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Updated: June 8, 2025
The commentary is not written in the Zend language, but in Pahlavi or Persian. The Avesta, which is written in the older Zend, the sacred language of Persia, is, like other Bibles, a collection of books written in different ages, and even, it may be, in different lands. The books were brought together into one only at some period after the Christian era.
To judge by the express statements and suggestions as also by various features in style and phraseology and further by all that we are aware of touching the circumstances of the literature we can say with certainty that, that original work like all other Persian narrative productions of the Sasanides and of the period of Arab conquest was composed in the written, language of this period, the Pahlavi.
And the same scientific character no doubt was attached to the activities of Musa and Yusuf, the sons of Khalid mentioned there as well as at Tamimi, the author of the astronomical tables Zichash Shahriyar. In this manner these translators mentioned after Ibn al Mukaffa constituted in a manner a peculiar group of scholars who prepared translations from Pahlavi into Arabic.
One can now understand why the Zend books were translated into Pahlavi. Here, too, everything agrees, and speaks loudly for their antiquity and genuineness."
Zoroaster composed the commentary on the Avesta which he called the Zend, and which in the eyes of his followers was revealed to him by God. He subsequently translated it from Pahlavi into Persian. Zoroaster, further, prepared a commentary on the Zend and called it Bazend.
Firdausi positively knew no Pahlavi and as for Arabic he knew next to nothing. He did employ written sources preponderatingly if not exclusively and these were in modern Persian. So far our information is surely trustworthy. For, Biruni testifies to a Shahname by Abu Mansur bin Abdar Razzak of Tus.
We cannot, for instance, ascertain whether alongside of the Khoday-Nameh there existed also other general continuous narrations or whether the deviations, which are for the most part trifling, in some cases of great moment, already existed in the Pahlavi work or are traceable to various recensions of that book.
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