The Iranians and their religion

Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religions in the world, going back to the 2nd millennium b.c.e. and the Iranian tribes still living in Central Asia. Since the Iranians did not have writing, the Iranians have not yet been identified among the archeological remains of the area, although there have been speculations.[1]

The oldest stage of the religion is known from the Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrians, which is a collection of texts of different dates and various contents that were orally transmitted for centuries and even millennia before they were finally written down about 500 c.e. The texts are in two forms of the language, one older and one younger; accordingly, we divide the Avesta into the Old Avesta and the Young (Younger) Avesta.[2]

From the historical and linguistic evidence, as well as the geographical horizon of the Young Avesta, we can surmise that the oldest texts originated among the ancient Iranians who inhabited the area between the Aral Sea and modern Afghanistan in the second millennium b.c.e., that is, in the area of the modern Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, whereas the younger texts were probably composed in the area of modern Afghanistan and eastern Iran.

The supreme god of Zoroastrianism is Ahura Mazdâ, literally, the All-knowing Ruler,[3] and Zarathustra is commonly regarded as its prophet and founder. In both the Old and Young Avesta, however, Zarathustra is presented as a mythical figure, a poet and a priest, to whom Ahura Mazdâ confided the sacred ritual texts and the other ingredients of the sacrifice[4] for him to take them down to proclaim and use among mortals. This would qualify him as a “prophet” in the Classical Greek sense. For the later Zoroastrians, he was the one who received God’s word and transmitted it to mankind, and it is in more recent times that he has been elevated to the status of prophet, in the Biblical, Muslim, and modern senses, both among Zoroastrians and Western scholars.

The Greeks called Zarathustra Zoroaster, hence the name of the religion. The followers of this religion are also called Mazdeans (or Mazdayasnians) after the Old Iranian term mazda-yasna, which literally means “he who sacrifices (performs a ritual of offerings) to Ahura Mazdâ.” Correspondingly, the religion is also called Mazdaism or Mazdayasnianism.

The Indo-Iranians

Stepping back in time, the scattered evidence indicates that, sometime in the third millennium b.c.e., the Iranians had separated from their cousins, the Indo-Aryans,[5] with whom they originally shared a common religion and oral literary traditions reaching back into Indo-European times,[6] although, in the oldest texts, there are great differences between the two religions, clearly the result of diverging developments over many hundreds of years.

While the Indo-Aryans migrated southeastward into what is today’s Pakistan and western India, descendants of the second-millennium Iranians, at some time about the turn of the millennium, migrated onto the Iranian plateau,[7] bringing with them their religion. During the Achaemenid period, the Persians and other Iranians, with their religions, became known to the Western world through the writings of Herodotus and other Greek writers.

Scholars in the twentieth century compared the Old Iranian religion with that of the Indo-Aryans in an attempt to recover common Indo-Iranian beliefs. Attempts were also made to isolate comparable data throughout the Indo-European literatures to identify elements that might be ascribed to the remote ancestors of all the Indo-European peoples, the proto-Indo-Europeans. By this research, it was established that the proto-Indo-Europeans sacrificed to heavenly gods, denoted by the word *deiwo, known in a variety of Indo-European languages: Old Indic deva, Avestan daêwa and Old Persian daiva, Latin deus, Old Norse Tyr, contained in the day name (Norwegian) tys-dag “Tues-day,” plural tivar. This word was in turn related to another word, *dyew, denoting the bright sky, which was probably worshipped as a high god by several Indo-European peoples: Old Indic dyau “heaven” and dyâus pitâ “father heaven,” Avestan dyao “heaven,” Latin Juppiter from the vocative *dyeu-pater “O father heaven,” Greek Zeus from *dyêus.

Most divine names differ in the various languages, however, and comparative religion and mythology has concentrated on the functions of gods and mythical characters to establish deeper relationships. This tendency for names to differ in the various traditions can be seen even in closely related, notably the Indo-Iranian, ones.

As the corpus of Old Indic texts, the Rigveda and the other Vedas and the somewhat later Brahmanas, is much more voluminous than the Old and Young Avesta, the Old Indic religion is also much better known. The Rigvedic religion is a polytheistic religion, populated by a variety of gods – devas and asuras – to whom worship and sacrifices are offered. There are, on the one hand, the two high asuras, Varun≥a and Mitra, both of whom watch over the cosmic Order (Old Indic rta); on the other hand, there are a number of devas, including Indra, the warrior god who, together with his companions, the Maruts, gods of winds and rains, releases the heavenly waters, allowing them to fertilize the world; Agni, the fire god, materialized in the sacrificial and heavenly fires; Vâyu, the god of the intermediate space between heaven and earth; Apâm napât, Scion of the Waters, the fire in the heavenly waters; and Soma, the divine plant and drink prepared in the sacrifice and offered to the gods to replenish their cosmic creative powers. Beside these, a multitude of other divine beings are made the target of worship and sacrifices, among them the heavenly waters, the couple heaven and earth, dawn and the sun, and others, among them a number of deified “abstract” concepts. They all contribute to the rejuvenation of the world, the ordered cosmos, maintaining it full of light, life, and fertility and protecting it from darkness and death.

