Zoroastrian hermeneutics in Late Antiquity : commentary on the Sūdgar Nask of Dēnkard Book 9 / Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vevaina, Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw, author.

Contributor:

Class of 1932 Fund.

Series:

Iranica ; 0944-1271 32.

Iranica, 0944-1271 ; Band 32

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dīnkard.

Zoroastrianism.

Zoroastrianism--Sacred books.

Pahlavi language--Texts.

Physical Description:

xxix, 476 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz Verlag, 2024.

Summary:

The Sudgar Nask of Denkard Book 9 is one of the most enigmatic and yet fundamental texts of Zoroastrianism. It is a commentary on the ?Old Avesta? of the 2nd millennium BCE produced in Pahlavi (Zoroastrian Middle Persian) in the Sasanian (224?651 CE) and early Islamic centuries. This commentary purportedly based on earlier Pahlavi translations and commentaries of lost Young Avestan tractates commenting in turn on the 'Old Avesta' is a value-laden, ideologically motivated discourse that displays a rich panoply of tradition-constituted forms of allegoresis. Despite its value and importance for developing our nascent understanding of Zoroastrian hermeneutics and the self-conception of the Zoroastrian priesthood in Late Antiquity, this primary source has attracted scant scholarly attention due to the extreme difficulty of its subject matter and the lack of a reliable translation.00Volume 32 serves as an intertextual commentary on this often-bewildering text. It contextualizes and historicizes the traditional intersignifications of the Sudgar Nask which evince indigenous hermeneutical interventions that violate the ?plain sense? of meaning, thus challenging our philological approaches to understanding the archaic corpus of the ?Old Avesta.? Reading the Sudgar Nask is a hermeneutic process of traversing texts, genres, and rituals in both the Avestan and Pahlavi corpora, thus activating nodes in a web or network of textual and meta-textual relations that establish new forms of allegoreses or meaning making. It is argued that this entire hermeneutical complex of weaving a ?new? text composed of implicit proof text and explicit commentary renews, extends, and, ultimately, makes tradition.00Critical edition with full text in volume 31, ISBN: 9783447121057.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 437-476).

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Class of 1932 Fund.

ISBN:

9783447121149

3447121149

9783447394772

3447394773

OCLC:

1417270246