Zend Avesta Part 03

Author(s): L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford

Page 30

FTIRRARE
REESE
INTRODUCTION CNIVERA XXyil
CALIFIKA period of repose, as we do those sections where meditation, speculation, or dogmatic statement, are prominent; but nothing is certain except that Y. LIII must have been written after Zarathustra had attained to a sufficient age to have a marriageable daughter. An ancient leader may have reached a position of influence from doctrinal productions, and afterwards expressed the vicissitudes of an active political career. One circumstance must, however, be held in view ; and that is, that neither the Gathas, nor any other ancient pieces, which were hardly at first committed to writing, have been preserved in the form in which they were delivered for the first time. The poet himself would file them into better) order at each subsequent delivery, and verses which referred originally to one period of time would, if especially striking, be reproduced in subsequent effusions. And pieces which the composer may have left in one shape, his early successors would be likely to modify by interpolations, excerptions, or inversions. I believe that the Gathas show the presence of less foreign matter than is usual, and that the interpolations which are present in them, are themselves of great antiquity, or even practically synchronous with the original. Certainly few of them show anything like an ingenious attempt at imitation. If there exist any interpolations, and we may say à priori that all existing compositions of their antiquity are, and must have been, interpolated, the additions were the work of the author's earliest disciples who composed fully in his spirit, while the position of sections in this or that Gâtha has little or nothing to do with the question of their relative age, the metres being all ancient, and the Ustavaiti, Spenta-mainyu, &c., showing as decided evidence of originality as any parts of the Ahunavaiti. (See remarks on the Gåtha Ustavaiti, p.91 ff.)
As we proceed from the question of the relative age of the particular sections as compared with each other to that of their age considered as a whole, we are first met by the question as to place. Were the Gâthas first sung in the East or the West of Iran? I would here say that I regard this point as especially open, as I am even inclined to differ in one particular from my eminent friend
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