Dan Sheffield: The Quest for the Historical Zarathustra from ZAGNY on Vimeo.
Dan Sheffield, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University will deliver this lecture as part of the Adult Lecture Series at the Darbe Mehr.
The Quest for the Historical Zarathustra: Parsis and Philologists on the Prophet in 19th century Bombay
In 1854, a German philologist named Martin Haug discovered that the Gāthās, a small section of the Zoroastrian scriptures, were composed in an older language than the rest of the Avesta. Haug became the first to attribute the authorship of the Gāthās to Zarathustra
and further argued that historical elements of Zarathustra’s life and philosophy could be gleaned from an analysis of the text. In 1859,
Haug accepted a position at the Government College in Pune and began to collaborate with Parsi scholars with the purpose of reforming traditional learning. During the same year, a leading member of the the Rāhnumā-e Mazdayasnān Sabhā, a Parsi reform organization, named Khurshedji Rustamji Cama travelled to Germany to study with Haug’s academic rival, Friedrich Spiegel. Upon Cama’s return to Bombay, debates about the nature of Zoroastrian scripture and the historical character of Zarathustra broke out within the Parsi community not just between traditionalists and reformists, but between different groups of Parsi scholars.
In this talk, Dan hopes to illuminate these complex debates and contextualize them within the intellectual networks in which they occurred in order to illustrate the complex relations between Zoroastrian scholarship, belief, and practice that in many ways continue to be of relevance for Zoroastrians today.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.