{"it":{"id":"TX045","kind":"text","sub":"Zoroastrian (Persian)","name":"Bundahishn","place":"Held in several collections","date":"Compiled mostly 8th-9th c. CE from older Avestan material","oldest":"9th c. CE+ (mss. later)","inst":"Pahlavi mss. (Indian and Iranian recensions) [unverified]","lang":"Middle Persian","src":[243,525,526],"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"The Bundahishn sets world history in a 12,000-year span of good versus evil.","why":"It sets all history in a 12,000-year plan that ends with evil defeated. Scholars see it as a medieval summary of older Iranian belief, not scripture itself.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":3,"yt":"Compare the 12,000-year figure.","rel":["TX054"],"hook":"A Persian creation book sets all history in a 12,000-year plan, with evil's defeat already scheduled."},"S":{"243":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Bundahishn"],"525":["Wikipedia: Bundahishn","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundahishn"],"526":["Wikipedia: Keyumars","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyumars"]},"rec":{"id":"TX045","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Bundahishn XV.2 (West SBE 5)","q":"Mashye and Mashyane (\"Matro and Matroyao\") grow up \"with the shape of a one-stemmed Rivas-plant\"","exact":"yes","tr":"E.W. West 1880 (PD)","url":"https://archive.org/details/wg905","mo":"creation"},{"ref":"Bundahishn XV.4 (West SBE 5)","q":"\"'Which is created before, the soul or the body?' And Auharmazd said that the soul is created before, and the body after\"","exact":"yes","tr":"E.W. West 1880 (PD)","url":"https://archive.org/details/wg905","mo":"souls_in_bodies"}],"tr":[{"by":"E.W. West","yr":"1880","t":"Pahlavi Texts pt 1 (SBE 5)","lic":"public domain","url":"https://archive.org/details/wg905"}],"mo":[{"v":"souls_in_bodies","ev":"P046","n":"Iranian","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Bundahishn"}],"tl":[{"comp":"Sasanian material, redacted 9th c. CE","old":"mss 16th c.+","pub":"Anquetil-Duperron 1771","b":"S","url":"https://archive.org/details/wg905"}],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Late compilation of Zoroastrian cosmology.","alternative_reading":"none prominent","alt_proponent":"n/a","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Late date.","key_theme":"Gayomard primal man; Mashya and Mashyana grow from a rhubarb plant","language":"Middle Persian","physical_object_institution":"Pahlavi mss. (Indian and Iranian recensions) [unverified]","composition_date":"Compiled mostly 8th-9th c. CE from older Avestan material","oldest_ms_date":"9th c. CE+ (mss. later)","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0085","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Bundahishn"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Bundahishn","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundahishn"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Keyumars","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyumars"},{"id":"VTX045-4","t":"The Bundahishn (West trans.), avesta.org","u":"https://www.avesta.org/mp/bundahis.html"},{"id":null,"t":"Encyclopaedia Iranica: Bundahišn (MacKenzie)","u":"https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/bundahisn-primal-creation"}],"sum":"# The Bundahishn: Zoroastrian Primal Creation and the 12,000-Year Plan\n\nAt noon, on the day of Ohrmazd in the month of Frawardin, the attack came. The evil spirit \"stood upon one-third of the inside of the sky, and he sprang, like a snake, out of the sky down to the earth.\" The sky was \"as shattered and frightened by him, as a sheep by a wolf.\" He pierced the middle of the earth, then went for the plants, the ox and the first man, and then the fire. \"Just like a fly, he rushed out upon the whole creation; and he made the world quite as injured and dark at midday as though it were in dark night.\"\n\nThis is the moment evil enters the world in the Bundahishn, the great Zoroastrian book of creation. The quotations here are from the English translation by E. W. West, published in 1880, made mainly from the shorter of the book's two versions.\n\n## A book of primal creation\n\nThe name means \"Primal creation.\" The scholar of Middle Persian D. N. MacKenzie, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, describes it as a major compilation in Pahlavi, the written form of Middle Persian: mainly a detailed cosmogony and description of the world based on the Zoroastrian scriptures, with a short history of the legendary Kayanid kings. It is written in the Book Pahlavi script, and most of its chapters date to the eighth and ninth centuries CE. It draws on the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture, but is not scripture itself.\n\nIt survives in two versions. The shorter, more corrupt one, known as the Indian Bundahishn, has about 30 chapters. A copy of it, made at Surat in 1734, was brought to Europe by the French scholar Anquetil-Duperron, who published a translation in 1771. The longer and better version, the Greater or Iranian Bundahishn, is about twice as long and reached India from Iran only around 1870, when Tehmuras Dinshawji Anklesaria obtained the codex now known as TD1. West estimated that its oldest manuscript was written around 1530.