The principle of the ordered cosmos is again Order,[8] characterized by light and life, but which is regularly replaced by darkness and chaos. The cover of darkness is sometimes said to be that of the lie (druh, e.g., Rigveda 7, 75, 1). The sacrifices offered to the deities, serve to aid the gods in re-establishing Order after periods of chaos.

Iranian languages and peoples

The oldest known Iranian languages are Old and Young Avestan and Old Persian. These languages permit us to reconstruct proto-Iranian as a branch of Indo-Iranian, an eastern branch of the Indo-European group of languages. Proto-Indo-Iranian (the parent language of Iranian and Indic or Indo-Aryan) may have been spoken in the area south and southeast of the Aral sea in the 3rd millennium b.c.e.. It split into Iranian and Indo-Aryan some time before 2000 b.c.e.

Avestan

Avestan is the language in which the most ancient Iranian religious texts are written, the Avesta. The Avesta is collection of miscellaneous texts first compiled and committed to writing in the mid-first millennium of our era. Before this time it had been transmitted orally by specially trained priests. This text corpus was subsequently, after the Muslim conquest, considerably reduced in volume.

The extant texts of each part of the collection go back to a set of single manuscripts dating from the 11th-12th centuries. Our earliest extant manuscripts date only from the latter half of the 13th century, although most of them are of much later date. This situation always has to be kept in mind when we discuss the Avesta and the Avestan language.

While both history and linguistics indicate that Old Persian was the language spoken in modern Fârs in southern Iran (hence Farsi = Persian), the language of the Avesta must have belonged to tribes from northeastern Iran. The Avesta contains a few geographical names, all belonging to northeastern Iran, that is, roughly the area covered by modern Afghanistan plus the areas to the north and south of Afghanistan. We are therefore entitled to conclude that Avestan was spoken primarily by tribes from that area. Only once is a possibly westerly name mentioned, namely Raghâ, if this is modern Rey south of Tehran, which in antiquity was regarded as the center of the Median Magi, but this identification is not compelling.[9]

We distinguish between texts in “Old Avestan” (OAv.) and texts in “Young(er) Avestan” (YAv.).

The Old Avestan texts comprise the Gâthâs and the Yasna Haptanghâiti, both of which are contained in the section of the Avesta called the Yasna, as well as various fragments scattered throughout the Yasna.

The Young Avestan texts are the other texts. Among these we must distinguish between genuine, old Young Avestan texts, that is, texts written in a consistent, correct language, and texts in late Young Avestan, compiled at a stage when Young Avestan was no longer a living language and the authors and compilers only had an incomplete knowledge of it.

The texts contain no historical allusions, so they cannot be dated exactly, but Old Avestan is a language closely akin to the oldest Indic language, found in the oldest parts of the Rigveda, and should therefore probably be dated to about the same time. This date has been much debated, but it seems probable—on archeological, as well as linguistic grounds—that the oldest poems were composed in the first half of the 2nd millennium b.c.e.

Compared with Old Avestan, Young Avestan represents a changed form of the language, linguistically close to Old Persian, and we may assume that it too was spoken in the first half of the 1st millennium, perhaps through the Median period, i.e, roughly the 10th-6th centuries. Such a dating, on one hand, accounts for the absence of references to western Iran in the texts (with the possible exception of Median Raghâ); on the other hand, it provides the necessary time span for Avestan to go through an “intermediate” period after the Old Avestan period before it developed into Young Avestan.

Median and Scythian

Beside Old Persian and Avestan other Iranian languages must have existed in the 1st millennium before our era. Of these Median, spoken in western Iran and presumably “official” language during the Median period (ca. 700-559), is known from numerous loan-words in Old Persian. Old northwestern languages, probably spoken by the Scythian Alan tribes are known from early inscriptions and personal and place names. In addition the Scythian tribes in central Asia must have spoken variants of Iranian that differed from Old Persian and Avestan. A few names of Scythian gods are mentioned in Herodotus’s Histories, as well as the Median word for “dog,” spaka.

Old Persian

Iranian tribes calling themselves Parswa (i.e. Persian) are found in (north)western Iran from the 9th cent. b.c.e. onward,[10] but the extant Old Persian texts, written in a cuneiform script, are from the Achaemenid period (ca. 558-330; the texts date from between 522 and ca. 350 b.c.e.) and represent a language spoken in southwestern Iran (Persia). The cuneiform script was probably invented under Darius for the purpose of recording his deeds. It was the first cuneiform script to be deciphered and provided the clue to all the other cuneiform scripts. The Old Persian language as we know it from the inscriptions (5th-4th cents.) was already about to change to Middle