Avesta

Middle Persian sources, chiefly the ninth-century Denkard, describe a Sasanian great Avesta in twenty-one nasks or volumes, the number chosen to match the twenty-one words of the Ahuna Vairya prayer and grouped in three sets of seven. The Denkard summarises the contents of each. Set against what actually survives, those summaries make the scale of loss plain: only about a quarter of the material came through, and several nasks are known only as titles and precis.

The surviving Avesta is organised by liturgical use rather than by subject. The Yasna, seventy-two chapters, is the text of the central act of Zoroastrian worship, recited while the ritual is performed. The Visperad is a supplementary set of invocations interpolated into the Yasna at seasonal festivals. The Vendidad, more properly Videvdad, "the law against the demons", is twenty-two chapters of purity regulation, dealing with pollution, corpses, dogs, medicine and penalties, and it is the most controversial part of the corpus, some modern Zoroastrians treat it as a priestly accretion at odds with the ethical religion of the Gathas rather than as scripture on the same footing. The Yashts are twenty-one hymns, each addressed to a particular divinity or divine concept, and they preserve a great deal of pre-Zoroastrian Iranian myth and heroic legend. The Khordeh Avesta, the "little Avesta", is a compilation of the short prayers, the five daily invocations and the passages a lay Zoroastrian actually uses, assembled in the Sasanian period and still the ordinary devotional book.

The Avesta is not written in one language. The Gathas, together with the short Yasna Haptanghaiti, are in Old Avestan, an archaic Iranian language; the rest is in Young Avestan, later and grammatically simpler. The gap between them is large enough that Young Avestan composers appear at points not to have fully understood the older text they were transmitting.

Old Avestan is strikingly close to the language of the Rig Veda, close enough that whole lines can be converted into Vedic Sanskrit by regular sound rules. That is the strongest evidence for dating, and it points early. On the linguistic argument, most Iranists now place the Gathas somewhere between about 1500 and 1000 BCE, which would put Zarathustra in the Bronze Age, before the Iranian tribes reached western Iran and long before any Persian empire.

The traditional chronology says otherwise. Zoroastrian and later Greek and Arabic sources place Zarathustra "258 years before Alexander", yielding a date around 600 BCE and making him roughly contemporary with the rise of the Medes; a separate strand of Greek report placed him thousands of years earlier still, which nobody now defends. The 258-year figure was long accepted and is defended by scholars who read it as preserving a genuine memory rather than a calculation invented to fit later needs, and it remains the date many Zoroastrians themselves give. The dating is therefore genuinely contested, but the weight of it runs early: the linguistic evidence is hard to explain if the Gathas were composed within a century or two of the Achaemenids, and the arguments for the late date rest on transmitted chronology rather than on the text.

For most of its history the Avesta was not a book. It was memorised and recited by priests, and the tradition held that the sacred word had power in its sound. Writing it came late and deliberately: in the Sasanian period, probably the fifth or sixth century CE, scribes devised the Avestan alphabet, an unusually large set of some fifty-odd letters built out of the Pahlavi script and designed to record vowels, length and fine phonetic distinctions exactly as recited. It is one of the most phonetically precise scripts of the ancient world, and it exists because the point was to fix pronunciation rather than meaning.

Even so, the surviving manuscripts are astonishingly late. The oldest, a Visperad manuscript in Copenhagen, is dated to the thirteenth century, and the oldest securely dated copies of the Yasna and Videvdad are from 1323, some eighteen centuries or more after the Gathas were composed, and seven after the alphabet was invented. Alongside the Avestan text runs the Zand, the Middle Persian translation and commentary made under the Sasanians. Zand is not Avesta; the two are distinct in status, and the European habit of calling the scripture "Zend-Avesta" came from a misreading of that relationship.

Europe knew almost nothing of the text until Anquetil-Duperron enlisted as a soldier of the French East India Company in 1755, spent years at Surat persuading Parsi priests to teach him and to part with manuscripts, and published a three-volume translation in 1771. William Jones promptly denounced it as a forgery, arguing that the work was too tedious to be genuine scripture and that Anquetil had not known enough Persian to read it. Anquetil was vindicated in the 1790s once Germanic scholars examined the manuscripts. The Avesta is still recited today by Parsi priests in India and Irani priests in Iran, in a language none of them speaks.