Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour.

• Author: Malandra, W.W.

The present work grew out of a series of five lectures delivered by the author at Columbia University in 1985. The plan of the book is to establish as precisely as possible the date and geographic setting of Zoroaster and then to proceed with an historical survey laying out the constitutive elements of the religion, tracing their persistence and vitality down to the present day. Although much of the book draws on Boyce's previous scholarship, especially her History of Zoroastrianism, it modifies some previous positions. In any case, the work presents what, one supposes, is the fully matured judgment of this, perhaps the greatest, scholar of Zoroastrianism. Those chapters dealing with the prophet will be of most interest to those already familiar with her work, since the remainder of the book introduces little new, even if intrinsically worthwhile.

The first two chapters ("Zoroaster's Supposed Time and Homeland: A Confusion of Fabrications" and "Zoroaster's Actual Time and Homeland") form "a necessary prologue" (p. xi) to the rest of the work and treat two sides of the same problem. Boyce first focuses on the question of place. She begins by summarizing the conclusion of the following chapter, namely, that Zoroaster's homeland, Airyana Vaejah of the Vahvi Daitya, lay far, far to the north of Iran, in the steppes of central Asia. She then produces arguments against all other claims about the prophet's homeland, whether in the extant Avesta, in Pahlavi books, or other late Sassanid traditions. Boyce's discussion of the contending regional claims is extremely interesting, especially when she describes the regional diversity of Zoroastrianism throughout history.

Having dispatched all pretenders, Boyce turns, in the second chapter, to the remaining possibility, Airyana Vaejah. The premise for this choice is that Iranian traditions placed it far to the north, and that its inhabitants moved south with their Zoroastrian religion long before the Achaemenids ever came to power. Her evidence includes archaeological data and theory, anthropological theory, comparative linguistics and literature, and the testimony of an array of Iranian texts themselves, in which her understanding of the Gathas and Yasna Haptanhati is decisive. (This understanding is fully articulated in chapters 4 and 5.)

The chronological side of the argument begins with the assumption (which I regard as baseless) that the Achaemenids from the time of Cyrus the Great were Zoroastrians...