\n\nOne modern edition had its own disaster. B. T. Anklesaria's transliteration and translation, begun in 1908 and almost ready by 1935, was nearly lost when the printing press burned a year after his death in 1944, destroying almost all the copies. It finally appeared in 1956, reproduced from a surviving print.\n\n## The plan of time\n\nThe book's most striking idea is a schedule. \"Time was for twelve thousand years,\" it says. For the first three thousand, Ohrmazd, the wise lord, kept his creatures in a spiritual state, \"unthinking and unmoving, with intangible bodies.\" The evil spirit, Ahriman, unaware of Ohrmazd \"on account of backward knowledge,\" rose from the abyss, saw the light and tried to destroy it, then fled back to darkness and made demons.\n\nThen comes a remarkable bargain. Ohrmazd knew that without a set period of conflict the evil spirit could lead his creatures astray. So he proposed one: \"Appoint a period! so that the intermingling of the conflict may be for nine thousand years.\" Ahriman, \"unobservant and through ignorance,\" agreed, \"just like two men quarreling together, who propose a time thus: Let us appoint such-and-such a day for a fight.\" But Ohrmazd already knew the outcome. For three thousand years everything would go by his will, for three thousand the two wills would mix, \"and the last three thousand years the evil spirit is disabled.\"\n\nWhen Ohrmazd recited the sacred Ahunwar prayer and showed his final triumph, the evil spirit fell back, stunned, into the dark. Only after that did the attack at noon begin.\n\n## The first man and the first couple\n\nThe first man, Gayomard, lived thirty years in torment after the onslaught. When he died, his seed was purified by the light of the sun. After forty years a plant grew from the earth, and from it came the first human couple, Mashye and Mashyane, at first joined together so closely \"that it was not clear which is the male and which the female.\" They changed from the shape of a plant into the shape of humans, and the breath went into them. The book's later chapters trace history down through legendary kings, and at the end comes the renovation, the Frashegird, when evil is finally defeated and the dead are raised.\n\n## Who wrote it, and when\n\nThe book grew through several redactions, and MacKenzie writes that it is impossible to say even roughly when it was first compiled. Several passages refer to the conquering Arabs and their misrule, suggesting a date after the Islamic conquest of Iran in the seventh century, though these may have been added later. Most scholars follow the view of W. B. Henning that it was \"an original work on cosmology in which the scattered teachings of the Avesta were coordinated and brought into a system,\" by an author living probably near the end of the Sasanian era, with the final chapters added later. One of the editors of its last important redaction names himself: a priest called Farrbay, a contemporary of a writer known to have been active about 880 CE.\n\nThe author also knew Greek and Indian science. One chapter resembles a Hippocratic treatise. In Henning's words, \"There is no doubt that the author of the Bundahishn knew perfectly well that the moon is nearer to the earth than the fixed stars; to say so, however, against the authority of scripture, would have branded him as a heretic.\"\n\nSome ancient-astronaut writers read the first man and the assault from the sky as memories of contact with outsiders. That is interpretation; nothing in the text gives measurable data for it. Scholars read the Bundahishn as a medieval summary of much older Iranian belief, compiled and preserved by Zoroastrian priests in the centuries around the Islamic conquest.\n\nWhat stands out still is the bargain. The war between good and evil is real and long, but it has an agreed term, and one side knows the ending before it begins. Does knowing the end make the struggle more meaningful, or less?","qs":["The Bundahishn sets all of history in a 12,000-year war of good and evil. Why might a people want time to have a plan?","Ohrmazd knows how the fight ends before it starts. Does a fixed ending make a struggle more meaningful or less?","Parts of this book were written after Islam reached Iran. How might that setting shape a story about evil being defeated?"]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX045-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Bundahishn, Held in several collections","by":"Mohamad.baghipoor","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yazd_Atash_Behram.jpg","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"9th c. CE+","h":"Oldest surviving copy: 9th c. CE+ (mss. later)","s":[322]},{"v":"Middle Persian","h":"Language","s":[322]}],"hs":{"322":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Bundahishn"]}}