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.
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
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.
Reviews for The Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation
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. * William W. Malandra, Journal of Indo-European Studies *
