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JULY, 1902.]
On these properly Gathic books follow seven others of miscellaneous contents, the HadhaManthraio, which treat of religious ceremonies, customs, legends, myths, of cosmogony and the Mazdayasnian law. The most important of these Nasks seems to have been the Damdat, "The production of the creation," a sort of genesis of the spiritual and the material world. The book also handles the same theme as the Bundehish, a Pehlevi writing of which only a recension of the 9th century has descended to us, and, as noted before, has been the ground-work of the same. Another of these books, the Vishtasp-Shasto, is held to have its reflex in the so-called Vistasp Yasht, the original text of which has been preserved. If that be so, we have here a somewhat younger writing, embodying, inter alia, in a form of instruction imparted by Zarathushtra to king Vishtaspa, the precepts of Mazdayasnianism, defective in structure and not very original.
THE RELIGION OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLES.
803
What was included in the Vashtap-Nask, which next comes up, we do not know, since it was lost very early. The two following, Spend and Chithradat, have this in common, that both deal with legends of saints and prophets; the second, which chronologically should be the first, proceeding from Hoshang to Zarathushtra, the first from Zarathushtra to Shoshyans. The Bakan Yast Nask comprised at the lowest fifteen of the Yashts which survive in the primitive text. In these Yashts the epic stories of Iran occupy prominent position. Then come five books on legislation, of which the last, the Vendidad, is extant. Like all law books of authority, they relate to a motley farrago of all possible subjects bearing on religion, on civil, on political matters. Nor does the tolerably detailed conspectus of its contents help us to discover a logical sequence. Only we are able to denote the first, Nikatum, as a species of penal code, and the fourth, Sakatum, as a regulation affecting personal and family concerns. But these general designations would apply to several of these chapters. The question, whether they are the Pellevi redaction of very archaic texts, does not lend itself to an easy solution. There is much in them which may be ancient, but more of which the contrary is less doubtful. In the synopsis of the contents of the penal code just referred to, there is nothing which may prevent our locating it in the times of the Achæmenides or even earlier. The same in general would hold good of the others, did we not omit to add that they have been reduced to unison with the later social and political exigencies and religious tenets, and that they have been copiously interpolated. Thus, to cite only a few illustrations, what is laid down in the Ganabasarnijat with reference to soldiers and their generals need not be of a posterior period. But when, in another chapter of this Nask, the enemy are. depicted as subserving the king of kings and doing homage to the Yazatas, and when they are threatened with death, should they recalcitrantly decline to adopt the Iranian nationality, we rest assured that it is the voice of one of the orthodox of the Sassanide times. It is possible to distinguish between the original and the subsequent accretions only when, as in the case of a portion of the Juristic book of Hushparam, the Avesta text is also available to us.15 Whether these law books were ever enforced and are founded on legal decisions it is difficult positively to affirm. It is not improbable as regards the Sassanide period; in the epoch with which we are concerned they were perhaps no more than sacred scripture in which the clergy and the theologian had drawn his ideals, while in public life they exercised no binding authority.
The whole collection closes with the Hadokhta Nask, which, in virtue of its name (HadhaUkhta), was a supplement to the other texts, and was by consequence composed of heterogeneous materials; but likewise embodied very old ingredients. Various fragments of it have survived in the primitive language, and the name of the Nask is cited in the younger Yashts.
A conclusion of no small moment, which may be deduced from our exposition, is that the Gathas, along with the allied texts, occupied the same exalted position in the ZendAvesta of the Sassanides that they at present hold, and that then, too, they constituted the
18 The contents of two Fargards of this Nask mostly correspond with the Nirangishtan, edited and translated by Darmesteter, Le Zend-Avesta, III. p. 91, seq.; but the order of succession is altogether different. Darmesteter has not observed that the first part of the Avesta-Nirangishtan has its parellel, not in the Fargard of the same name in the Nask, but in the preceding cne of Aerpatishtan.
