Projektbeschreibung

The Zoroastrian Literature in new Persian is an important branch of Classical and New Persian literature, which unfortunately has been neglected in the Iranian Studies. Based on the long tradition of Pahlavi Rīvāyāt in Middle Persian (PahlRiv), the Zoroastrian Literature in New Persian made use of the Persian Language in order to put down religious matters in writing. The study of the genesis of the ZLCNP, as the successor of a religious genre of the PahlRiv, its literally/linguistic formation, socio-religious historical backgrounds and contemporary context shows a serious desideratum within the Iranian studies.

Among others, a planned edition of the treatise Ṣad Dar, will be undertaken. The treatise Ṣad Dar “Hundred Chapters” or “Hundred Gateways” belongs to the so-called genre of the older Zoroastrian Revāyat (Pl. Revāyāt) Literature, composed in both Middle Persian (Pahlavi) and New Persian. The Revāyāt are typically a collection of discussions about religious laws, costumes, legends etc. which were mostly composed between the late 15th and the late 19th century. Their typical structure is the format of questions and answer(s) to elaborate the issue. Among the old Revāyāt, the treatise Ṣad Dar, a miscellaneous collection of Zoroastrian lores and customs, seems to have had a higher and explicit authority among Zoroastrians for a long time, as it has been cited extensively in almost all later Revāyat Literatures. Besides the prose Ṣad Dar, there are also two other versions of the treatise in esse, one in poetry, the so-called Ṣad dar-e naẓm “the metrical Ṣad dar” and Ṣad dar-e baḥr-e ṭavīl “the long-meter Ṣad dar”.

The last study and translation of the prose treatise together with another treatise Saddar Naṣr

and Saddar Bundehesh has been done more than a century ago, in 1909 by DHABHAR.