Vologases I Orders the Avesta's Scattered Texts Collected

Zoroastrian tradition, recorded centuries later in the ninth century Denkard, credits the Parthian king Vologases I, who ruled from about 51 to 78 CE without a firmer date surviving for the order itself, with commanding that whatever remained of the Avesta, scattered and orally transmitted since Alexander the Great burned Persepolis in 330 BCE, already recorded here, be sought out across the Parthian realm and gathered back together, roughly three hundred eighty one years after that destruction and one hundred seventy three years before Zoroastrianism became Persia's state religion in 224, also recorded here. The Denkard remembers Alexander himself as gizistag, the accursed, whose conquest left the Good Religion in general confusion, its priesthood scattered and much of its oral corpus at risk of being lost with them; Vologases's command, whichever Arsacid king of that name the later tradition actually meant, is the first attempt the Zoroastrian community's own memory records to reverse that loss deliberately, rather than simply carrying the surviving fragments forward informally from teacher to student. The effort produced no single fixed text of the kind later ages would recognize as a canon, and Sasanian priests under Ardashir I and his successors would still need to complete a more thorough written recension after 224. But the Parthian era compilation the tradition remembers under Vologases's name is the point at which the community itself first tried to arrest the damage Alexander had done, nearly four centuries before Zoroastrianism had state power behind it again to finish the work.