Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 53

VENDIDAD.
Tagik?. Now the oldest period known when the Arabs settled along the Euphrates and Tigris is the second half of the Arsacide period. We know that at that time Holwan was on the frontier between the Iranians and Arabs. The region east of Holwân 'was in the hands of the Provincial kings (Mulûk ut-taväif = danhu-paitis) who were all Persians, and did not recognise the authority of the Arabs. Iraq and Savåd remained in the hands of the Arabs, who were waging a perpetual war with one another, as they are used to do?' Therefore the texts in which the Arab Asi Dahaka appears as reigning in Babylon belong to a time when Arabs were already settled in Mesopotamia.
A certain Zaini-gaus or Zaînîgâv 8 is mentioned once in the Avesta as being conquered and killed by Frangrasyan + who on that one occasion was invested with the royal Hvarenô and who, accordingly, in the Shâhnâma, is credited with having delivered Iran from an Arab invasion : in the absence of Kai-Kaus, it says, invaders flowed over Iran from every side, both Turanians and Arabs: 'the Arabs were conquered by the Turanians. Perhaps the key to the Afråsyâb enigma is here. One can hardly understand how the Turanians beyond the Oxus, whom Afrasyâb is supposed to represent, could repel the Arabs coming from over the Euphrates. But one must bear in mind that Afräsyäb's career ends on the banks of the Kaèkasta lake, in Adarbaigàn”, north of Mesopotamia. On another side, the legendary history of Yemen tells of the Tubba'h Aba Kurrub's invasions into Mesopotamia and his struggles with
1 Tag, a brotber of Hôshang and the ancestor of the Tågiks (Kitradåd Nask, in Dinkart VIII, 13, 8).
* Tabari, tr. Zotenberg, II, 8-9. The Hatra, Hira, and Ghassanian king. doms were already flourishing in the first century of our era. The Ghassanians reigned at Damas when Paulus was a prisoner there.
& Bearing the same name as Asi Dahaka's grandfather (p. xlix).
• Yt. XIX, 93. The translation in the Sacred Books of the East is to be corrected as follows: 'that glory that Frangrasyan, the Turanian, bore, when the wicked Zainigau was killed.' (Cf. Greater Bundahis: 'There was a fiend called Zinigâv who had poison in his eye: he had come from the country of the Arabs to reign on Iran-Shahr: any man he gazed at with his evil eye, he killed. The Iranians called Frâsyâv into their country, he killed that Zinigåv.)
1 Yt. XVII, 42.
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