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CHAPTER III, 10, II.
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they may use it anew, and the fire may become shining in these countries of Iran which I, Adharmazd, created. 11. For when one shall be able to save his own life, he has then no recollection of wife, child, and wealth, that they may not live, in that perplexing time, O Zaratust! yet the day when the hundredth winter becomes the end of thy millennium, which is that of Zaratust, is so that nothing wicked may go from this millennium into that millennium ?.'
with the word kithra, which means both pêdâk, clear,' and tôkhmak, originating,' but to express the latter meaning he used the synonym mây akîk, which can be written exactly like mâhîk. Owing to the involved character of this section it is not very clear in English, but it is still more obscure in the Pahlavi text, in which the whole of this clause about the fre is inserted parenthetically after the first mention of Padashkhvârgar.
1 This last clause may be read several ways, and it is by no means easy to ascertain clearly the chronological order of the events which are jumbled together in this last chapter. But it would appear that Zaratůst's millennium was to end at a time when the religion was undisturbed, and just before the incursion of the demons or idolators, the details of which have been given in Chap. II, 22-III, II, and which is the first event of Hůshedar's millennium (see § 13). Now according to Bund. XXXIV, 7-9, the interval from the coming of the religion,' in the reign of KaiVistâsp, to the end of the Sasanian monarchy was 90+112 + 30 +12+14+14+ 284 + 460=1016 years. If by the coming of the religion' be meant the time when Zaratust received it, as he was then thirty years old, he must have been born 1046 years before the end of the Sasanian monarchy (A. D. 651), and the end of his millennium must have been in A. D. 605, the sixteenth year of Khusrô Parvîz, when the Sasanian power was near its maximum, and only a score of years before it began suddenly to collapse. This close coincidence indicates that the writer of the Bahman Yast must have adopted the same incorrect chronology as is found in the Bundahis. If, however, the coming of the religion' mean its acceptance by Vistâsp, which occurred in Zaratûst's fortieth or
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