________________
CHAPTER XII, 3-10.
135
before Zaratust came out to his conference!, which is one of their statements from the annals of the religion in a manuscript of the ancients.
7. The name of Zaratûst is also cited on the earth at 300 years before his conference 2. 8. For Irân, at the supplication even of the priests in the land, and for the sake of the pacification of a dispute arisen, Allharmazd produced a great ox, by whom the boundary of Irân next to TQrân was intimated by pawing with his hoofs, and he was kept in a jungle. 9. Whenever contention arose, the boundary was fully made known by that ox, until it was the wish of Kat-Us to take, fully covetously, a portion of the land of Torân back into Irân, and he saw that the ox is about to act very ill-naturedly, because it was not besought with forms which were prescribed for it, where a boundary was intimated by it .
10. There were seven brothers, and he who was
· If this coming to conference with the spirits be the coming of the religion,' in the thirtieth year of Vistâsp's reign, then, according to Bundahis chronology, these 528 years will carry us back to twenty-eight years before the accession of Mânûskîhar. As any alteration in the date of Mânûskîhar's accession would disturb the millennial arrangement of Bd. XXXIV, it is probable that some copyist has miswritten the ciphers, and we ought to read 428. This legend appears not to occur elsewhere.
According to Bd. XXXIV, 7, Kaf-Us reigned from 360 to 210 years before the coming of the religion. At this point a dislocation of the text occurs in all existing MSS., owing to the misplacement of a loose folio in some unknown copy written before 1530; the contents of this folio, $8 8-16, are found in the existing MSS. three folios further on (after Chap. XIV, 14), and are here restored to their original position, as determined by the meaning of the text.
* T has by that ox. This legend is also told in Dk. VII, ii, 62-66.
Digitized by Google