The History of Antiquity, Vol. 5 (of 6). Duncker Max

---

Скачать книгу

---

horse recovered all its four feet. After this Vistaçpa did nothing without the advice of Zarathrustra, and built fire-altars and fire-temples. And Zarathrustra showed the king the place he would one day occupy in heaven, and made Çpentodata invulnerable.142

      Hence from the Bundehesh we obtain no more than the genealogical tree of Zarathrustra, which though characteristic for the place allotted to him, is without historical value; and from the Zartusht Nameh, Sharastani, and Mirkhond, which repeat some miracles more or less similar to those quoted, we gather nothing beyond certain traits: the smiling at birth, the fiery mountain, the preservation of Zarathrustra in the fire, which Pliny and Dio Chrysostom had already made known to us, and which belong to the ancient tradition of Iran. In the miracles which take place by means of oxen and horses, we can merely recognise the ancient and close relation of the Arians in Iran to these animals, a relation which has already been remarked (p. 46). We might perhaps add that Firdusi represents Zarathrustra, whom he puts beside Vistaçpa, as having been killed at a fire in Balkh when the city was captured by Turanians. The intercourse of Zarathrustra with Auramazda was known to Western writers, as we saw, at a far earlier date.

      If we can hardly glean anything worth notice from these accounts about Zarathrustra's life and work, we may perhaps gain some information about his date. The evidence of Ammianus Marcellinus and Agathias, when they represent him as a contemporary of Hystaspes, in whom we recognise Vistaçpa of Bactria, carries us no further than the Avesta, which places him in the closest relation to this prince (p. 38), because his date is equally uncertain. Trogus Pompeius, Kephalion, Theon, and Eusebius make Zarathrustra an opponent and therefore a contemporary of Ninus and Semiramis. But as neither Semiramis nor Ninus ruled over Asshur, and they are to be regarded as the personification of the rise of the power and dominion of that country (II. 23), we must substitute for this king and queen the ruler or rulers of Asshur of whom it is certain that their campaigns reached the east of Iran. We found that so far as we can at present judge from the monuments it was only Shalmanesar II. who received tribute from the Eastern lands, and that the armies of Tiglath Pilesar II. trod the soil of Arachosia (p. 19). If we could assume that the contests of Ninus and Semiramis have taken the place of the achievements of these rulers in the East of Iran, the date of Vistaçpa and Zarathrustra would have to be placed between 860 and 740 B.C. But this supposition is really without any basis.

      The more ancient statements of the Greeks carry us much further back than the reasoning of Trogus Pompeius and his successors. If we set Pliny aside, who asserts "that the kind of Magism established by Zoroaster was many years older than that taught by Moses," Hermippus of Smyrna puts Zoroaster 5000 years before the Trojan war. Even before Hermippus, Theopompus of Chios, and Hermodorus, the pupil of Plato, had ascribed the same date to him. Eudoxus of Cnidus, the contemporary of Plato, placed him still higher; he thought that Zoroaster lived 6000 years before the death of Plato. According to Pliny, Aristotle ascribed to him the same antiquity, and, as we learn from Diogenes Laertius, maintained that the Magians were older than the Egyptians. And even in the fifth century B.C., Xanthus the Lydian is said to have written that from the time when Zoroaster lived to the march of Xerxes against Hellas a period of 6000 years had elapsed.143

      Through these statements there runs, beyond all doubt, a system, the knowledge of which began in the fifth century B.C. among the Greeks and continued beyond the time of Alexander. Whether we take 5000 years before the Trojan war, or 6000 years before Plato's death, we are equally brought back into the seventh millennium B.C. If the later statements of the West, which make Zoroaster a contemporary of Ninus and Semiramis, are the results of combining the most prominent name in Bactria with the conquest of Bactria by the founder of the Assyrian power, as related in the Medo-Persian Epos, the fixing of Zoroaster's date so many thousand years previously must have been taken by the Greeks from the Persians. In these dates we seem to be dealing with certain cyclic periods. We learn from Theopompus of Chios, that according to the doctrine of the Magians, one of the two gods Oromazdes and Areimanius would reign and the other be subject for 3000 years; for another 3000 years they would be in conflict, and one destroy the works of the other, until at length Areimanius would succumb and men become happy.144 From this we may with certainty conclude that periods of 3000 years were in use among the priests of Iran to denote certain spaces of time, and that these cycles form the base of the statements of the older Greeks, if we can prove the use of such periods in the Avesta or in the books of the Parsees.

