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 62

INTRODUCTION, VI.
lix
palace, the Var of Yima, where the finest specimens of human, animal, and vegetable species will live till the moment when, the evil days being over, they shall open the doors of the Var and repeople the earth with a better race.
(4) Division of the Earth.-Noah has three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, the ancestors of the three races between which the earth is divided.
Thraêtaona, the avenger and successor of Yima, has three sons, Airya, Sairima, and Tūra, between whom the earth is divided : Airya receives Iran, the centre of the earth's surface, Sairima receives the West, and Tūra the East.
Putting aside the legend of Airya, killed by his brothers, which reminds one, but not closely enough, of Joseph persecuted by his brethren, we arrive at the fact that is the central interest of the two books:
(5) The Revelation. Zarathustra converses with Ahura, as Moses with Jehovah, and receives, like him, the revelation of the laws of every description, on the Mountain of the Holy Conversations, as Moses did on Sinai.
(6) Both Moses and Zarathustra had forerunners. A first covenant was made by Jehovah with Noah.
The Iranian Noah, Yima, had been first offered to act ! the part of a lawgiver, which he modestly declined.
Moses was preceded by three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So Zarathustra was preceded by three great saints, who practised before him the worship of Haoma : Vivanghant, Athwya, and Thrita.
$ 3. Certainly it would not be safe to affirm that the coincidences between Genesis and the Avesta are due to a direct action of one on the other. The newly-recovered fragments of a Chaldaean Genesis leave room open for a third medium. However, the myths of the creation and the deluge, the only part of the Biblico-Chaldaean mythology which has, in a rather mutilated form, come down to us, differ so widely in the Bible and the Babylonian tablets, that it is only out of scientific scruple that we leave the Chaldaean door open. For the other points of comparison,
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