BABYLON AND PERSIA

32 MEDIA, BABYLON, AND PERSIA. 'in a great measure filled from sources which, if com¬paratively modern, are not devoid of authority, sincethey are beyond a doubt supplied from ancient tra¬ditions ; these sources are various books composinga voluminous Pehlevi literature, and all belonging tothe Sassanian period, but certainly containing muchof the material of which the lost books of the oldAvestan literature were made up, even though mod¬ernized and greatly transformed by ages of oraltransmission and altered conditions of culture.Chiefand foremost among these late growths of an ancientand much grafted stem is the BuNDEHESH, an inval¬uable collection of mythical and religious narratives,about the beginning of things, and also the endand regeneration of the world, the order that rulesthe universe, chapters of afanciful geography andastronomy clearly betraying the same mythicalorigin, scraps of national heroic epos, and evenphilosophical digressions.All these rather hetero¬geneous elements arc worked into asystem with asymmetry which detracts from the genuine worth ofthis compilation by giving it a too obviously arti¬ficial character. Where every thing is smoothedand ordered and fashioned to fit, wc may be surethat the original material is marred in the handling.Still, if the handling be modern, the material as cer¬tainly is old, as is, moreover, abundantly proved byvarious hints in the Avesta it.sclf, which become in¬telligible by the light of the Bundehesh.This iswhy, although this book by its date is far removedfrom the time which the present volurrie is meant to(nearly a thousand years later than the latest