Quick Answer
The biggest Zoroastrian book there is, compiled by priests in the ninth century to save a religion that was losing its scripture, its language and its people. It defends dualism against Islam, tells the life of Zarathustra, collects the wisdom of the ancients, and summarises an Avesta that has otherwise vanished. There is no complete English translation and there may never be. The way in is through the scholarship, and Yuhan Vevaina's study of how the Denkard's priests read the Gathas is the best door now open.
Key Takeaways
- Nine books, two lost, and the survivors run past a thousand pages.
- Book 3 argues dualism against the monotheisms, and argues it well.
- Books 8 and 9 are the ghost of the Avesta, our main evidence for what is gone.
- The priests read the Gathas as prophecy, and Vevaina shows how.
- No complete translation. Go through the scholars.
17 min read
What the Denkard Is
The Denkard, in Middle Persian Dēnkard, Acts of the Religion, is a compendium of Zoroastrian learning compiled in the ninth century CE and surviving in a manuscript tradition that goes back to a single copy made in Baghdad in 1020.
It originally had nine books. Books 1 and 2 are lost entirely, and the beginning of Book 3 is missing. What remains is still by far the largest Zoroastrian text in existence, and it is not a single work but a library: theology, apologetics, history, ethics, biography and scriptural digest, gathered by priests who understood that if they did not write it down nobody would.
It is not scripture. The scripture is the Avesta, in the older Avestan language, and most of that is gone. The Denkard is what the priests knew about the scripture, and about their religion, at the moment it was slipping from them.
How to get at it. There is no complete English Denkard. The way most readers approach it is through scholarship that translates and explains parts, and the book linked from this review is one such: Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina's Zoroastrian Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity, a study and translation of the Sudgar Nask commentary in Book 9. This review treats the Denkard as a whole and Vevaina's book as the recommended entry, since that is how the material is actually available.
The Two Compilers
The Denkard names its makers, which is unusual for a text of this kind.
The first was Adurfarnbag son of Farrokhzad, high priest of the Zoroastrians of Fars in the early ninth century, who is known from other sources to have held a public disputation with a Zoroastrian convert to Islam before the caliph al-Ma'mun. He assembled the core of the work.
The second was Adurbad son of Emed, high priest later in the same century, who found the work in a damaged state, restored and expanded it, and gave it the form we have. A colophon records his labour and his reasons.
Both were men whose job was to keep a religion alive under a hostile state, and the Denkard is what that job looked like on the page.
The Emergency Behind It
The same emergency that produced the Bundahishn, and worth restating.
Two centuries after the Arab conquest, Zoroastrianism in Iran was a shrinking minority. Conversion to Islam was steady, priestly schools were closing, the Avestan language was becoming unreadable even to priests, and the great Sasanian Avesta of twenty-one divisions, the nasks, was disintegrating as the manuscripts and the people who could read them were lost.
The ninth-century priests responded by writing in Middle Persian, the language they still had, everything they could: cosmology in the Bundahishn, law and ritual in other works, and in the Denkard, theology and a summary of the scripture itself.
The Denkard is therefore a rescue operation. It reads as one. It is defensive, encyclopaedic, sometimes desperate, and it preserves things nothing else does.
The Lost Books
Books 1 and 2 do not survive and their contents can only be guessed. The beginning of Book 3 is also lost, so that the great apologetic opens in mid-argument.
The loss is a reminder of how thin the thread is. The whole Denkard descends from one manuscript, copied in Baghdad in the eleventh century, itself incomplete. What we have is what happened to survive in one book in one city, and the religion whose learning it preserves was already, by then, a remnant.
Book 3: The Defence of Dualism
The longest and most important surviving book, and the one that gives Zoroastrian theology its fullest reasoned statement.
Book 3 is a series of over four hundred chapters, many of them short, answering questions and objections about the religion. The recurring opponent is Islam, though Judaism, Christianity and Manichaeism are addressed, and the recurring argument is for the two principles.
The case runs roughly as follows. The world contains both good and evil. If there is one God who made everything, then that God made evil, and is either not good or not all-powerful. The only coherent account is that good and evil come from two independent sources, that the good God is wholly good and did not make evil, and that evil is a real opposing principle whose defeat is the purpose of creation. Monotheism, on this view, is the doctrine that God is the author of evil, and the Zoroastrian priest finds that blasphemous.
The argument is made with scholastic care and considerable polemical skill, and it is the most sophisticated defence of theological dualism in any ancient literature. A reader who has only met the two spirits as myth will find them here as philosophy.