      In the fragments of the Avesta which have come down to us we find invocations addressed to the "time without beginning," "the time that rules the long periods."145 But the fact that Yima's reign is fixed at 1000 years shows that the priests of Iran reckoned by long periods, and other expressions in the Avesta (p. 33) prove that triple multiplications were in use,146 which agrees with the periods given by Theopompus. If, therefore, the Greeks of the fifth and fourth century B.C. relate that Zarathrustra lived about 6000 years before their time, a system must by that time have been current among the priests of Iran in which two cycles of 3000 years were supposed to have elapsed since the time of the prophet, and the third cycle had commenced. A book of the Parsees, the Mainyo-i-Khard, which appears to have been written towards the close of the empire of the Sassanids,147 tells us that Angromainyu made a compact with Auramazda for 9000 winters, and when these winters were past, Angromainyu would be destroyed, and the creation and all creatures would be as Auramazda had made them.148 The Bundehesh also speaks of a similar compact, but divides the years in a different manner. All time consists of 12,000 years. In the first 3000 Auramazda reigned alone with the creatures which he had created in an invisible manner; for the first 3000 of the next 9000 everything went according to the will of Auramazda; for the second 3000 the will of Auramazda was crossed by that of Angromainyu, but for the last 3000 Angromainyu will be powerless. The Bundehesh goes into yet further detail in these matters: in the first 3000 years the heavenly creation was secure from attack; in the next 3000 Gayo maretan and the ox, i. e. the first man and the first bull, came into existence. After these 6000 years the enemy arose and slew the first man and the first bull. The reign of Yima is placed by the Bundehesh in the first millennium of the new period, but this reign extends only to 716 years, the first 284 years of the thousand being filled with creatures prior to Yima. The second millennium of the period is occupied with the reign of Thraetaona, Manuschithra, Kava Kavata, Uça, Huçrava, and Aurvataçpa, and the early part of the reign of Kava Vistaçpa, whose thirtieth year coincides with the end of the second millennium.149 At the beginning of the third millennium, i. e. a thousand years after the death of Yima, Zarathrustra appears; and the period of more successful opposition to the evil spirits begins. According to the more ancient conception, which may still be plainly traced in the Avesta, the world began with the happy age of Yima; it is owing to later views formed within priestly circles that earlier creatures such as the first man and first bull are placed before this period; but it will be shown below that these views existed when the Avesta was written down. A later book of the Parsees, the Sad-der-Bundehesh, puts the period of the conflict between the good and evil deity at 6000 years, and places Zarathrustra exactly in the middle of it; he was created 3000 years after the period of Gayo maretan, and 3000 years before his own resurrection.150 Hence it is clear that the formation of these cycles rose among the priests of Iran from the necessity of limiting the period of the old and new law, and of conflict between the good and evil spirits, and the desire to fix the date of the more successful repulse of evil which came in with Zarathrustra. The abbreviation of the period of Yima shows us that the cycles in the Bundehesh do not throughout agree with those of the Avesta. But it is sufficient to establish the fact that periods of 3000 years were in use, and that Zarathrustra appeared at the beginning of a new millennium, in order to understand that the Persians could speak to the Greeks of millenniums in this sense, and of one or two cycles which had elapsed since Zarathrustra's time.

      The idea and tendency of such a scheme for the history of the world are easily understood: these periods of 3000 years, which can be increased or diminished without alteration

---

Скачать книгу