The scriptures of Zoroastrianism, written in Avestan, a language of the E branch of the Indo-European family. Traditionally believed to have been revealed to Zoroaster, only the Gathas, a set of 17 hymns, may be attributed to him. Few portions of the original survive.
See Avesta Municipality for the Swedish town
The Avesta is the primary collection of sacred texts of Zoroastrianism. Although some of the texts are very old, the term Avesta itself only dates to the second century CE.
History
Age of the texts
The texts of the Avesta was collated over several hundred years. The most important portion, the Gathas, in Gathic Avestan, are the hymns thought to have been composed by Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) himself, and dates linguistically to around 1000 BCE. The liturgical texts of the Yasna, which includes the Gathas, is partially in Older and partially in Younger Avestan. The Visperad contains the youngest portion of the Avesta, which are in middle Persian and date to Sassanid times (226-651 CE).
Early transmission
Some Avesta texts are thought to have been transmitted orally for centuries before they found written form. The Book of Arda Viraf, a work composed in the 3rd or 4th century CE, suggests that the Gathas and some other texts that were incorporated into the Avesta had previously existed in the palace library of the Achaemenid kings (648–330 BCE). However, neither assertion can be confirmed since the texts, if they existed, have been lost.
Nonetheless, Rasmus Christian Rask concluded that the texts must indeed be the remnants of a much larger literature, as Pliny the Elder had suggested in his Naturalis Historiae, where he describes one Hermippus of Smyrna having "interpreted two million verses of Zoroaster" in the 3rd century BCE. An Introduction to an Ancient Faith (1998, Brighton) points out, it is unlikely that the Gathas and older Yasna texts would have retained their old-language qualities if they had only been orally transmitted.
Later redaction
According to the Dēnkard, a semi-religious work written in the 9th century, the king Volgash (thought to be the Parthian king Vologases IV, c. 147–191 CE) attempted to have the sacred texts collected and collated.
In the 3rd century, the Sassanian emperor Ardashir I (226-241 CE) commanded his high priest Tonsar (or Tansar) to compile the theological texts. According to the Dēnkard, the Tonsar effort resulted in the reproduction of twenty-one volumes, called nasks, in the Avestan language (though not in the original Gathic Avestan), subdivided into 348 chapters, with approximately 3.5 million words in total.
One final redaction took place under Shapur II (309-379). The Avesta, as used today, is essentially the result of that revision, although important sections of the text have been lost since then, especially after the fall of the Persian empire, after which Zoroastrianism was supplanted by Islam.
European scholarship
The texts became available to European scholarship comparatively late. Abraham Anquetil-Duperron travelled to east India in 1755, and discovered the texts in Parsi communities.
Several Avesta manuscripts were collected by Rasmus Rask on a visit to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1820, and it was Rask's examination of the Avestan language that first established that the texts must indeed be the remnants of a much larger literature of sacred texts of ancient Persia and Bactria (Ta-Hsia).
Rask's collection now lies in the library of the University of Copenhagen.
The Zend
The word Zend or Zand, meaning "commentary" or "translation", refers to late middle Persian and Pazend language supplementaries in Pahlavi script. These commentaries from the early Sassanid era were not intended for use as theological texts by themselves but for religious instruction of the (by then) non-Avestan-speaking public. In contrast, the texts of the Avesta proper remained sacrosanct and continued to be recited in Avestan, which was considered a sacred language.
The use of the expression Zend-Avesta to refer to the Avesta, or the use of Zend as the name of a language or script, are relatively recent and popular mistakes.
The confusion then became too universal in Western scholarship to be reversed, and Zend-Avesta, although a misnomer, is still occasionally used to denote the older texts.
Rask's seminal work, A Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Zend Language (Bombay, 1821), may have contributed to the confusion.
Structure and content
In its present form, the Avesta is a compilation from various sources, and its different parts date from different periods and vary widely in character.
The 21 nasks mirror the structure of the 21-word-long Ahuna Vairya prayer: each of the three lines of the prayer consists of seven words. Only about a quarter of the text from the nasks has survived until today.
The contents of the Avesta, that is, the contents of the nasks supplemented by other (semi-)theological texts, are generally divided into five categories.
The texts are preserved in two languages: the more ancient in the Avestan language, the oldest attested Indo-Iranian language still very closely related to Sanskrit and the younger texts in Middle Persian with Pahlavi script.
The Yasna
The Yasna (middle Persian yazišn "worship, oblations", cognate with Sanskrit yajña), is the primary liturgical collection. The Yasna includes all of the 21st nask (the seventh and last volume in the third and last group), which in turn includes the Gathas, the oldest and most sacred portion of the Avesta, and believed to have composed by Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) himself. The Gathas are structurally interrupted by the Yasna Haptanghāiti ("seven-chapter Yasna"), which makes up chapters 35-42 of the Yasna and is almost as old as the Gathas, consists of prayers and hymns in honour of the Supreme Deity, Ahura Mazda, the Angels, Fire, Water, and Earth.The Visparad
The Visparad (middle Persian vîspe ratavo, "all lords") is a collection of supplements to the Yasna. The Yašts are for the most part metrical in structure, and some hymns show considerable poetic merit, an attribute that is not common in the Avesta texts. The text consists of 22 Fargards, fragments arranged as discussions between Ahura Mazda and Zoroaster.Other material
All material in the Avesta that is not already present in one of the other four categories falls into a fifth category. This category does not have a name, and is generally considered to include shorter texts and prayers (as included in the Khordeh Avesta, see below), the five Nyaishes (worship and praise of the Sun, Moon, Mithra, Water, and Fire), the Sirozeh and the Afringans (blessings).The Khordeh Avesta
The Khordeh Avesta, literally meaning 'abridged Avesta', or 'a selection of Avesta prayers', is a selection of texts from the Yasna, Visparad and Yasht, as well as minor texts and brief prayers, such as the five Nyaishes.
Other Zoroastrian religious texts
Although the Avesta is by far the most important of the Zoroastrian theological texts, other works, in both middle and modern Persian, are also included in the sacred canon. The most notable among the early middle Persian texts are the Dēnkard ("Acts of Religion"), dating from the 9th century;
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