AVESTA

i. Survey of the history and contents of the book

the holy book of the Zoroastrians. Avesta is the name the Mazdean (Mazdayasnian) religious tradition gives to the collection of its sacred texts. The etymology and the exact meaning of the name (Pahlavi ʾp(y)stʾk/abestāg) can not be considered established, although, despite a recent study by W. Belardi (“Il nome dell’”Avesta””), Bartholomae’s hypothesis (Die Gatha’s, p. 108) still seems to be very convincing: we should read abestāg and derive this from Old Iranian *upa-stāvaka- “praise.” Properly speaking Avesta is the collection of texts in Avestan, and Zand their translation and commentary in Book Pahlavi. The interest of the book of Avesta is twofold; on the one hand, it transmits to us the first Mazdean speculations and, on the other hand, it contains the only evidence for Avestan, an Old Iranian language which together with Old Persian constitutes the Iranian sub-division of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. The Avesta is a compilation of ancient texts, which we owe to the collaboration of the Mazdean priesthood and the Sasanian political power, but of which, unfortunately, only a fraction has been transmitted to us by the Parsi communities of India and Iran, which still remain true to the old religion. The corpus which Western scholarship has reconstituted is found in manuscripts that all date from this millennium; the most ancient (K 7a) dates from A.D. 1288 (Yasna).

3. The Indian Vidēvdād sāda is divided into two branches, that of Br1, L2, and K10, a collection of manuscripts from the eighteenth century, and that of L1, M2, O2, B2, and P1, which are all of poorer quality.

History of Avestan studies. A specimen of the Vidēvdād sāda, which was given to a merchant by the Parsis of Surat, reached the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1723: the West thus learned that Zoroaster’s book was not lost. It had only to be collected and interpreted, which could be done only with the cooperation of the Parsi priesthood. This was the work of Anquetil-Duperron. He went to India in 1755, succeeded in overcoming the reticence of the Parsis, and on 15 May 1762, deposited the 180 Avestan, Pahlavi, Persian, and Sanskrit manuscripts in the King’s library. He then began to analyze the documents he had gathered and prepared a translation of the Avesta, which was published in 1771. The following years saw no progress in Avestan studies, mainly on account of the long polemics concerning the authenticity of the text brought back by Anquetil, though already in 1776-1777 there appeared a German translation of Anquetil’s works. Also, the notion was entertained for a long time by William Jones, Paulin de Saint-Barthélémy, and others, that the Avesta was written in a Sanskrit or Prakrit dialect. The works of Emmanuel Rask and Eugène Burnouf not only established an adequate method for a philological approach to the text, but also proved conclusively that though Avestan was a language with an Iranian phonetic system, it was not the direct ancestor of Modern Persian. The deciphering of the Old Persian inscriptions finally proved, by revealing an Iranian language closely akin to Avestan and dating from the Achaemenid period, that the language of the Avesta was an antique representative of an independent Indo-European language, which was however more closely related to Indian than to any other branch of the family. The publication of a complete edition of the Avesta, by Nicolas Westergaard, a follower of Rask, concluded this first stage of the research.

Avestan studies were particularly active during the second half of the nineteenth century and became involved in a fierce polemic between the “traditional” school represented by scholars such as Spiegel and Darmesteter, who considered that the Avesta could only become clear with the help of the native Pahlavi commentary, and the “Vedic” school, of which Karl-Friedrich Geldner was the most famous representative. The latter school, skeptical about the commentary, which in its view was no more reliable a guide to the Avesta than was Sāyaṇa’s commentary to the Rigveda was convinced that the best approach to the true meaning of the Avesta was the etymological one, for which Vedic provided abundant material. During the last years of the century the discord was, if not dissipated, at least mollified: The representatives of both schools became aware that their respective methods were legitimate and dangerous at the same time, and, above all, they had learned to rate the Pahlavi commentary at its true value. This estimate of the Pahlavi commentary has not changed since that time (Klingenschmitt, “Die Pahlavi-Version”); it is essential for the understanding of the Vidēvdād and some fragments such as the Nīrangistān, but absolutely devoid of any value as to the Yasna and texts such as the Vištāsp Yašt. The scholars of that generation gave Avestan philology its great monuments, which still have not been superseded. We must mention Darmesteter’s translation (1892-1893), Geldner’s monumental critical edition (1889-1896), which was based upon the analysis of more than 120 manuscripts, the grammatical description of Avestan in the Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie (1896), and the Altiranisches Wörterbuch (1904) by Christian Bartholomae.

The year 1902 opened a new period in the history of Avestan philology. That year, at the congress in Hamburg, Friedrich-Carl Andreas stated the hypothesis that the Avesta, as it is transmitted to us, was a clumsy transcription in a differentiated phonetic alphabet of a text—the Arsacid archetype—that had been recorded in a script that omitted vowels and confused some consonants (see Andreas iii). From this he logically concluded that the only adequate philological approach to rediscover the authentic aspect of a form consisted in imagining the manner in which it was written in the Arsacid archetype. For more than forty years this principle of graphic restoration was universally applied. It was not until counterarguments were brought to light during World War II by Henning (“Disintegration”), Bailey (ZoroastrianProblems), and Morgenstierne (“Orthography and Sound-system”) that confidence in Andreas’ principle was lost. But harm had been done. Avestan philology had gone off on a wrong track precisely during the important fifty years in which the Vedic, Greek, or Latin philologies accomplished progress of prime importance and produced reference books of paramount value. Only two important works were published during that period: Les infinitifs avestiques by Emile Benveniste (Paris, 1935) and Les composés de l’Avesta by Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin (Paris and Liege, 1936), works which achieved results of value because their authors, while claiming to apply Andreas’ methods, only rarely did so.

Progress in Avestan studies from 1902 until about 1965 was confined largely to the elucidation of particular facts, almost always from the etymological point of view. Two approaches were available: etymology “from above,” from Vedic and Indo-European, and etymology “from below,” from Middle Iranian dialects that became known in the course of this century. The two approaches did not give scope for a confrontation, as had happened in the nineteenth century, because their fields of research were not the same. Comparison with Vedic and Indo-European allows us to explain morphological facts and is more fruitful in the analysis of the most ancient parts of the Avesta, while the Middle Iranian languages help clarify the phonetic and semantic aspects. Two outstanding works, both published in 1959, illustrate this point in a striking way. In his new translation of the Gāthās, H. Humbach exploited to the full the “Vedic” approach (it was used later by S. Insler in his translation of the Gāthās). On the other hand, I. Gershevitch, in his edition of Yt. 10, shed much light on the text by comparing the Middle Iranian languages.

Over the last twenty years K. Hoffmann has been in the center of the renewal of an adequate philological approach to the Avesta. His critical investigations have resulted in his delineating convincingly the history of the formation of the canon and in his establishing an important point of methodology, namely that the extant Avesta is not that of the authors but that of the Sasanian diascevasts. Thus the primary task of the philologist is to determine exactly what was written in the canon that the Sasanian priesthood collected in the course of the fourth century. The only sound way to answer this question is to combine the traditional methods of philological analysis with the handling of a linguistic postulate. The different readings must be evaluated on the basis of criticism of the manuscripts, and the reading which must be considered as genuine in the sense that it belonged to the Sasanian archetype must be confronted with the linguistic postulate, i.e., with the form which comparison with Vedic leads one to expect. If both agree, we can consider it as a proof.