The problem of evil is usually presented as a difficulty for monotheism that monotheists have found ways around. Book 3 of the Denkard is the other side of that argument, made by people for whom it was not a difficulty but a refutation. They looked at the same world and concluded that a single all-powerful creator was not a comforting doctrine but an accusation. Whether or not one agrees, it is bracing to read the case made by its best advocates, in their own words, against the religion that was replacing them.
Book 4: The History of the Scripture
A short book with a large claim.
Book 4 recounts the history of the Avesta as the priests understood it: its revelation to Zarathustra, its collection under the ancient kings, its destruction by Alexander, its partial recovery under the Parthians, its restoration and expansion under the Sasanians, who are said to have gathered learning from India, Byzantium and elsewhere and incorporated it, and its establishment as the canon of twenty-one nasks.
The history is partly legendary and partly not. What it shows is that the priests understood their scripture as something that had been lost and recovered before, and that the ninth-century rescue was, in their minds, one more turn of a cycle.
Book 5: Answers to a Christian
Book 5 contains a set of answers to questions posed by a Christian named Boxt-Mahre, along with other material on doctrine and practice.
The exchange is one of the few surviving records of direct Zoroastrian-Christian theological engagement from the period, and it shows the priests addressing an interlocutor who accepts a good God and a devil but not their independence. The tone is more conciliatory than Book 3's polemic against Islam.
Book 6: The Wisdom of the Ancients
The most readable book and the one most often translated.
Book 6 is a collection of sayings, maxims and short teachings attributed to the ancient sages, the poryotkeshan, on ethics, the good life, the conduct of the soul, and the relation of thought, word and deed. It is wisdom literature in the tradition of Proverbs and the Egyptian instructions, and it is Zoroastrianism at its most humane.
Shaul Shaked translated it as The Wisdom of the Sasanian Sages, and a reader who wants a way into the Denkard that does not require a taste for polemic should start here. The sayings on the three-fold path of good thoughts, good words and good deeds, on contentment, on the treatment of the poor and on the dangers of the wrong kind of knowledge are as fresh as anything in the ancient world.
Book 7: The Life of Zarathustra
The fullest surviving account of the prophet's life, compiled from the lost Spand Nask of the Avesta.
Book 7 tells of the transmission of the divine glory, the xwarrah, down the generations to Zarathustra; his miraculous birth, laughing rather than crying; the attempts of demons and hostile priests to kill him in infancy; his revelation at thirty on the bank of a river; his seven conversations with Ohrmazd and the archangels; his conversion of King Vishtasp; and the prophecies of the saviours to come.
This is the biography the tradition tells, not the historical Zarathustra, of whom almost nothing is known beyond the Gathas. It is a legend of the founder in the manner of the lives of the Buddha or of Jesus, and it is the source of most of what later Zoroastrians and outsiders have believed about the man.
Books 8 and 9: The Ghost of the Avesta
The books that make the Denkard indispensable to scholars.
Book 8 gives a summary of the contents of each of the twenty-one nasks of the Sasanian Avesta, division by division, chapter by chapter in some cases. Most of those nasks are lost. Book 8 is, for the majority of them, all we know.
Book 9 goes deeper into three of the nasks, the Sudgar, the Warshtmansr and the Bag, which were commentaries on the Gathas and the other Old Avestan texts. It summarises their commentary section by section, following the Gathic hymns in order.
These two books are summaries of Middle Persian summaries of Avestan commentaries on Avestan hymns. They are three removes from the original. They are also the only surviving witness to a vast literature, and the reconstruction of the Sasanian Avesta rests on them.
Vevaina's Study
Zoroastrian Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity: Commentary on the Sudgar Nask of Denkard Book 9, published by Harrassowitz in the Iranica series in 2022, is a scholarly monograph by Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina, who teaches Zoroastrian studies at Oxford.
The book provides a new edition and translation of the Sudgar Nask summary in Book 9, chapter by chapter, with detailed commentary, and a series of analytical chapters on what the text reveals about how Zoroastrian priests interpreted their scripture.
It is not an introduction to the Denkard, and a reader without background will find it demanding. It is, however, the most illuminating recent study of the Denkard's method, and it makes a section of Book 9 available in reliable English for the first time in over a century. For a reader who wants to understand what the Denkard was doing rather than only what it contains, it is the book.
The Sudgar Nask
The text Vevaina studies, and what it is.
The Sudgar was one of the seven Gathic nasks of the Avesta, a commentary on the Gathas and the other Old Avestan texts organised in twenty-two fragards or sections, each keyed to a passage of the hymns. The Avestan original is lost. Its Middle Persian translation and commentary, the zand, is lost. What survives is the Denkard's summary of the zand, in Book 9, chapters 2 to 23.
