Here the Persian religion emerges as a problem no less difficult than those of race and language.[1] Scholarship has associated it with these as though the association were self-evident, and has, therefore, treated it always with reference to India. But the religion of these land-Vikings was not related to, it was identical with the Vedic, as shown by the divine pairs Mitra-Varuna and Indra-Nasatya of the Boghaz Keüi texts. And within this religion which held up its head in the middle of the Babylonian world Zarathustra now appeared, from out of the lower ranks of the people, as reformer. It is known that he was not a Persian. That which he created (as I hope to show) was a transfer of Vedic religion into the forms of the Aramæan world-contemplation, in which already there were the faint beginnings of the Magian religiousness. The dævas, the gods of the old Indian beliefs, grew to be the demons of the Semitic and the jinn of the Arabian. Yahweh and Beelzebub are related to one another precisely as Ahuramazda and Ahriman in this peasant-religion, which was essentially Aramæan and, therefore, founded in an ethical-dualistic world-feeling. Eduard Meyer[2] has correctly established the difference between the Indian and the Iranian view of the world, but, owing to his erroneous premisses, has not recognized its origin. Zarathustra is a travelling-companion of the prophets of Israel, who like him, and at the same time, transformed the old (Mosaic-Canaanitish) beliefs of the people. It is significant that the whole eschatology is a common possession of the Persian and Jewish religions, and that the Avesta texts were originally written in Aramaic (in Parthian times) and only afterwards translated into Pehlevi.[3]
But already in Parthian times there occurred amongst both Persians and Jews that profoundly intimate change which makes no longer tribal attachment but orthodoxy the hall-mark of nationality.[4] A Jew who went over to the Mazda faith became thereby a Persian; a Persian who became a Christian belonged to the Nestorian "people." The very dense population of northern Mesopotamia — the motherland of the Arabian Culture — is partly of Jewish and partly of Persian nationality in this sense of the word, which is not at all concerned with race and very little with language. Even before the birth of Christ, "Infidel" designates the non-Persian as it designates the non-Jew.
This nation is the "Persian people" of the Sassanid empire, and, connected with the fact, we find that Pehlevi and Hebrew die out simultaneously, Aramaic becoming the mother tongue of both communities. If we speak in terms of Aryans and Semites, the Persians in the time of the Tell-el-Amarna Corre-
- ↑ For what follows, cf. Ch. VII-IX.
- ↑ Geschichte des Altertums, I, § 590, et seq.
- ↑ Andreas and Wackernagel, Nachrichten der Göttingischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (1911), p. 1, et seq. [On the subject generally, see articles by K. Geldner, "Zend-Avesta" and "Zoroaster," and by Ed. Meyer, "Parthia," in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]
- ↑ See, further, below.
