The Zend Avesta, Part I (SBE04): Vendîdâd: Fargard I

8:6 Vendîdâd Sâdah: 'Then they come forth to kill and to strike to the heart! A gloss cites, as productions of the wizard, I snow and hail' (cf. Hippocrates, De Morbo Sacro 1, and Pausanias 2, 34, 4). To that gloss seems to belong the corrupt Zend sentence that follows, and that may mean 'they increase the plague of locusts' (cf. Farg. VII, 26). 8:7 Raï. See Introd. III. 15. 8:8 'They doubt themselves and cause other people to doubt' (Comm.) 9:1 A land unknown. Asp.: China, which is certainly wrong. There was a town of that name in Khorasan (Karkh). 9:2 See Farg. VIII, 73. 9:3 See the Introd. to the Farg. 9:4 Farg. XVI, 11 seq. 9:5 Possibly an allusion to Azis Dahâka (Zohâk), who, as a king, represents the foreign conqueror (in later tradition the Tâzî or Arab; possibly in older tradition the Assyrian). 9:6 The basin of the affluents of the Indus, the modern Pañgâb (= the Five Rivers). 9:7 'Arvastân-i-Rûm (Roman Mesopotamia),' (Comm.; see the Introd. to the Farg.) 9:8 It is interpreted in a figurative sense as meaning 'people who p. 10 do not hold the chief for a chief' (Comm.), which is the translation for asraosha (Comm. ad XVI, 18), 'rebel against the law,' and would well apply in the Sassanian ages to the non-Mazdean people of Arvastân-i-Rûm. I think we must adopt the literal meaning, and recognise in this passage the source, or at least the oldest form, of those tales about people without a head, with eyes on their shoulders, which Pliny received from the half-Persian Ctesias (Hist. N. VII, 2; V, 8; cf. Aul. Gell. IX, 4; Sanct. August. De Civit. Dei, XVI, 8). Persian geographers mention such people, they place them in the Oriental islands near China, whence they sent ambassadors to the Khan of the Tatars (Ouseley, Catalogue). The mythical origin of those tales may be traced in Indian and Greek mythology (Orm. Ahr. § 222; cf. Pausanias IX, 20). 10:1 Vendîdâd Sâdah: 'And the oppression of the land that comes from taoza (?).'