Ahura Mazda in Old Persian

<< The Nature of the Deity Ahura Mazda 
<< MySite Home 
 
By the grace of G-d 
Copyright © 2009 Nathaniel Segal 

The conventional translation of Ahura Mazda, the Persian god's name, is 'Wise Lord'.  It is also considered to be one word in Old Persian, or at least like a single word.

I beg to differ.  The name of the Persian high god derives from two words.  The word ahura ^* likely refers to the vault of the sky in the Old Persian language, and mazda probably means 'highest', 'largest', or 'greatest'.  The Persians were worshiping "Highest Heaven" in the sense of believing in one All-High G-d ^* who has no pantheon.

I maintain that the Achaemenid kings were using monotheism as a state policy – one All-High G-d.

The earliest text invoking Ahura Mazda as G-d survives from the period of the Achaemenid Empire but not earlier.  Conventional wisdom attributes the origin of the name Ahura Mazda to an early religion from a region of Persia.

Supposedly, the religion of the Persians before and during the Achaemenid period was Zoroastrianism.  Perhaps we can call their religion by this name, but we have only legend about Persian religion before the Avestan scriptures were written.  Zarathustra (Zoroaster) was the prophet/founder of Zoroastrianism.  His life, though, is full of legend. It is also unreasonable to assign any date to his life.

Zarathustra (Zoroaster) was a charismatic personality.  One must believe that he lived, and then surmise when he lived.  This is especially true in pre-literate societies.  Prophets and founders of religions rarely, if ever, leave tangible evidence about their lives and when they really lived.  They tread lightly before the derived religion acquires temples, and so on.  In the case of Zoroastrianism, their worship sites centered on fire pillars.  Although remnants of fire pillars can be assigned dates by archaeologists, there is no way to connect these artifacts with the avowed leader of the worshipers. Some linguists claim to be able to date the Avestan books based a on studies of the language. These experts fail to tell us that the speech communities

According to collective wisdom, the Old Persian word mazda means 'wise'.  However, our knowledge of Old Persian gives us no clue.  This word is only associated with the word ahura, and our knowledge of Old Persian gives us no clue to what this word means.

Linguists propose their theories of the Old Persian language based on the closely related languages in the Indo-European group of languages – often called the Indo-Iranian family.  This speech community lost contact with the Indo-European speakers who migrated to Europe.

Old Persian belongs to the Aryan subfamily of the Indo-European languages.  At times we find striking similarities between words in one Indo-European language and another.  This is the case with the words ahura and mazda.  These words have cognates ^* in other languages.

In the Greek language, we find the word o'ürănόs ^* which refers to the sky and the heavens.  The later Greeks, when they began to write their language and its dialects, had lost the ability to pronounce the letter 'h'.  Therefore, it is easy to see that at one time there had been an /h/ sound between the two vowels that begin the word o'ürănόs.  Only later, the two vowels became transformed into one vowel sound – /ū/ – a vowel that had not been part of Greek speech before.  Without the vowel change, speakers of Greek would have faced pronunciation of a difficult diphthong.  (Since then, the two Greek letters omicron and epsilon together represent this vowel /ū/.)

As a relic, the Greeks inserted a breath mark over the letter üpsilon (epsilon):

The word mazda also has cognates in Indo-European languages:  Sanskrit and Greek.  In Greek, the word mega denotes 'large.'  A form of the comparative, 'larger', is:

According to Liddell and Scott (in their elaborate dictionary of the Classical Greek language), Plutarch uses the word:

Also, according to Liddell and Scott, majman- means 'greatness' in Sanskrit.

Returning to Persian, in contemporary Parsee (Farsee), the spoken language of today's Iran, the word mazdâ means profit – that which is 'higher than' or 'above' expenses.

The Achaemenians wrote the god's name Ahura Mazda as one string of characters.  In later Achaemenian inscriptions, Ahura Mazda is written with a unique logogram – three characters instead of writing out Ahura Mazda with seven.  Even so, this logogram requires almost the same amount of effort to write as does the character string.  The logogram consists of twenty-five cuneiform wedges, whereas writing the full name requires twenty-seven wedges.

From about the time of Jesus onward, we have a rich nexus of information about charismatic figures.  Even so, what we do not know heavily outweighs what we know or think we know.

Notes and Comments:

* ahura - Old Persian was written as syllables, not quite with an alphabet.  The word ahura was written as:  a-ū-ra.  According to linguistic evidence, these two vowels – a-ū – were not pronounced as a diphthong, although diphthongs do exist in Old Persian.  An example of an Old Persian diphthong occurs in the name 'Cyrus' – Kuraush.  The Old Persian spelling of this name is /kū-ū-ra-ū-sh/.  Almost certainly, Cyrus's name was pronounced with only two syllables – KOO rowsh or koo ROWSH.  The Old Persian spelling /a'ūra/ corresponds to the Greek spelling of o'ürănόs.  Note the three distinct root syllables.  The syllable nόs is a Greek language suffix.

* All-High G-d - compare with the Hebrew expressions Keil Elyon;  Keil HaShamayim.  These two expressions appear in Hebrew texts not long after Jewish contact with Persians.

* cognates -

* o'ürănόs - oh ü rah NOHS;  all "short European" vowels.

In the small lexicon of Old Persian, framâtâr means 'lord' or 'master'.  Similarly, framânâ or framâ mean 'command'.  'Wise' does not appear in the lexicon.  However,
upariy : above, over
asman- : sky