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200
BAHMAN YAST.
the heterodoxy (gavid-rastakih) which existed, and the wicked Akandgar-i Kilisyâkih 1 is utterly destroyed by this religion, and goes unseen and unknown from the world. 20. And that which was of tin is the reign of King Vährám Gôr?, when he
successors of Alexander were subdued in Persia by Ask (Arsaces I), who defeated Seleucus Callinicus about B.C. 236. But the third book of the Dînkard (in a passage quoted by Haug in his Essay on the Pahlavi Language) mentions Valkhas (Vologeses) the Askânian as collecting the Avesta and Zand, and encouraging the Mazdayasnian religion. This Valkhas was probably Vologeses I, a contemporary of Nero, as shown by Darmesteter in the introduction to his translation of the Vendidad.
'I am indebted to Professor J. Darmesteter for pointing out that Nêryôsang, in his Sanskrit translation of Yas. IX, 75, explains Kalasiyâkâh as 'those whose faith is the Christian religion ;' the original Pahlavi word in the oldest MSS. is Kilisâyâîk, altogether a misunderstanding of the Avesta name Keresâni, which it translates, but sufficiently near the name in our text to warrant the assumption that Nêryôsang would have translated Kilisyâkîh by
Christianity;' literally it means 'ecclesiasticism, or the church religion' (from Pers, kilisyâ, Gr. ekkAnoia). Akandgar is probably a miswriting of Alaksandar or Sikandar ; though Darmesteter suggests that Skandgar (Av. skendo-kara, Pers. sikandgar),
causer of destruction,' would be an appropriate punning title for Alexander from a Persian point of view. The anachronisms involved in making Alexander the Great a Christian, conquered by an Askânian king, are not more startling than the usual Pahlavi statement that he was a Roman. To a Persian in Sasanian times Alexander was the representative of an invading enemy which had come from the countries occupied, in those times, by the eastern empire of the Christian Romans, which enemy had been subdued in Persia by the Askânian dynasty; and such information would naturally lead to the anachronisms just mentioned. The name Kilisyâkîh is again used, in Chap. III, 3, 5, 8, to denote some Christian enemy.
* This Sasanian monarch (A. D. 420-439), after considerable provocation, revived the persecution of the heretics and foreign creeds which had been tolerated by his predecessor, and this conduct naturally endeared him to the priesthood.
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