The Gāthās

Memorised for Two Millennia

First attested
1323No manuscript containing the Gāthās survives from before the fourteenth century. The oldest are two Yasna manuscripts of 1323 — J2, now in the Bodleian, and K5, in Copenhagen — both copied by Mihrābān Kayhusraw, a priest of a Sīstān family working at Cambay in Gujarat at the invitation of the Parsi merchant Čāhil son of Sangan. Older Avestan manuscripts exist but do not carry the Gāthās: K7a, a Visperad, bears a date read as 1258 or 1288 and may itself be a later copy. The oldest physical witness to any Avestan text is earlier still and is likewise not a Gāthā — a single Aṣ̌əm Vohū prayer written in Sogdian script, from Dunhuang, dated about 800 CE (British Library Or. 8212/84). The Avestan alphabet is a Sasanian invention; before it the hymns were carried by memorised recitation, fixed word for word long before the redaction that finally wrote them down. The composition date of roughly 1700–1000 BCE is a linguistic argument, not a dated witness.
Claimed
the 580s BCEasserted by Zoroastrian chronology of the Sasanian period and after, preserved in the Middle Persian Bundahišn, which places Zarathustra 258 years before the death of Dārā son of Dārā — the end of the Achaemenid line under Alexander — and so about 588 BCE. Gherardo Gnoli argued the figure is historically sound; most Iranists reject it.

The claim runs about 1.9 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The oldest surviving copies of the Gāthās are two Yasna manuscripts written in Gujarat in 1323 by the priest Mihrābān Kayhusraw — more than two millennia after the hymns were composed, and long after the Sasanian priests who rendered them into Pahlavi had, Humbach judged, ceased to understand Avestan properly.

The sacred hymns attributed to the prophet Zarathustra, forming the poetic foundation of Zoroastrian ethics and faith.

Seventeen hymns in Old Avestan, grouped by metre into five gāthās and set inside the Yasna liturgy at chapters 28–34, 43–51 and 53 — around the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, which shares the archaic language but not the attribution to Zarathustra. Their date rests on that language alone, since the hymns name no datable king or place. Mary Boyce argued in 1975 for the second millennium BCE, her limits running from about 1700 to 1000; Prods Oktor Skjærvø and others place them about 1000. Zoroastrian tradition dated its prophet later — 258 years before Alexander, roughly 588 BCE, a reckoning the Bundahišn preserves. Priests still chant them in the daily Yasna. What English calls the Zend-Avesta is a misnomer: zand is the Pahlavi commentary, and the phrase came of misreading how Parsi priests labelled their manuscripts.

Light

Yasna 44 puts question after question straight to Ahura Mazdā — who fixed the path of sun and stars, who holds the earth below and the sky from falling. Yasna 30.2 tells each hearer to weigh the two choices himself, man by man.

Shadow

They are quarried for firsts — that Zarathustra invented monotheism, heaven and hell, the devil, the messiah. Skjærvø's 2011 translations show how much of that is later Sasanian systematisation. Whose words they are is itself disputed: Kellens reads ritual poetry, not autobiography.

Sources and verification9 sources · 5 links

Primary source

  • Mary Boyce (ed. and trans.), Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, 1984, University of Chicago Press edition, 1990; the Gāthic passages, cited by Yasna chapter and stanzaCitable English of Gāthic passages with their Yasna references — the practical way to quote the hymns without relying on the 1880s Zend-Avesta.