Vevaina's edition establishes the text of those chapters, translates them, and traces, where possible, the line of interpretation from the Gathic verse through the lost commentary to the surviving summary.
The result is a partial recovery of how a Sasanian priest, hearing a Gathic hymn, would have understood it, and that is a window on late antique religion that hardly exists anywhere else.
How the Priests Read Scripture
Vevaina's central finding, and the reason his book matters beyond Iranian studies.
The Gathas, on their face, are hymns: Zarathustra addressing Ahura Mazda, asking questions, praising, lamenting, in dense poetic language. The Sudgar commentary reads them as something else: as encoded prophecy of the end of the world, the coming of the saviours, the resurrection and the final renovation. A line about the cow's lament becomes a statement about the suffering of the good creation until the end. A question about the ordering of the heavens becomes a description of the eschatological judgment.
Vevaina shows that this is not arbitrary. The commentators had a system: a set of assumptions about what scripture must be about, techniques for moving from the surface to the hidden meaning, and a conviction that the whole of the religion's teaching was contained in the Gathas for those who knew how to read.
The priests, in other words, were doing what priests of scripture everywhere have done: making an ancient text speak to the present by reading it as having always spoken of the present.
Midrash, Allegory and the Zand
The comparison Vevaina draws, and the one that places the Denkard in world history.
Jewish midrash reads the Torah as inexhaustibly meaningful, every word carrying teaching beyond its surface. Alexandrian Christian allegory, in Origen and his heirs, reads the Old Testament as prophecy of Christ. Both traditions developed rules for the move from letter to meaning, and both flourished in the same late antique world as the Zoroastrian zand.
Vevaina argues that the Sudgar commentary belongs to this family: a scriptural hermeneutic of late antiquity, with its own rules and its own theological drive, developed by a community in contact with Jews and Christians and Manichaeans who were doing the same thing to their own texts.
That reframing turns the Denkard from a curiosity of Iranian philology into a participant in one of the central intellectual movements of the ancient world, and it is the most valuable thing in the study.
The Translation Problem
The obstacle every reader meets.
Edward West translated Books 7, 8 and 9 for the Sacred Books of the East between 1892 and 1897, and Book 5 in part. His versions are free online and are the source of most quotations. They are pioneering, unreliable in places, archaic in style, and based on an understanding of Middle Persian that has been superseded.
Jean de Menasce translated Book 3 into French in 1973, and it remains the only complete translation of that book in any Western language. Shaked translated Book 6 into English in 1979. Molé translated Book 7 into French. Various scholars have translated sections of Books 4, 5, 8 and 9. Vevaina has now done the Sudgar section of Book 9.
There is no complete Denkard in English and no immediate prospect of one. A reader has to assemble it from the parts, and the parts are of very different quality. This is the single greatest barrier to the text and it is unlikely to fall soon.
Beside the Bundahishn
The two great ninth-century compilations are complementary and should be read together.
The Bundahishn is a cosmology: creation, the assault of evil, the structure of the world, the end. The Denkard is a theology and a scriptural digest: why dualism is true, how the scripture was transmitted, what it contained, how it should be read, and how the prophet lived. The Bundahishn tells the story; the Denkard defends it and traces it to its sources.
Both came out of the same priestly families under the same pressure, and both preserve older material that would otherwise be gone. A reader who wants Zoroastrianism as a whole needs the Bundahishn for the picture and the Denkard for the argument.
The Difficulties
Four, and they are serious.
Inaccessibility. No complete translation, uneven partial ones, and a text that assumes the reader already knows the religion.
Distance from the sources. Books 8 and 9 are summaries of summaries. What they tell us about the Avesta is real and it is at three removes.
Polemical distortion. Book 3 presents the rival religions in order to refute them, and the presentations are not fair.
Lateness. Like the Bundahishn, the Denkard is a ninth-century text and cannot be taken as direct evidence for earlier Zoroastrianism without argument.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have gone past the introductions to Zoroastrianism and want the tradition's own theology at its most developed.
Read Book 3, in de Menasce or in the scholarly discussions, if you want the case for dualism made seriously.
Read Book 6, in Shaked, if you want the religion's ethics in the sages' own words.
Read Vevaina if you are interested in how scripture was read in late antiquity across the traditions, and want the Zoroastrian case set beside the Jewish and the Christian.
