postulates the same stage of development for Iran as was reached for the Indians on the Ganges by the law of Manu. Many periods in the religious life must have been pa.s.sed through before the religious consciousness was no longer shocked by the fact that the supreme deity in person answered petty questions of ritual, and dictated in the most exact gradation and with regard to every possible variety of circ.u.mstance, the number of stripes required for the criminals.

This faded mythology and formalised worship, these speculative attempts and casuistry of law, are accompanied by a completely-arranged scheme of certain abstract categories already established. Throughout the whole Avesta runs the division between this world and the next, between the corporeal and incorporeal world, truth and falsehood, and the triple distinction of thinking, speaking, and acting, of thought, word, and deed. And when we further consider that rewards are attached to the reading of sections of the Avesta, that the "long study" of the "thoughts of the pure man," "the excellent knowledge, thought, and conception" are praised and invoked as divine powers, no one will be inclined to see in the Avesta the product of _nave_ religious feeling, or the deposit of a priestly civilisation which is as yet in its early stages.

Still, if we wish to avoid making any false steps in the conclusions to be drawn from the nature of the Avesta about the time of its composition, we must bear in mind that it contains some conceptions which are the exact opposite of the characteristics just noticed. The myth of Yima, the form of Mithra, the descent of plants, prove older traits in the Avesta than we find in the Veda; the old G.o.ds still occupy a large s.p.a.ce beside Auramazda and the abstract forms of heaven, and strict unity of system is not yet attained. We must remember also at what an early date the neighbours of Eastern Iran, the Arians of India, arrived at meditation and abstraction; how quickly and entirely they allowed animal sacrifice to pa.s.s into the background; with what breadth and detail they developed the rules for purification; how numerous were the daily prayers and repet.i.tions, before the religious feeling became weakened. In the Avesta the time without limit is frequently invoked; among the Indians the G.o.ds of light are even in the oldest hymns of the Veda the sons of Aditi, _i.e._ of the Eternal or the Infinite. And if the att.i.tude of the Avesta is for the most part by far more flat and prosaic than that of the Veda, the Arians of Iran were of a more logical nature, and the glow of imagination which the land of the Ganges kindled in their kindred tribes did not exist in Iran. For this reason the consideration of the character of the Avesta can only lead us to the result that a period of several centuries must have elapsed between the rise of the religion named after Zarathrustra and the writing down of the Avesta; that lists of prayers and rubrics must have been in existence about the year 800 B.C.; that the extensive books which then formed the Avesta may have been written in the first half of the period, which we ascribed to them, extending from 750 to 350 B.C. In any case we can maintain that the Gathas were composed, and that the Avesta existed in its essential parts in the East of Iran, before Cyrus put the empire of the Persians in the place of the empire of the Medes, and all the various parts were collected together before the "Enlightened" began to preach on the Ganges, _i.e._ about the year 600 B.C.

We have already remarked the importance which the Achaemenids ascribed to the possession of Bactria (p. 23); and we were able at any rate to guess at the civilisation of that district about the year 500 B.C., from the amount of the tribute imposed upon it by Darius. That the economic civilisation was not behind the material was shown by indications in the Avesta. The kingdom which grew up there, as we saw (p. 47), long before the days of the Medes, and in which about the year 800 B.C. the doctrine of Zarathrustra was current, succ.u.mbed to Cyrus, the great founder of the Persian empire. If we place the beginning of the doctrine of Zarathrustra, which first made its appearance there, before the middle of the ninth century B.C., at which time the armies of Shalmanesar II. reached the East of Iran, and a.s.sume that it came forward about 1000 B.C., we shall hardly place its rise too high. We remember that about this time occurred the great change in the religious conceptions of the Arians in India, the repression and degradation of the old G.o.ds by Brahman. It was an a.n.a.logous development when the good and evil spirits of Bactria were combined into unities, and placed under leaders, when the chief of the deities of light was made the creator of the heaven and the earth, and surrounded with abstract forms, which contest the traditional place and honour of the old G.o.d. It is the same religious impulse, the desire to grasp the unity of the divine nature, the same line of combination that we observed in its beginning and progress in India, which comes to the surface in the doctrine of Zarathrustra. We have no reason to contest with the Avesta the fact that Vistacpa ruled over Bactria when this change took place, or that Zarathrustra, a man of the race of Haechatacpa, gave the impulse to the reform, and that the leading idea in it belongs to him. If Vistacpa ruled over Bactria about the year 1000 B.C. the growth of the Bactrian monarchy must be placed at least a century before this time, _i.e._ about the year 1100 B.C.

FOOTNOTES:

[118] [Cf. Darmesteter, "Zend-Avesta," Introduct., c. iv. -- 40, and c.

iii.]

[119] Plato. "Alcib. I." p. 122.

[120] Diog. Laert. prooem.

[121] Plin. "H. N." 80, 2.

[122] 1, 94.

[123] Justin, 1, 1.

[124] "Numa," c. 4; "Quaest. Sympos." 4, 1. [The reading [Greek: Zoroastren] is doubtful; cf. Wyttenbach.]

[125] Dio Chrys. 2, 60, ed. Dind.

[126] Euseb. "Chron." ed. Auch. p. 43; cf. Georg. Syncell. p. 167.

[Greek: Batou] after Zoroaster should here be changed into [Greek: Baktrou] rather than [Greek: Magou].

[127] Arn.o.b. "Adv. Gent." 1, 5.

[128] Euseb. _loc. cit._ p. 35.

[129] Porphyr. "De antro nymph." c. 6.

[130] Ammian. Marcell. 23, 6.

[131] Agathias, 2, 24.

[132] Suidas, [Greek: Magoi, Zoroastres].

[133] Above, p. 17. Georg. Sync. p. 78, 79. Vol. I. p. 241, 247.

[134] Yet with Moses Zoroaster is a Mede, I. p. 87.

[135] Plut. "Pomp." c. 24.

[136] Cf. Von Gutschmid, "Die Sage vom heiligen Georg;" Sachsische Gesellschaft d. W., 1861, s. 175.

[137] "Farvardin Yasht," 131.

[138] C. 20 in Justi, [c. 20; -- 32 West]; cf. "Vend." 19, 15.

[139] C. 30, cf. above, p. 40. [C. 29, -- 14, West.]

[140] Strabo, p. 515, derives it from Atropates, whom Alexander made satrap there.

[141] Still less important than the Bundehesh is the gloss on "Vend." 1, 60. "Many say that Zartusht was from Rak in Atropatan." Ragha is not in Atropatene.

[142] Spiegel, "Eran," 1, 684 ff.

[143] Plin. "H. N." 30, 2. Diogen. Laert. prooem. The different readings of 500 years in Suidas and 600 in Diogenes, as compared with 5000 and 6000 in the other MSS., can hardly be maintained against the uniform evidence of other witnesses.

[144] Plut. "De Isid." c. 47.

[145] "Vend." 19, 33; Spiegel, "Avesta," 3, 9, 201, 206.