Der Zamyad-Yast: Edition, Ubersetzung, Kommentar.

• Author: Skjaervo, P. Oktor

The Zamyad Yast (Yt. 19) is the last substantial text (97 strophes) of the collection of yasts (hymns to individual deities) in the Avesta. From a literary point of view its main interest lies in the stories from the Iranian epic tradition that are here elaborated to a greater extent than anywhere else in the Avesta, presenting in "chronological" order the tales of the heroes and villains who asked for and obtained or did not obtain the [x.sup.v]arenah-. Hintze's edition is a reworking of her German Ph.D. dissertation, which she wrote under the guidance of Johanna Narten. The work thus stands in the tradition of the "Erlanger school," applying Karl Hoffmann's strict principles for philological analysis as elaborated by his student Narten (especially in her two books: Die Amesa Spentas im Avesta [Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982], and Der Yasna Haptanhaiti [Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1986]), a method that leads to brilliant results at its best, is always sound, useful, and inspiring, but occasionally tends toward fragmentation and pedantry.

The book contains an introduction, in which numerous problems and aspects of the text are discussed; the text edition itself, containing text, critical apparatus, translation, and commentary; a less than complete glossary with etymological notes and references to the secondary literature; a rich bibliography; and exhaustive indices. (I am puzzled by the decision to exclude from the glossary words "repeated from other texts" [p. 401], as I have not found any discussion of the original loci of such passages. The fact that the scribes of the archetype of the manuscripts of this yast abbreviate a text they have already copied does not mean that the text itself was originally foreign to this yast.)

The problems discussed in the nine-part introduction center on the structure and contents of the hymn. After a survey of previous work on the hymn, Hintze discusses in part two the cosmological section on the origin of mountains, with which this hymn begins and which is commonly assumed to have originally been a separate text appended to the actual hymn. It is not, however, clear to me whether Hintze shares this opinion, since on pp. 12-13 she presents the argument for it from the karde ("section") division in the manuscripts, but on p. 14 she points out that the first, cosmological, part corresponds to the final, eschatological, part of the hymn. In the next parts of the introduction Hintze discusses...