Zandi Vahman Yasht : A Zoroastrian Apocalypse in New Persian
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The genesis of the apocalyptic genre of literature and the role Iranian traditions played in this context has been the center of attention in recent decades. The uncertainty over the origin of apocalypticism has demonstrated the need for a more contemporaneous and complete survey of the history of the Zand ī Wahman Yašt, the most important Zoroastrian text in apocalyptic genre. In this text, Ahura Mazda (the supreme God in Zoroastrianism) foretells the apocalyptic events at the End of Time to Zoroaster in a prophetic dream and explains the calamities that the Iranian nation and Zoroastrian believers will have to endure. The present study investigates, edits, and translates the New Persian version of the ZWY for the first time, and argues that the ZWYᴺᴾ is not a translation of the extant Pahlavi ZWY and must have derived from another recension of the apocalyptic materials in Pahlavi. Nevertheless, there are several unsettled problems associated with the ZWYᴾᵃʰ· that can be solved with the help of the ZWYᴺᴾ. The ZWYᴺᴾ contains several paragraphs of significant length missing from both the ZWYᴾᵃʰ· and the Pāzand ZWY. These passages find resemblance in other Zoroastrian apocalyptic texts. There are several uncertainties in these shared passages, and the present dissertation has proposed new solutions to these old problems with the help of the information contained in the ZWYᴺᴾ. For example, there are several unspecified kings/conquerors in the text who were previously misidentified. These characters are reexamined, and new identifications are proposed. Additionally, several toponyms/ethnonyms are re-evaluated, and all are demonstrated to be in east Iran. Finally, it is proposed that the ZWY is the product of the turbulent era in the first half of the 8th c. CE in east Iran and Central Asia when the Umayyads had lost control over most of the region and the indigenous population and their local rulers were trying to regain their autonomy by siding with the Turks. This is when the descendants of Yazdgird III, the last Sasanian Emperor, sought refuge in the region and were able to establish a short-lived court-in-exile with the help of the Chinese. The character of Bahrām-i varjāvand in the ZWY and in other Zoroastrian apocalyptic texts is mainly formed after one of these Sasanian princes, and Padišxwārgar, their last stronghold, is where the apocalyptic Wahrām is expected to emerge from.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".