The Zend Avesta, Part I: The Vendîdâd

by F. Max Müller

This is part I of the Sacred Books of the East Zend Avesta translation.

About Author:

James Darmesteter (28 March 1849, Château-Salins, Moselle – 19 October 1894) was a French author, orientalist, and antiquarian.
He was born of Jewish parents at Château-Salins, in Alsace. The family name had originated in their earlier home of Darmstadt. He was educated in Paris, where, under the guidance of Michel Bréal and Abel Bergaigne, he imbibed a love for Oriental studies, to which for a time he entirely devoted himself. In 1875 he published a thesis on the mythology of the Avesta, and in 1877 became teacher of Persian language at the École des Hautes Études. He continued his research with his Études iraniennes (1883), and ten years later published a complete translation of the Avesta and associated Zend (lit. "commentary"), with historical and philological commentary of his own (Zend Avesta, 3 vols., 1892-1893) in the Annales du Musée Guimet. He also edited the Avesta for Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series (vols. 4 and 23).

Genres: Religion, Theology, Philosophy

421 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

Friedrich Max Müller, K.M. (Ph.D., Philology, Leipzig University, 1843)—generally known as Max Müller or F. Max Müller—was the first Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University, and an Orientalist who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology and the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations, was prepared under his direction.

Müller became a naturalized British citizen in 1855. In 1869, he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres as a foreign correspondent. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite (civil class) in 1874, and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art the following year. In 1888, he was appointed Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, delivering the first in what has proved to be an ongoing, annual series of lectures at several Scottish universities to the present day. He was appointed a member of the Privy Council in 1896.

His wife, Georgina Adelaide Müller was also an author. After Max's death, she deposited his papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Reviews

[Hibiscus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading religious scriptures requires some special mood. I need to confess that I didn't always approach this book with the proper attitude. Given my background, I thought that Zoroastrian theology would be readily understandable to me, wrongly. This collection of rituals, traditions, and rules is a true relict, a glimpse into a different reality, a world largely vanished in the fog of history. It defies rationality, it often makes no sense, yet the more dogmatic it gets, the more it mesmerizes and strangely feels real.

Let this be my first step into the message delivered to the prophet of Ormizd.