See Avesta Municipality for the Swedish town

The Avesta is a collection of the sacred texts of the Mazdaist (Zoroastrian) religion. Although some of the texts are very old, the term Avesta itself only dates to the second century CE. The term's etymological roots are the middle Persian Abestāg, old Persian Upastāvaka, "Praise ".

In Persian mythology, Abraham read the Avesta and the Zend in the midst of a furnace into which he was thrown by Nimrod. (Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable)

History

The Avesta was collated over several hundred years. The oldest 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 later portions constitute elaborations of Zoroastrian theology along with detailed descriptions of ritual practices. Some Avesta texts are known to have been transmitted orally for centuries before they found written form.

At the time of Alexander's invasion of Persia in 330 BCE, the palace library of Darius III, the last king of the Achaemenid dynasty, encompassed some 12,000 volumes (not necessarily of a religious nature) in the Gathic Avestan language. According to the Book of Arda Viraf, a work composed in the 3rd or 4th century CE, the religious and semi-religious texts were inscribed in gold ink on parchment. During the looting of Persepolis by Alexander's League troops, a fire broke out in the eastern palace of Xerxes and spread to the rest of the city. It is not known if this was a drunken accident or a deliberate act of revenge for the burning of the (first) Parthenon during the second Greco-Persian War. According to the Shatroiha-i Airan, the palace library was lost in the fire, and although this text specifically names the Avesta among the destroyed works, this latter assertion is doubtful since the Avesta is thought to not have have existed in written form until much later. Equally doubtful is a Zoroastrian legend in which Alexander commanded the Avesta be thrown into the river Zeravshan near Samarkand.

It was not until the second century CE, during the reign of Volgash (presumed to be the Parthian king Vologases IV), that any attempt was made to reconstruct the contents of the library from other sources.

Around 550 years after the destruction of the royal library by Alexander, the Sassanian emperor Ardashir I (226-241) commanded his high priest Tonsar (or Tansar) to recompile the theological texts. According to the Dinkard, a semi-religious work written in the 9th century, 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

The texts became available to European scholarship comparatively late. Abraham Anquetil-Duperron travelled to East India in 1755, and discovered the text in Parsi communities. He published a French translation in 1771, based on a modern Persian language translation provided by a Parsi priest.

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. Other manuscripts are preserved in the East India House and the British Museum in London; the Bodleian library at Oxford and at various university libraries in Paris.

The terms Zend and Avesta

"Zend-Avesta" is sometimes used to collectively refer to Zoroastrian scripture, or occasionally, as the language of Zoroastrian scripture. Both uses of the expression are incorrect.

The word Zend or Zand, meaning "commentary" or "translation", refers to late middle Persian language supplementaries in Pahlavi script. Such commentaries had become necessary because the Pahlavi script, with its minimal 14 letter alphabet, could not adequately render the Avestan words - the Avesta prayers, as recited, were in Avestan, but when written, were transliterated in the Pahlavi script. These commentaries were not intended for use as theological texts by themselves but for religious instruction of the non-Avestan-speaking populace.

The use of the expression Zend-Avesta to refer to the Avesta is a relatively recent and popular misunderstanding. In 1759, Anquetil-Duperron reported having been told that Zend was the name of the language of the more ancient writings. In his third discourse, published in 1798, Sir William Jones mentions a conversation with a Hindu priest who told him that the the script was called Zend, and the language Avesta.

The confusion then became too universal in Western scholarship to be reversed, and Zend-Avesta, although a misnomer, is still used to denote the older texts.

The error may be related to the fact that the Avestan alphabet developed during Sassanian times to work around limitations in the Pahlavi script (so as to better represent the Avestan sound system) was also referred to as Pazend, or language of the Zend. Since the words Pah-Zend and Zend are accoustically very similar, the leading syllable may have been overheard, or lost in translation.

Rask's seminal work, Über das Alter und die Echtheit der Zendsprache (German: " on the age and authenticity of the Zend-language"), 1826, may also have contributed to the confusion. N. L. Westergaard's Zendavesta, or the religious books of the Zoroastrians (Copenhagen, 1852–54) only propagated the error.

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 contents of the Avesta, that is, the contents of the nasks supplemented by other (semi-)theological texts, are generally divided into five categories. This divisions are topical (even though the organization of the nasks is not) and are by no means fixed or canonical. Some scholars prefer to place the five categories in two groups, the one liturgical, and the other general.

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. It consists of 72 sections called the Ha-iti or Ha. The 72 threads of lamb’s wool in the Kusti, the sacred thread worn by Zoroastrians, represent these sections. 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 structure of the Yasna, though handed down in prose, may once have been metrical. Six of the nasks from the first group of nasks, which are commentaries on the Gathas, also belong to the Yasna category.

The Visparad

• The Visparad (middle Persian vîspe ratavo, "all lords") is a collection of supplements to the Yasna. The Visparad is subdivided into 23 karda (sections, singular: kardo), which deal with a description of the angels, and the worship thereof.

The Yashts

• The Yašts (yešti, "worship by praise"), of which there are twenty-four, are hymns in honour of various divinities, many of whom also have days of the month dedicated to them (see Zoroastrian calendar). The hymns are an important source of Persian mythology, and were incorporated by Ferdowsi, with due acknowledgement, in his Shahnameh epic. Among the divinities to whom special Yašts are devoted we find Ardvi Sura, the goddess of waters; Tishtrya, the star Sirius; Mithra, the divinity of light and truth; Fravaši, the guardian spirits; Verethragna, the genius of victory; and the Kavaya Hvarenah, "kingly glory", the divine light illuminating the ancient kings. 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 older Hôm Yašt is part of the Yasna and is not counted among the twenty-four Yašts.

The Vendidad

• The Vendidad (corruption of Avestan Vî-Daêvô-Dāta, "Given Against the Demons"), embodies the civil and penal code. As such, it is not a religious rubric, but a guide for social behaviour, and is therefore considered by Zoroastrians to be a handbook on how to avoid evil. The Vendidad includes all of the 19th nask, which is the only nask that has survived in its entirety. The text consists of 22 Fargards, fragments arranged as discussions between God and Zoroaster. The first fargard contains a creation story in which Ormuzd (the Creator), is thwarted by Ahriman (the devil), and is followed by the description of a destructive winter on the lines of the deluge of mythology. The second fargard recounts the legend of Yima (Jamshid). The remaining fargards are mainly concerned with laws of religious purity and the penances required to atone for the violation of these laws. The Vendidad is an ecclesiastical code, not a liturgical manual. Its different parts vary widely in character and in age. Some parts may be comparatively recent in origins although the greater part is very old.

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, praise, praise" to 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. The collection, taken together, is considered the prayer book for general daily use.

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 Dinkard ("Acts of Religion"), dating from the 9th century; Bundahishn, ("Original Creation"), finished in the 11th or 12th century, but containing older material such as the nasks; the Mainog-i-Khirad ("Spirit of Wisdom"), a religious conference on questions of faith, and the Arda Viraf Namak, a sort of Zoroastrian Divina Commedia, which is especially important because of its account of the Persian ideas concerning the future life. Later Zoroastrian literature in modern Persian include the Zartushtnamah ("Book of Zoroaster"), the Sad-dar ("Hundred Doors, or Chapters"), and the Rivayats (traditional treatises).

Passages in this article incorporate text from the public domain Catholic Encyclopedia.

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