Denkard

The Denkard was compiled two centuries after the Arab conquest of Iran, in the Abbasid world where Zoroastrianism, once the imperial religion of the Sasanians, was becoming the faith of a shrinking, taxed and disputing-with-its-neighbours minority. The work's temper reflects that setting. Book three, the largest surviving portion, is a long sequence of doctrinal and apologetic chapters, defending the coherence of the good religion in the vocabulary of reasoned argument, treating the nature of the two principles, the goodness of the creator, the purpose of creation and the resurrection, and answering, sometimes explicitly, the objections of Muslims, Christians, Jews and sceptics.

Book four gathers traditions about the transmission of the sacred learning, including the celebrated account of how the Avesta was assembled, scattered by Alexander, and recollected under the Sasanian kings, a narrative that shaped all later understanding of the canon's history. Book five answers questions put by inquirers, book six is a vast anthology of andarz, the gnomic wisdom literature of the sages, and book seven narrates the life and marvels of Zarathustra from his pre-existence to his mission. Books eight and nine perform the service scholars prize most: chapter-by-chapter summaries of the twenty one nasks, the divisions of the Sasanian Avesta, and detailed exposition of three of them. Since most of that Avesta never survived the following centuries, the Denkard's digest is the principal window onto what was lost.

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.