Indian Antiquary Vol 34

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 70

64
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[MARCH, 1905.
higher culture, but with a naive candour for the interests and the supremacy of their status, and who do not dissociate personal advantage from the triumph of their cause.
4. The Mother-country of the Zarathushtrian Religion, The question of the birth-place of the Zarathushtrian religion does not coincide with that of the locality in which the books of the Avesta were, we do not say, committed to writing, but composed and perhaps for a prolonged space of time continued to be handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. The books might issue from very varying countries. The most archaic texts, the Gáthas, were in all likelihood first chanted in a place where the language of the minstrel was current. But this is just the problem: Where was this language spoken? The several books, as everyone knows, are not of equal antiquity and are written in a double dialect, one more ancient than the other. Of the later body of writings much could very well have been indited in lands where the vernacular was different, but where the employment of the old sacred tongue in which the creed was originally enunciated was considered necessary to the composition of religious scripture. In a few of the youngest portions traces of Persian influence have been actually discovered. Should we even definitely settlo the area of the Gathic dialect, that would not prove that Zarathushtrianism took its rise in that region. It is possible for it to have been promulgated there by the saintly prophets and yet to have its origin in another quarter. The point at issue is : Where are we to look for the nativity of the Zarathushtrian faith?
It is a difficult question to solve. We lack the necessary documents, and the Gatha texts betray not the faintest trace of geographical allusion. All that can be laid down with certainty is that Persia proper cannot be the original habitat of the Mazdayaenian religion. The speech obtaining here is indeed akin to the Avestaic or Baktrian, but is actually different, Therefore all the other provinces of Iran are open to examination. No wonder that in the scarcity and the unreliability of the data the views of the researchers on the point are widely divergent. While one of them believes he can bring forward evidence in support of East Iran, particularly Baktria, another champions Media, and a third points to the North-West, contending that the religion spread from the South-West of the Caspian Sea from Atropatene that was to be, and extended over the rest of Iran.
It is not possible here to recapitulate all the arguments even in their main outlines. They are co-related with the hypothesis respecting the age of the Avesta, though not so that they stand or fall together. We cannot more than stop a moment to glance at a few.
Those who are for the East Iranian theory find eminent support in the first fargard or chapter of the Vandidad, of which we have already spoken before. But waiving the surmise, which it involves, that the author of the chapter drew upon an earlier document of an exclusively geographical nature, granting for the moment that all the countries catalogued in the jargard are comprised in East Iran, supposing also that all the names of places occurring in the Avesla refer to East Iran (which is far from established), - still it would not follow that the new faith originated in East Iran. It may there have attained to its earliest growth and may have seen the light elsewhere. If we take into consideration that the Vendidad ranks but with the younger components of the body of the Aresta literature; that the writer of its opening chapter, in its present condition, had in view not a description of the mother country of his religion, or the history of its dissemination, but simply a survey of the Mazdayasnian world of his day and that before all it was his objeci to recount the injuries which the counter-creations of the evil had inflicted; further, that to bim Airyana-vaojo, the primeval abode of the Aryans, belonged to the region of legends; and lastly, that the existence of other countries. was not unknown to him, then we shall no longer jump to the conclusion that the Zernth nahtrian reformation was conenmmated in Faet Tran