Airport Taxi in Zand

Zend or Zand (Middle Persian: 𐭦𐭭𐭣) is a Zoroastrian profound term for exegetical glosses, paraphrases, commentaries and translations of the Avesta’s texts. The term zand is a contraction of the Avestan language word zanti (𐬰𐬀𐬌𐬥𐬙𐬌, meaning “interpretation”, or “as understood”).

Zand glosses and commentaries exist in several languages, including in the Avestan language itself. These Avestan language exegeses sometimes accompany the native text innate commented upon, but are more often elsewhere in the canon. An example of exegesis in the Avestan language itself includes Yasna 19–21, which is a set of three Younger Avestan commentaries upon the three Gathic Avestan ‘high prayers’ of Yasna 27. Zand also appears to have next existed in a variety of Middle Iranian languages, but of these Middle Iranian commentaries, the Middle Persian zand is the isolated one to survive fully, and is for this explanation regarded as ‘the’ zand.

With the notable exception of the Yashts, almost whatever surviving Avestan texts have their Middle Persian zand, which in some manuscripts appear alongside (or interleaved with) the text monster glossed. The practice of including non-Avestan commentaries contiguously the Avestan texts led to two oscillate misinterpretations in western scholarship of the term zand; these misunderstandings are described below. These glosses and commentaries were not designed for use as theological texts by themselves but for religious guidance of the (by then) non-Avestan-speaking public. In contrast, the Avestan language texts remained sacrosanct and continued to be recited in the Avestan language, which was considered a sacred language. The Middle Persian zand can be subdivided into two subgroups, those of the unshakable Avestan texts, and those of the directionless Avestan texts.

A consistent exegetical procedure is evident in manuscripts in which the original Avestan and its zand coexist. The priestly scholars first translated the Avestan as literally as possible. In a second step, the priests then translated the Avestan idiomatically. In the total step, the idiomatic translation was complemented subsequent to explanations and commentaries, often of significant length, and occasionally when different authorities physical cited.

Several important works in Middle Persian contain selections from the zand of Avestan texts, also of Avestan texts which have before been lost. Through comparison of selections from wandering texts and from remaining texts, it has been reachable to distinguish with the translations of Avestan works and the commentaries on them, and hence to some degree reconstruct the content of some of the purposeless texts. Among those texts is the Bundahishn, which has Zand-Agahih (“Knowledge from the Zand“) as its subtitle and is crucial to the concurrence of Zoroastrian cosmogony and eschatology. Another text, the Wizidagiha, “Selections (from the Zand)”, by the 9th century priest Zadspram, is a key text for conformity Sassanid-era Zoroastrian orthodoxy. The Denkard, a 9th or 10th century text, includes extensive summaries and quotations of zand texts.