Before the Poem Had Him

A thin Avestan layer · A fuller Zoroastrian one · A full epic life

He grew in three stages, and the oldest one is barely a sentence.

He grew in three stages and the oldest is barely a sentence. In the ancient Iranian hymns he is a name with an epithet meaning mighty and a passing mention of his spirit among the faithful — that is close to the whole of the Avestan layer. The later Zoroastrian books, in Middle Persian and in Persian, are a different matter: they give him the championship of the religion, a role in the wars of conversion, and the boon that makes his body proof against weapons. The Shahnameh then supplies the full biography. Thin, fuller, complete — and the thinness belongs to the first layer only.

A thin Avesta

A fuller Pahlavi

A full epic life

On the sources

The Avestan attestation is thin but real: his name carries an epithet meaning mighty, and his fravashi is venerated among the faithful. The championship of the faith is carried in the Middle Persian books, and it should not be folded into the later Persian ones — the Denkard makes his becoming champion a condition of Zoroaster's healing of Goshtasp's horse, and names him among the first at court to spread the religion. The invulnerability is transmitted separately again, in the Persian Zaratosht-nama and in the Wizirkard i denig. A date of attestation is not a date of origin. The Wizirkard is a nineteenth-century compilation, and its late date is evidence about the manuscript rather than about when the tradition it carries arose; the Zaratosht-nama is held to elaborate older Zoroastrian material. How much of this stood in the Sasanian Avesta and its commentaries is a reconstruction from a Denkard summary of a book that has not survived, and is reported here as a reconstruction. The Parthian and Sasanian ruling houses both claimed descent from him.

The Avesta, the Denkard, and later Zoroastrian Persian works

Unlocks in-game at Ascension tier 4.

Before the Poem Had Him

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