Zend Avesta Part 01

SR No.: 007671
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1895
Total Pages: 2695
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 547

INTRODUCTION.
xxxix
readings which seem due to the illegibility of the original from which M6 was copied, as already explained. In Chaps. XXVIII, XXIX, XXXI, XXXII, and XXXIII, however, TD has been taken as a principal authority, merely checked by K20, and having its additional passages carefully indicated; and in Chap. XXXI, K20 b has also been consulted.
Since the present translation was printed, any lingering doubts, as to the genuineness of the text in TD, have been, in a great measure, dissipated by the discovery that a small fragment of an old MS. of the Bundahis, which has long been in Europe, is evidently a portion of a text of similar character to TD, and of exactly the same extent. This small fragment consists of two folios belonging to an old MS. brought from Persia by the late Professor Westergaard in 1843-44, and which is evidently the codex mentioned by him in the preface to his Zend-Avesta, p. 8, note 3. These two folios, which are numbered 130 and 131 in Persian words, now form the commencement of this old mutilated MS., of which the first 129 folios have been lost. They contain very little more than one page of the Bundahis text, namely, the last sentences of the last chapter (corresponding to Bund. XXXIV, 7-9), followed by a colophon occupying less than two pages. This fragment of the text contains some additional details not found in the Indian MSS., as well as a few other variations of no great importance. It may be translated as follows:
'[. ... Sâhm? was in those reigns of Adzôbô, Kavad, and Manuskihar.) Kaî-Kâyūs, till his going to the sky, seventy-five years, and after that, seventy-five years, altogether a hundred and fifty years; Kaî-Khúsrôbô sixty
I am indebted to Professor G. Hoffmann, of Kiel, for directing my attention to this fragment, and also for kindly sending me a facsimile of it. It had been recognised as a portion of the Bundahis by Dr. Andreas some years ago, and probably by the owner of the MS., the late Professor Westergaard, long before that.
See Bund. XXXI, 27. As the beginning of this sentence is lost, it; translation is uncertain. Details not found in Kao and M6 are here enclosed in brackets, and words added by the translator to complete the sense are printed in italics.
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