Khusro, restorer of the faith

Touraj Daryaee, possibly our best researcher in Late Sasanian Iran, explains Khusro's propaganda. The first Khusro, not the doofus who claimed his name and threw Persia into the dumper.

Khusro came to the scene with a disunited Iran. One Mazdak had spread about an attempt at unifying the dên religion, further bringing in some Manichaean elements I think. Mazdak's proposals failed to impress the Magi in the outlying shrines. Plus in AD 540 everyone else was doin' it.

So Khusro told his people a story. Under the founder of his dynasty, Artaxerxes / Arda[x]shir - Khusro claimed - the old dên had been broken. The Greeks had occupied Perse(polis) and stolen its library; they drove other refugees to the Indus. Ardashir brought the texts back. But recently Mazdak has scattered the remnants again.

The texts which tell this tale are now in the dên-kard books, specifically volumes III and IV. The tale is anachronistic as stated: Ardashir never got as far as the India. Also Ardashir was unaware of several Avestan tropes (e.g the Kayanid kings - not historical), or at least unaware that they mattered to his state. But Khusro got that far, and knew that much. And his vision of the religion - which we now call Zoroastrianism - was able to argue its case against the (now-Christian) Greeks on a Greek level; further explaining how it got here.

Of interest (to me) is who is not in these Denkard books: Yazdegird I, around 400 AD. It was then that the shahanshah starts referring to such Avesta tropes as are not generally Iranian - like the Kayanids. To the extent Khusro had a predecessor in "restoring" the Iranian faith, it was Yazdegird.

At a guess, Ardashir offered propaganda points that Yazdegird couldn't. Ardashir was earlier, in fact the founder of the dynasty. As Ardashir united the state, he could be made to unite the state's religion - in Khusro's image. (Him and Tansar, whom Daryaee calls "Tôsar". I understand the Letter of Tansar is authentic, being the real ideologic underpin of Ardashir's state.) Also as earlier he could "witness" to more antiquity for the Zoroastrian texts and dogmas. In Persia, anyway; the Avesta is of course an Iranian text much older than the Sasanian state, but it's not Persian.