Zoroastrian bāj and drōn—l

Abstract

The word bāj (older wāj) has been an important part of Zoroastrian religious vocabulary from at least Sasanian times; and the act of ‘taking the bāj ‘is so general and significant that in a Jewish-Persian text the Zoroastrians are distinguished thereby from those of other faiths: gabragān abā bāj-stānš ān ‘the Zoroastrians with their taking the bāj ‘.1 Down the centuries the word has acquired additional meanings; but the range of its usages in older times was already so wide that E. W. West, working on the Pahlavi texts, applied for an interpretation of them to Tehmuras D. Anklesaria. This Anklesaria admirably provided, in a letter which he himself subsequently published among the appendixes to the Gujarati translation of the first part of the Dādestdn ī dīnīg, made by him in collaboration with S. D. Bharucha.2 This was the pioneer treatment of the term.

A note on Pahlavi lexicography: Middle Persian hassār, hassārīh

“…Boyce and Kotwal (1971: 68) take the spelling for <hs’lyh> as a corruption of Av. ašaiia and interpret the “ ašaiia of the barsom ” as a reference to Y.8.2 (so Williams 1990), but there is clearly no need for such an emendation.…”

Mādayān ī Wīrāzagān: a newly discovered Middle Persian text: transliteration, transcription, and translation

“…For more details, see Modi 1922: 296–9. For a comparatively recent study, see Boyce and Kotwal 1971a, 1971b.…”