The Denkard is what a religion looks like when it is trying not to die. Every book in it is an act of preservation: argue the doctrine before the arguers are gone, write down the scripture's contents before the last reader forgets them, record the founder's life before the story is lost. The priests knew they were losing and wrote anyway, and what they wrote is the reason we know their religion was ever more than a set of myths. There is a lesson in that about what to do with what one loves when the world is moving on from it. Write it down. Argue it. Leave the summary of the summary. Someone in Baghdad in 1020 will copy it, and someone in Oxford a thousand years later will read it.
The Denkard's method, recovered: how Zoroastrian priests read the Gathas, in the study that opens Book 9.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the Denkard's inaccessibility and of the demands Vevaina's study makes on a reader is set out above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Denkard?
The largest surviving work of Zoroastrian literature, a ninth-century compendium in Middle Persian whose title means Acts of the Religion. It originally had nine books; the first two and part of the third are lost, and what remains runs to well over a thousand pages.
Who wrote it?
Two high priests of the ninth century, Adurfarnbag son of Farrokhzad and, later, Adurbad son of Emed, who compiled and edited earlier material into the form we have. It is a priestly work, not a single author's.
What does it contain?
Book 3 is a long defence of Zoroastrian doctrine against Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Manichaeism. Book 4 is a history of the scripture. Book 5 answers questions from a Christian. Book 6 is wisdom literature. Book 7 is the life of Zarathustra. Books 8 and 9 summarise and comment on the lost Avesta.
Why is it important?
Because most of the Avesta is lost and Books 8 and 9 are our main evidence for what it contained, and because Book 3 is the fullest statement of Zoroastrian theology as a reasoned system, written under pressure from rival faiths.
Is there a complete English translation?
No. West translated Books 7, 8 and 9 for the Sacred Books of the East in the 1890s. Book 3 exists in de Menasce's French translation. Modern English translations exist for parts, and Vevaina's study translates the Sudgar Nask commentary from Book 9.
What is Vevaina's book?
Zoroastrian Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity, a study and translation of the Sudgar Nask commentary in Denkard Book 9, showing how the priests read the Gathas allegorically and eschatologically. It is the best recent scholarly entry to the Denkard's method.
What is the Sudgar Nask?
One of the twenty-one divisions of the lost Avesta, a commentary on the Gathas and other Old Avestan texts. The Avestan original is gone; what survives is the Denkard's summary of its Middle Persian commentary, which is what Vevaina studies.
How did Zoroastrian priests read scripture?
Vevaina shows that they read the Gathas as encoded prophecy of the end of the world, drawing eschatological meaning from lines that on their face are hymns, in ways closely parallel to Jewish midrash and early Christian allegory.
How does it relate to the Bundahishn?
Both are ninth-century Pahlavi compilations preserving older tradition. The Bundahishn is a cosmology; the Denkard is a theology, an apologetic and a scriptural digest. They were produced by the same priestly milieu under the same pressures.
Is it readable?
Only in parts, and only in translation with commentary. Book 6, the wisdom sayings, and Book 7, the life of Zarathustra, are accessible. Book 3 is dense scholastic argument. Books 8 and 9 are summaries of summaries.
What is the argument of Book 3?
That the Zoroastrian dualism of two independent principles is the only rational account of a world containing both good and evil, and that monotheism, by making God the author of everything, makes him the author of evil. It is directed against Islam above all.
Who should read it?
Students of Zoroastrianism beyond the introductory level, readers interested in how scripture was read in late antiquity across traditions, and anyone wanting to see a dualist theology argued rather than assumed.
Take the argument seriously
Book 3 of the Denkard asks a question most people raised in a monotheist culture have learned not to ask: if one God made everything, who made the evil? The priests thought the question had only one honest answer and they built a theology on it. You do not have to agree. But sit with the argument as they made it, without the reflexive replies, for as long as it takes to see why intelligent people held it for a thousand years. That is the exercise the Denkard offers, and it is one very few other books can.
Sources & References
- Vevaina, Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw. Zoroastrian Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity: Commentary on the Sudgar Nask of Denkard Book 9, Harrassowitz, Iranica, 2022.
- West, E. W., trans. Pahlavi Texts, Parts IV and V (Denkard Books 7, 8, 9), Sacred Books of the East vols. 37 and 47.
- De Menasce, Jean, trans. Le troisième livre du Dēnkart, 1973.
- Shaked, Shaul, trans. The Wisdom of the Sasanian Sages (Dēnkard VI), 1979.
- Molé, Marijan. La légende de Zoroastre selon les textes pehlevis, on Book 7.
- Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices.