Bundahish: Persiska (Farsi) 1400

BUNDAHIŠN, the name, meaning “Primal creation,” traditionally given to a major Pahlavi work of compilation, mainly a detailed cosmogony and cosmography based on the Zoroastrian scriptures but also containing a short history of the legendary Kayanids and Ērānšahr in their days. There is also a Ṣad dar-e Bondaheš, a considerably later (ca. 8th-9th/14th-15th century) work in Persian of a hundred miscellaneous chapters on the Zoroastrian religion, morals, legends, and liturgy. The Pahlavi work is preserved in two distinct recensions. One, a shorter and patently more corrupt version, is known as the Indian Bundahišn (IBd.). It is from this corrupt text, beginning; Zand [ī] āgāh ī nazdist abar bundahišnīh ī Ohramazd ud patyārag ī gannāg mēnōg, understood as “The Zand-knowing, which is first about Ohrmazd’s primal creation and the onslaught of the Evil Spirit,” that the name was evidently taken. The first manuscript codex containing the better and more complete recension was brought to India (and so gradually to public knowledge) from Iran in about 1870, and came to be known as the Great(er) or Iranian Bundahišn. Its introduction suggests that neither Bundahišn(īh), nor probably (as most modern scholars assume) Zand-āgāhīh “Knowledge from the Zand,” is in fact a title originally given to the work. It reads, in full: ān < ī> zand āgāhīh, nazdist abar *bundahišnīh ī Ohrmazd ud petyāragīh ī gannāg mēnōg, pas abar čiyōnīh ī gēhān ud dām az bundahišnīh tā frazām [IBd. here: ī tan ī pasēn], čiyōn az dēn ī māzdēsnān paydāg, pas abar xīr *ke *gēhān dārēd, pad wizārišn ī čēīh ud čiyōnīh “Knowledge of (i.e. deriving from) the Zand; first about the primal creation of Ohrmazd and the (counter-)onslaught of the Evil Spirit; then about the nature of the world and the creatures from the primal creation until the End [which is the Final Body], as it is revealed in the religion of the Mazda-worshippers; then about the things which the world contains, with an interpretation of (their) essence and nature.” (It is possible, but less likely, that the first *bundahišnīh is to be read *bunyaštīh, i.e., “the fundamentality of Ohrmazd.”)