Airyanem Vaejah

"”The first chapter of the Vendidad or the handbook of the Parsees enumerates sixteen holy lands created by Ahura Mazda which were later rendered unfit for the residence of man (i.e. the ancestors of the Iranians) on account of different things created by Angra Mainyu, the evil spirit of the Avesta… The first of these lands was of course Airyana Vaejo which was abandoned by the ancestors of the Iranians because of severe winter and snow; of the others, one was Hapta Hindu, i.e. Saptasindhu”."

"Geographically, the Avesta has little to offer the quest for the homeland of the Indo-Aryans speakers—with one very important exception. In sharp contradistinction to the lack of any clear reference in the Vedic tradition to an outside origin, the Avesta does preserve explicit mention of an airiianam vaejo, the legendary homeland of the Aryans and of Zarathustra himself. The descriptions of this place, despite the fact that "it is revealed that Ohrmazd made [it] to be better than the other places and regions," speak of severe climatic conditions (Humbach 1991, 35). Gnoli (1980, 130) situates the airiiansm vaejo in the Hindu Kush because all the identifiable geographic references in the Avesta are of eastern Iran, south central Asia and, Afghanistan, with an eastern boundary formed by the Indus. There is no mention of any place north of the Sir Darya (the ancient Jaxartes), nor of any western Iranian place (Boyce 1992, 3). ... There are also identical names of rivers common to both Iran and India, such as the Iranian Harahvaiti and Haroyu, which correspond to the Indian Sarasvati and Sarayu (Sanskrit s = Iranian h). In and of themselves, all that can be said of this data is that these names could have been either transferred by incoming Indo-Aryan tribes from Iranian rivers to Indian ones, as is generally assumed, or by outgoing Indo-Iranian tribes from Indian rivers (although any transfer from Iran to India must have occurred before Iranian developed the h phoneme, since s can become h but never vice versa)."

"Also, Airyanam Vaejo, mentioned ibidem, is a bit of a mystery to iranologists, but one serious candidate is certainly Kashmir, where summer does indeed last only two months, in conformity with the description given."

"Significantly, Iranian traditions record the earliest homeland of the Iranians as Airyana Vaējah, a land characterized by extreme cold. Gnoli, one of the greatest Avestan scholars, suggests that this land, mentioned in the list of the sixteen Iranian lands in the Avesta in Vendidād I, should be ―left out of the discussion since ―"the country is characterized, in the Vd.I context, by an advanced state of mythicization"."

"However, it is clear that the list of sixteen Iranian lands is arranged in rough geographical order, in an anti-clockwise direction which leads back close to the starting point; and the fact that the sixteen evils created by Angra Mainyu in the sixteen lands created by Ahura Mazda start out with ―severe winter‖ in the first land Airyana Vaējah, move through a variety of other evils (including various sinful proclivities, obnoxious insects, evil spirits and physical ailments), and end again with ―severe winter‖ in the sixteenth land, Raηhā, shows that the sixteenth land is close to the first one. And since Gnoli identifies the sixteenth land, Raηhā, as an ―eastern mountainous area, Indian or Indo-Iranian, hit by intense cold in winter, it is clear that Airyana Vaējah is also likely to be an eastern, mountainous, Indian area."

"“Given its very Oriental horizon, this list must be pre-Achaemenid; on the other hand, the remarkable extendedness of the territories concerned recommends situating them in a period much later than the Zoroastrian origins. (…) one or several centuries later than Zarathuštra’s preaching.”"

"The only possible identification of Airyana Vaejah must point to the great Hindukus mountain range."

"As far as these points are concerned, we must at any rate bear in mind that the great mountain ranges running from the Hindu Kush to the Pamir and the Himalayas could, with their arctic temperatures, have inspired the various successive identifications of nordic, polar elements with the ancient cosmology and traditional geography of the Aryans. This could be the explanation of the story of the severe climate of Airyana Vaēǰah rather than that deriving from theories about nordic origins and reminiscences."

"The Iranians had retained a distinct memory of the Indo-Iranian common home in their mythology but the Indo-Aryans... have nothing to say on the point. [... There is a ] distinctively Indian Rigvedic culture... a distinct product of the Indian soil."

"... Bhargava points out: The evidence of the Avesta makes it clear that sections of these Aryans in course of time left Sapta Sindhu and settled in Iran. The first chapter of the Vendidad [. . .] enumerates sixteen holy lands created by Ahura Mazda which were later rendered unfit for the residence of man (i.e. the ancestors of the Iranians) on account of different things created by Angra Mainyu, the evil spirit of the Avesta . . . [...]. The first of these lands was of course Airyana Vaejo which was abandoned by the ancestors of the Iranians because of severe winter and snow; of the others, one was Hapta Hindu, i.e. Saptasindhu. This is the clearest proof that the Aryan ancestors of the Iranians were once part and parcel of the Aryans of Sapta Sindhu before they finally settled in Iran. Excessive heat created in this region by Angra Mainyu was, according to the Vendidad, the reason why the ancestors of the Iranians left this country. [. . .] The Hapta Hindu mentioned in the Vendidad is obviously the Saptasindhu (the Punjab region), and the first land, “abandoned by the ancestors of the Iranians because of severe winter and snow” before they came to the Saptasindhu region and settled down among the Vedic people, is obviously Kashmir."