Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 48

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had no right to have a second fire of their own: 'it was a bad innovation, contrary to the custom of the old kings.' It is more likely that the unity of the royal fire was a new dogma, invented on the spur of the moment to serve the usurper's political devices; and Åtar himself, when found to favour anarchy, was treated like any other rebel. In fact many were the laws, introduced by Ardashîr, that were disapproved by public opinion as unwarranted innovations: such were the laws on the strict division of the people into classes with their functions, rights, and distinctive marks; and the laws on heredity. His restoring the Law of the Ancients, said Gasnasf, is nothing else than destroying the real Law 1.
INTRODUCTION, III.
§ 14. How far these reforms were represented as resting on the mere will and reason of the king, or on the authority of religious texts, we do not know. As to the religious texts themselves, and their collection into a body of doctrines, the Dinkart has the following: 'Ardashîr had all the scattered teaching (âmôk-î pargandak) brought together to the capital under the high authority of Tansar; Tansar came; him alone he accepted (frâg patîraft); and from all the others he took away authority.' In other words, among the Zoroastrian schools, there were current several collections of religious texts, more or less authentic, and it was the one taught by Tansar that was stamped by Ardashîr with an official character. From another text in the Dinkart it appears that the Ardashîr compilation contained two classes of texts: texts that were incorporated as they were, and other texts that were conjecturally restored by Tansar, the Pôryôtkês, so as to make a collection that should be an exact reproduction of the Vistâsp Avesta, the lost treatise of Shapîgân 2: which is as much as saying that the Ardashîr Avesta is a compound of texts anterior to Tansar and texts emanating from Tansar, the whole being an ideal restoration of a primitive Avesta, of the 'old law' or of what was supposed to be the old law, in the time of Ardashîr.
1 Journal Asiatique, 1894, No. 3, p. 514.
* See the text in the Guimet Zend-Avesta, III, p. xxxi, note 2.
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