Scholarship

  • Almut Hintze, "Avestan — Introduction, Part 4: Avestan manuscripts" (university teaching materials), undated slide set, hosted at spw.uni-goettingen.deThe two oldest manuscripts carrying the Gāthās — the Yasna manuscripts J2 (Bodleian) and K5 (Copenhagen), both copied in 1323 by Mihrābān Kayhusraw, of a priestly family of Sīstān, invited to Cambay in Gujarat by the Parsi merchant Čāhil son of Sangan — and the Sogdian-script Aṣ̌əm Vohū from Dunhuang, c. 800 CE, British Library Or. 8212/84, described there as the oldest witness to any Avestan text, predating the earliest Avestan manuscripts by more than four centuries.
  • Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1: The Early Period, 1975, Brill, Handbuch der OrientalistikThe argument, from the language of the Old Avestan hymns and the social conditions they imply, for placing Zarathustra and the Gāthās in the second millennium BCE — her limits run from about 1700 to 1000 — rather than in the sixth century. The date is hers, sits at the early end of what is argued, and is disputed; it must be attributed rather than stated.
  • Jean Kellens, "AVESTA i. Survey of the history and contents of the book", Encyclopædia Iranica, 1987, published 15 December 1987; iranicaonline.orgThat the Avesta is not a single book with fixed contents but a liturgical collection; the position of the Gāthās and the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti within its Old Avestan layer; and the Sasanian written redaction standing at the end of a long oral transmission.
  • Jean Kellens and Eric Pirart, Les textes vieil-avestiques, 3 vols, 1991, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1988–1991 — vol. 1 introduction, text and translation; vol. 2 grammatical repertoires and lexicon; vol. 3 commentaryThe reading of the Gāthās as ritual poetry produced by and for a religious community rather than one prophet's autobiography — the basis of the case against Zarathustra's personal authorship.
  • Helmut Humbach, "GĀTHĀS i. Texts", Encyclopædia Iranica, 2000, published 15 December 2000; iranicaonline.orgThe Gāthās' extent and arrangement — seventeen hymns at Yasna 28–34, 43–46, 47–50, 51 and 53, grouped into five gāthās by metre — their Old Avestan language as against the Young Avestan of the surrounding Yasna, and Humbach's judgement that the author or authors of the Pahlavi translation had a very poor knowledge of Avestan.
  • Prods Oktor Skjærvø, The Spirit of Zoroastrianism, 2011, Yale University Press; the Old Avestan texts and their introductionCurrent philological English of the Gāthās, and the corrective to claims that Zarathustra invented monotheism, heaven and hell, the devil or the messiah, much of which belongs to later Sasanian systematisation rather than to the hymns.

Where this claim originates

Further reading

  • Helmut Humbach, Josef Elfenbein and Prods Oktor Skjærvø, The Gāthās of Zarathushtra and the Other Old Avestan Texts, 2 vols, 1991, Heidelberg: WinterThe standard English philological edition and commentary on the whole Old Avestan corpus — the Gāthās, the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti and the short prayers — and the place to check any rendering used in this entry.

Linked entries

  • Set againstPseudo-Dionysius the AreopagiteDisputed

    Two opposite attribution problems. The Dionysian corpus is a demonstrably later text circulating under a borrowed ancient name; the Gāthās are demonstrably ancient, and it is the named author who is doubted — Kellens and Skjærvø read them as a community's ritual poetry rather than one prophet's, while Humbach and Hintze keep the traditional attribution.

  • Set againstYggdrasilAttested

    Both bodies of verse reached surviving parchment in the same span and no earlier: the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda was written in Iceland about 1270, the oldest Yasna manuscripts carrying the Gāthās in Gujarat in 1323. Neither gap argues against antiquity, but in both cases everything before the manuscript is inference.

  • Set againstThe KojikiAttested

    Both survive only in fourteenth-century copies: the oldest securely dated Avestan manuscripts, J2 and K5, were written by Mihrābān Kay Khusraw in 1323, half a century before Ken'yu copied the Kojiki.

  • Set againstThe Descent of InannaAttested

    Inanna's descent survives on Old Babylonian clay of about 1800 BCE, close to its own composition; no object carrying the Gāthās was made before 1323 CE. What a culture chose to write on, more than how old its words are, decides what can be recovered from it.

  • Received fromThe AvestaAttested

    The Gāthās sit inside the Avesta rather than beside it: seventeen Old Avestan hymns placed within the Yasna at chapters 28-34, 43-51 and 53, surrounded by Young Avestan text several centuries younger in language.

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