avesta

"The Zoroastrians were a colony from Northern India. They had been together for a time with the people whose sacred songs have been preserved to us in the Veda. A schism took place, and the Zoroastrians migrated westward to Arachosia and Persia."

"By means of indirect calculations, one can arrive at such vague dates for the time of his activity as "1000-600 BC." In any case, it seems that Zarathustra must be placed considerably earlier than the Achaemenid Great Kings in the West, such as Cyrus or Darius. Otherwise, however, the veil of timeless Aryan antiquity lies over his life."

"[If] we use archaeology and history to date the Avesta, we cannot turn around and use the Avesta to date the same archaeological and historical events, and vice versa."

"I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language…"

"Let the Pundits fight among themselves; it is the Hindus who have all along called themselves Aryas. Whether of pure or mixed blood, the Hindus are Aryas; there it rests. If the Europeans do not like us, Aryas, because we are dark, let them take another name for themselves—what is that to us?"

"The object of the peoples of Europe is to exterminate all in order to live themselves. The aim of the Aryans is to raise all up to their own level, nay, even to a higher level than themselves."

"Children of Arya are led by light."

"Armed with the thunderbolt, and confident in his strength, he has gone on destroying the cities of the Dasyus. Thunderer, acknowledging (the praises of thy worshipper), cast, for his sake, thy shaft against the Dasyu, and augment the strength and glory of the A′rya."

"The lords of men had hastened forth From east and west and south and north, Áryan and stranger, those who dwell In the wild wood and on the , And as the Gods to Indra, they Showed honour to the king that day."

"For the deed proclaims the hero from the man of spacious lies, Marks the true and upright Arya from the scheming worldly-wise!"

"Wretch, thou shall be the king of those whose practices and precepts are impure, amongst whom men of inferior blood procreate children upon women of blue blood, who live on meat, who are mean, who hesitate not to appropriate the wives of their superiors, whose practices are those of birds and beasts, who are sinful, and non-Aryan."

"O my Lord, a person who is chanting Your holy name, although born of a low family like that of a Chandala, is situated on the highest platform of self-realization. Such a person must have performed all kinds of penances and sacrifices according to Vedic literatures many, many times after taking bath in all the holy places of pilgrimage. Such a person is considered to be the best of the Arya family."

"He is the Aryan, who is born through prayer."

"An Arya is one who hails from a noble family, of gentle behavior and demeanor, good-natured and of righteous conduct."

"[T]he ' and ' agreed that the essence of their shared parental Indo-Iranian identity was linguistic and ritual, not racial. If a person sacrificed to the right gods in the right way using the correct forms of the traditional hymns and poems, that person was an Aryan."

"The distinction between Aryan and un-Aryan on which so much has been built seems on the mass of evidence to indicate a cultural rather than a racial difference."

"Unto her did the Maker offer up a sacrifice in the Airyana Vaegah, by the good river Daitya; with the and meat, with the baresma, with the wisdom of the tongue, with the holy spells, with the speech, with the deeds, with the libations, and with the rightly-spoken words."

"[T]he role of a particular race in a great melange of races, though easy to exaggerate, is impossible to determine."

"Nazis said that the Aryan race, the most advanced form of humanity, had to be protected and fostered, while degenerate kinds of Homo sapiens like Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally ill had to be quarantined and even exterminated."

"According to Nazis, Homo sapiens had already divided into several races, the Aryan race, had the finest qualities - rationalism, beauty, integrity, diligence. The Aryan race therefore had the potential to turn man into superman. Other races, such as Jews and blacks, were today's Neanderthals, possessing inferior qualities. If allowed to breed, in particular intermarry with Aryans, they would adulterate all human population and doom Homo sapiens to extinction."

"The whole of India is Aryan, nothing else."

"The loom of the fabric of Aryan civilisation is a vast, warm, level country, interspersed with broad, navigable rivers. The cotton of this cloth is composed of highly civilised, semi-civilised, and barbarian tribes, mostly Aryan. Its warp is Varnashramachara, and its woof, the conquest of strife and competition in nature."

"“With VarAna and RaNhA, as of course with Hapta HAndu, which comes between them in the Vd. I list, we find ourselves straight away in Indian territory, or, at any rate, in territory that, from the very earliest times, was certainly deeply permeated by Indo-Aryans or Proto-Indoaryans.” ..."

"[the Avesta reflects] “an historical situation in which Iranian elements exist side by side with … Aryan or Proto-Indoaryan (elements)”. ..."

