The Avesta
A Liturgy, Not a Book
- First attested
- around 800 CENo copy of any Avestan text survives from antiquity. The manuscript tradition begins only in the late thirteenth century: Jean Kellens opens his Encyclopædia Iranica survey by naming K7a, dated 1288, as the oldest, and Karl Hoffmann's article on the script gives the same year — though Kellens's own survey of the manuscripts, later in that article, prints 1278 for it. The Yasna manuscripts J2, in the Bodleian, and K5, in Copenhagen, were both copied in 1323 by Mihrābān Kayhusraw, of a priestly family of Sīstān, working in Gujarat at the invitation of the Parsi merchant Čāhil son of Sangan; his Pahlavi Vidēvdād manuscripts are L4, of 1323, and K1, which Alberto Cantera dates to 1324. One witness stands outside that line and four centuries earlier: an Aṣ̌əm Vohū prayer written in Sogdian script at Dunhuang, about 800 CE, British Library Or. 8212/84 — for Almut Hintze the unique witness of a lost Eastern Iranian recension. Hoffmann held that every extant manuscript descends from copies of the ninth or tenth century that were already corrupt.
- Claimed
- the 580s BCEasserted by The Pahlavi account in the Dēnkard and the Ardā Wirāz-nāmag: the twenty-one nasks were created by Ahura Mazdā and brought by Zarathustra to king Vištāspa, who had two copies written out; Alexander's Greeks destroyed them, and the Arsacids and Sasanians reassembled what could be found. The date is the Zoroastrian chronology preserved in the Bundahišn, which places Zarathustra 258 years before the end of the Achaemenid line under Alexander — about 588 BCE. Jean Kellens states flatly that no Achaemenid Avesta ever existed.
The claim runs about 1.4 thousand years ahead of the evidence.
The first European Avesta, published by Anquetil-Duperron in Paris in 1771, was called a Parsi forgery in the same year by William Jones — whose grievance, on Michael Franklin's account, was that Anquetil had falsely accused Oxford's Thomas Hunt of professing Avestan and complained of the Bodleian's unheated rooms — and Anquetil was not vindicated until Tychsen and Heeren, some twenty years later.
Zoroastrian scripture in Avestan, held as Ahura Mazdā's revelation to Zarathustra and recited to this day.
Avesta is the Zoroastrian name for the texts in Avestan, an Old Iranian language attested nowhere else. The ninth- or tenth-century Dēnkard describes a Sasanian collection of twenty-one nasks; Karl Friedrich Geldner reckoned in 1896 that at least three quarters is lost, and only the Vidēvdād, Alberto Cantera notes, survives in the arrangement the Dēnkard gives. The Avestan alphabet — fifty-four letters on Cantera's count, fifteen of them vowels — was invented under the Sasanians to fix a recitation's sound, not its sense. A Vidēvdād nobody in Europe could read reached the Bodleian in 1723; Anquetil-Duperron sailed for India in 1755, learned from Parsi priests at Surat, and published in 1771; William Jones at once called the manuscripts Parsi forgeries. What survives is a working liturgy, not a canon — which is why "the Avesta says" names no single book.
Light
Priests in India still recite the Yasna from memory. Alberto Cantera observes that the scribes who copied the manuscripts were those same priests, performing without them: the books were a safeguard against forgetting, not the thing remembered.
Shadow
Europe took twenty years to credit it — Duchesne-Guillemin dates the vindication to Tychsen and Heeren, 1791-94. Michael Franklin calls Jones's Lettre of 1771 a clash of egotisms: Anquetil had falsely accused Oxford's Thomas Hunt of professing Avestan, and it retarded Zend-Avesta studies for years.