Zend Avesta Part 03

Author(s): L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford

Page 40

INTRODUCTION.
xxxvii
from their brethren in Iran, soon became estranged from them, and their most favoured Gods fell slowly into neglect, if not disfavour.
We need time to account for this change, and no short interval of time. We can therefore place the Gathas long after the oldest Riks. While, therefore, in view of the established age of the Rig-veda, the Gâthas may possibly have been composed as early as about 1500 B.C., it is also possible to place them as late as (say) 900-1200 B.C., while the fragments in the Gathic dialect must be considered somewhat later. The dates of the composition of the several parts of the later Avesta, on the other hand, must be supposed to extend over many centuries, as the various sections in the Zend dialect are so much more numerous than those in the Gâthic, the Gathas themselves representing practically but one date. Placing then the oldest portions of the later Avesta somewhat earlier than Darius, we are obliged to extend the period during which its several parts were composed so far as perhaps to the third or fourth century before Christ, the half-spurious matter contained in them being regarded as indefinitely later.
It seems necessary to state here for the information of non-specialists, and as bearing very seriously upon all the questions involved, that a very unusually severe controversy prevails upon the exegesis of the Avesta, and that it centres in the question as to the value of the Asiatic translations of it. A similar debate was once held on the Rigveda, but that is now silenced, all agreeing that the traditional renderings are neither to be slavishly followed, nor blindly ignored. Very different has been the fate of Zend philology, and in one important particular the studies are poles apart; for whereas the commentaries on the Riks are written in Sanskrit, which is clear to experts, those on the Zend-Avesta are written in a language upon which the lexicography is most incomplete, and the elucidation of these explanations themselves remains by far the most
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