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JULY, 1906.)
THE RELIGION OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLES
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been derived from the Semites; and the more so because both Jew and Persian express the notion by words which primarily mean to "cut." Thus it is argued, the Babylonian creator Marduk cuts in twain Tiamat, the cosmio Titan, as does also Bel, in Berossos, his own head. It is all pure fantasy. The words which the Jew, the Persian and likewise the Vedic Indian employ to denote creation all signify cutting, but in the sense of "forming," "making," " carpentering," "building."27 That this idea is Semitic, and ergo non-Aryan, is one of the scientific dogmas which pass current, and yet it cannot bear the test of cloge scrutiny. That one or more exalted beings have created, that is, made, shaped, or constructed the world, is neither a Semitic nor an Aryan view, but one which is universally human and which we encounter smong every people. The idea that the world has become," in materialistic or pantheistic sense, is the outcome of later speculation.
Not more tenable is the theory that the dualism which stands out so prominently in the Zarathushtrian system must be a loan from the Semites equally with the cognate doctrine of resurrection and retribution,28 The fact is qnite the reverse. True, we meet with these conceptions in the Semites, bat among them they are not genuinely indigenous. For with them the sovereignty is the fundamental and all-pervading religious principle out of which issue, as a mature fruit, their rigid monotheism, - a monotheism less philosophie than religious. Duslistic beliefs are by no means uncommon in all ancient religious systems. They are an outcome of the most primeval myths about light and darkness, the wars between the beneficent and the demoniac agencies of the heavens. And the dualism found among the Iranians is in the same way traceable to the same sources. Its bala outline among them, and more especially in Zarathushtrianism, can be explained on historical grounds, - mainly from their relation as the ruling, though perhaps numerically weaker, nation to the earlier inhabitants of the land and from their relation as a small body of believers to the devotees of the daevas.
Recently one step still further has been taken. It is alleged that so far back as prior to the reform of Zarathushtra, before the separation of the Iranians and Indians in the East Aryan age, Semitic influences were already at work. To them the number "seven" of the highest beings of the Vedic Adityas, as well as of the Zarathushtrian Amesha Spentas, owes its abstract and ethical, and therefore non-Aryan, trait of origin. Accordingly, the Semitic features which we come upon in Zarathushtrianism need not be ascribed to direct contact. They were already existing in the popular religion from which Zarathustrianism took its rise. Now this hypothesis, unnecessary to account for the facts, appears to me in the last degree improbable. Historically, such a commerce between the still united Indo- and Perso-Aryans and the Semitic tribes, who bad ascended to a comparatively superior ethico-religious level, is scarcely imaginable. This much is possible: the number "seven" was borrowed, for it does play an important rôle not only in the theology but also in the philosophy of the Iranians and the Indians. All the same it is not of Semitic origin. It belongs rather to the ancient aborigines of West and Central Asia, on whose civilization the Semites grafted their own. And
* The Hebrew bara in compared with the Avesta expressions for creation, thwardah, takah, and fwakah - but it is omitted to be remembered that the Veda, too, nines words of like import. Compare Rig Veda 11, 12 and X, 21, and Atharva-Voda IV, 2; also nee Oldenberg, Die Hymnen des Rig Veda 1, p. 314 seg. Consider at the same time the old god Twaabtr and the younger Vishwakarman, the arch-maker of all. My colleague, Dr. W. H. Koster, has had the kindness to bave all the passages in the Old Testament examined where the word bara occurs. With three exceptions, they are all exilio or post-exilio, and evidently nowhere is the sense of "cutting" intended and even in the oldest places it indicatos nothing but "to make" with reference to thinge as well as mon. It was not till later times that the term was applied to the creation of heaven and earth.
Spiegel goes so far as to assert that the Persian dualism, because unknown to Herodotus and Xenophon and not mentioned in the insoriptions of the Achæmenides, must be of younger origin; although he conoedes that it is thought in the oldest Avesta doonments and was known to the Greeks since the 4th century BC. As for Xonophon, his romanoe is no authority, and as to Herodotus from 1, 140 it is evident he understood something of the Persian dualism. The Achaemenides write no dogmatics and they mention evil genii, and, above all, donounce the spirit of Lie with the same omphasis as the Avesta. Add to it all that the most ancient texts of the Avesta oould not have been written subsequent to the 5th centuty B. C., as bus been shown abovo.
