Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 64

INTRODUCTION, VII.
lxi
is as old as anything we know of Persia. Darius proclaims Auramazda, the greatest of all gods, a powerful God, who made this earth, who made that heaven, who made man, who made Darius king.
The gods invoked with the Persian Zeus (Auramazda) are, according to Herodotos, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, the Wind, the Waters, that is to say, natural Deities. The two greatest gods, next to him, according to Artaxerxes Mnemon, are Mithra and Anahata (Anahita), that is to say, a God of the Light and a Goddess of the Waters. There is no allusion to, no mention, no indication whatever, of the Amesha Spentas, nor of that crowd of abstract divinities so . characteristic of the later Mazdeism. This is no wonder; as we have seen already that the Amesha Spentas are i a Platonic development.
8 3. The principle of dualism is pre-Alexandrian. This is implied, in the time of Darius, by the great king stating that Ahura 'created welfare (shiyatim) for man";' in the time of Herodotos, by the religious war waged by the Magi against the ants, snakes, and other noxious creatures, which shows that the distinction of Ormazdian and Ahrimanian V creatures was already in existence. Moreover, at the end of the Achaemenian period, Aristotle knows of a Good Spirit and the Evil One, Zeus-Oromazdes and AdesAreimanios.
$ 4. Already in the Achaemenian Mazdeism, the existence of the world was limited to twelve thousand years, distributed into four periods, the character of which was altered in the post-Alexandrian period, to humour the NeoPlatonic tendencies of the age. It was already an established dogma that Ahriman would be conquered at last and that men would live again. The belief in resurrection and a future life implies the correlative belief in future : rewards and punishments, which plays a great part in the ! post-Alexandrian religion, but must have belonged to the older stratum.
1 See Rawlinson, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. X, p. 291; Benfey, Die Persischen Keilinschriften, pp. 63, 95.
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