The work identifies its own makers. Its first compiler, Adurfarnbag son of Farrokhzad, was a leading priest of Fars in the early ninth century, remembered also for a recorded disputation at the court of the caliph al-Mamun; the manuscript tradition relates that his compilation suffered damage and dispersal, and that Adurbad son of Emed, a priestly scholar of the tenth century, gathered, restored and completed the work in the form that survives. Both men belonged to the milieu that produced the other great Pahlavi books of the ninth century, the Bundahishn among them, a burst of encyclopedic writing by which a community under pressure banked its inheritance.
The Denkard's own first two books were already missing when the surviving manuscripts were copied, the oldest substantial witness being a codex whose line runs back to a manuscript of 1020 CE. Transmission thereafter ran through the Zoroastrian communities of Iran and India, and the work reached print in the monumental Bombay edition of Dhanjishah Madan in 1911, with the facsimile of the B manuscript following; translations remain partial, book by book, the whole having defeated every single translator by its bulk and difficulty. Modern scholarship mines it constantly: for Sasanian theology and court culture, for the history of the Avesta, for Zoroastrian ethics, and for the vocabulary of Middle Persian abstract thought, of which it is the richest surviving specimen.