Note 18 — Chapter II · The Zoroastrians in Persia

This series of vicissitudes and misfortunes accounts for the small number of the survivors, their precarious life, their difficulties in the exercise of their religion, and the dispersion of their sacred books. In the time of Ibn Haukhal each village had its temple, its priests, and its sacred book. According to Mr. Dosabhai Framji Karaka, in 1858 there were thirty-five Fire Temples in Yezd and its environs. At present there are four in Yezd itself, eighteen in the neighbouring village, and one at Kirman. As for the sacred books there are only those that are to be found in India. Westergaard, who visited Persia in 1843, writing to his friend the late Dr. Wilson of Bombay, to inform him of his disappointment, says,18 “I have stopped in Yezd for eleven days, and although I have mixed in their gatherings, I have seen but sixteen or seventeen books in all; two or three copies of the Vendidad Sadé and of the Izeschné, which they call Yasna, and six or seven copies of the Khorda-Avesta. I have only been able to obtain two and a portion of a third, a part of the Bundahish and of another Pehlvi book. That is all that I have succeeded in obtaining, in spite of all my efforts to get more—for instance, the fragments of the Izeschne with a Pehlvi or Pazend translation, of which there is only one copy in Europe, that at Copenhagen.”