Read more
The
Bundahišn, meaning primal or foundational creation, is the central Zoroastrian account of creation, cosmology, and eschatology. Redacted sometime in the ninth century CE, it is one of the most important of the surviving testaments to Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature and pre-Islamic Iranian culture. Well known in the field as an essential primary source for scholars of ancient Iran's history, religions, literatures, and languages, the
Bundahišn is also a great work of literature itself, which ranks alongside the creation myths of other ancient traditions: Genesis, the Babylonian
Emunah Elish, Hesiod's
Theogony, and others.
List of contents
- Foreword by Shaul Shaked
- Introduction
- Prologue
- 1: On Material Creation
- 2: On the Creation of the Lights
- 3: On Why Creation Chose to Fight
- 4: On How the Adversary Attacked Creation
- 5: On the Opposition of the Two Spirits
- 6: On the Stages of the Battle of the Material Creation against the Evil Spirit
- 7: On the Likenesses of the Creatures
- 8: On the Nature of the Lands
- 9: On the Nature of the Mountains
- 10: On the Nature of the Seas
- 11: On the Nature of the Rivers
- 12: On the Nature of Lakes
- 13: On the Nature of the Five Forms of Animals
- 14: On the Nature of Mankind
- 15: On the Nature of the Birth of All Species
- 16: On the Nature of Plants
- 17: On the Mastery of Men, Animals, and Everything
- 18: On the Nature of Fire
- 19: On Sleep
- 20: On Songs
- 21: On the Nature of Wind, Clouds and Rain
- 22: On Vermin
- 23: On the Nature of the Wolf Species
- 24: On Various Things: How they were Created, and how their Adversaries Came
- 25: On the Religious Year
- 26: On the Great Deeds of the Spiritual Deities
- 27: On Ahriman and the Demons' Evil Deeds
- 28: On the Human Body as the Measure of the Material World
- 29: On the Mastery of the Continents
- 30: On the Cinwad Bridge and the Souls of the Departed
- 31: On the Celebrated Lands of Iran, and the Kayanid House
- 32: On the Glorious Kayanid Palaces, which they call Wonders and Marvels
- 33: On the Calamities that have Befallen Iran, Millenium by Millenium
- 34: On Resurrection and the Final Body
- 35: On the Family and Lineage of Kayanids and on the Lineage of Porusasp
- 36: On the Chronology of the Arabs of Twelve Thousand Years
- Afterword by Guy G. Stroumsa
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Domenico Agostini is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Tel Aviv University. He has been the recipient of the Prix Pirasteh in Persian Studies at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris (2008) and the Polonsky fellowship for Outstanding postdoctoral researchers (2013-2017). He has published extensively in the field of the Zoroastrian apocalyptic ideas and Middle Persian literature.
Samuel Thrope is a research fellow at the Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Haifa. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a fellow of the Martin Buber Society at Hebrew University. His translation of Persian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad's The Israeli Republic was published in 2017, and he is co-editor, with Roberta Cassagrande-Kim and Raquel Ukeles, of the 2018 exhibition catalogue Romance and Reason: Islamic Transformations of the Classical Past.
Summary
The Bundahisn, meaning primal or foundational creation, is the central Zoroastrian account of creation, cosmology, and eschatology. Compiled sometime in the ninth century CE, it is one of the most important surviving testaments to Zoroastrian literature in the Middle Persian language and to pre-Islamic Iranian culture. Despite having been composed some two millennia after the Prophet Zoroaster's revelation, it is nonetheless a concise compendium of ancient Zoroastrian knowledge that draws on and reshapes earlier layers of the tradition.
Well known in the field of Iranian Studies as an essential primary source for scholars of ancient Iran's history, religions, literatures, and languages, the Bundahisn is also a great work of literature in and of itself, ranking alongside the creation myths of other ancient traditions. The book's thirty-six diverse chapters, which touch on astronomy, eschatology, zoology, medicine, and more, are composed in a variety of styles, registers, and genres, from spare lists and concise commentaries to philosophical discourses and poetic eschatological visions. This new translation, the first in English in nearly a century, highlights the aesthetic quality, literary style, and complexity and raises the profile of pre-Islamic Zoroastrian literature.
Additional text
Agostini and Thrope have produced an excellent translation together with introductory matter and notes that make the Bundahišn readily accessible to not only Iranists, but also to Indo-Europeanists and students of religion in general.