"To point to the list of words common to the Avesta and viii [of the Rigveda] with its group, and say that here is proof positive that there is closer relationship with the Avesta, and that, therefore, viii after all is older than the books which have not preserved these words, some of which are of great significance, would be a first thought. But this explanation is barred out by the fact that most of these Avestan words preserved in viii, withal those of the most importance, are common words in the literature posterior to the Rik. Hence to make the above claim would be tantamount to saying that these words have held their own through the period to which viii (assuming it to be older than ii-vii) is assigned, have thereupon disappeared, and then come into vogue again after the interval to which the maker of this assumption would assign ii-vii. This, despite all deprecation of negative evidence, is not credible. Take, for instance, udara or uṣṭra or meṣa, the first is found only in viii., i., x.; the second in viii., i.; the last in viii., i., ix., x. Is it probable that words so common both early and late should have passed through an assumedly intermediate period (of ii.-vii.) without leaving a trace? Or, again: is a like assumption credible in the case of kṣīra, which appears in the Iranian khshīra; in RV. viii., i., ix., x.; disappears in the assumedly later group ii.-vii.; and reappears in the AV. and later literature as a common word? Evidently, the facts are not explained on the hypothesis that the Avesta and RV. viii. are older than RV. ii.-vii. We must, I think, suppose that the Avesta and RV. viii. are younger than RV. ii.-vii.; or else that the poets of viii. were geographically nearer to the Avestan people, and so took from them certain words, which may or may not have been old with their Iranian users, but were not received into the body of Vedic literature until a time posterior to the composition of ii.-vii."―[....] viii with the General Books and post-Rik literature agrees with Avestan as against the early family books" "[....] viii joins the later Avesta to post-Rik literature and the other General Books."

"“Not only in grammatical structure and vocabulary, but also in literary form, in certain metres like the TriSTubh and in a way GAyatrI, there is resemblance between the Avesta and the Rgveda. The fact is usually mentioned in good manuals. But there is a peculiarity about these points of resemblance which is not so commonly known: It is the eighth MaNDala which bears the most striking similarity to the Avesta. There and there only (and of course partly in the related first MaNDala) do some common words like uSTra and the strophic structure called pragAtha occur. … Further research in this direction is sure to be fruitful.”"

"“Two Young Avestan texts contain lists of countries known to their authors, YaSt 10 and VidEvdAd, Chapter 1. The two lists differ considerably in terms of composition and are therefore most probably independent of one another. Both lists contain only countries in northeastern Iran.” ...[All these places are] “located to the east of the Caspian Ocean, with the possible exception of Raga”."

"“H. Oldenberg showed that in spite of the genetic closeness of religious beliefs, the Vedas and Avesta differ considerably, and that in the Avesta many of the heroes play opposite roles to their counterparts in the Veda.” (p.183)"

"[The horizon of the Avesta] “is according to Burrow, wholly eastern and therefore certainly earlier than the westward migrations of the Iranian tribes.” ..."

"“The fact [is] that Avestan geography, particularly the list in Vd. I, is confined to the east,” ...[this list is] “remarkably important in reconstructing the early history of Zoroastrianism”. ..."

"“It must be emphasised that the process of polarisation of relations between the Ahuras and the DaEvas is already complete in the GAthAs, whereas, in the Rigveda, the reverse process of polarisation between the Devas and the Asuras, which does not begin before the later parts of the Rigveda, develops as it were before our very eyes, and is not completed until the later Vedic period. Thus, it is not at all likely that the origins of the polarisation are to be sought in the prehistorical, the Proto-Aryan period. More likely, ZarathuStra’s reform was the result of interdependent developments, when Irano-Indian contacts still persisted at the dawn of history. With their Ahura-DaEva ideology, the Mazdayasnians, guided by their prophet, deliberately dissociated themselves from the Deva-Asura concept which was being developed, or had been developed, in India, and probably also in the adjacent Iranian-speaking countries… All this suggests a synchrony between the later Vedic period and ZarathuStra’s reform in Iran.”"

"[the attempt to transpose the geography of the Avesta from Afghanistan to western Iran] “was doubtless due to different attempts made by the most powerful religious centres of western Iran and the influential order of the Magi to appropriate the traditions of Zoroastrianism that had flourished in the eastern territories of the plateau in far-off times. Without a doubt, the identification of RaYa with AdurbAdagAn, more or less parallel with its identification with Ray, should be fitted into the vaster picture of the late location of Airyana VaEjah in ADarbAyjAn.” ..."