When was the zend avesta written

The Avesta texts fall into several different categories, arranged either by dialect, or by usage. Even today, the Vendidad is the only liturgical text that is not recited entirely from memory.

Avestan language , also called incorrectly Zend Language , eastern Iranian language of the Avesta , the sacred book of Zoroastrianism. Avesta, also called Zend-avesta, sacred book of Zoroastrianism containing its cosmogony, law, and liturgy, the teachings of the prophet Zoroaster Zarathushtra.

The extant Avesta is all that remains of a much larger body of scripture, apparently Zoroaster's transformation of a very ancient tradition. What does Ahura mean? What does the name Avesta mean? Do Zoroastrians have a holy book?

How old are the gathas? Who do Zoroastrians worship? Zoroaster began teaching followers to worship a single god called Ahura Mazda. In the s, Russian archaeologists at Gonur Tepe, a Bronze Age site in Turkmenistan, discovered the remains of what they believed to be an early Zoroastrian fire temple. Can you convert to Zoroastrianism?

The hymn falls into two clearly distinct parts: draw upon the formulas of Yt. His conclusions were adopted by S. Hartmann, who reinforced them by adding his views concerning a tradition impregnated with Zurvanism, and by J. This distinction, if correct, reveals a duality of tradition in primitive Mazdaism based on deep divergences of formulary.

He completes his mission by building an artificial cave vara as a refuge from the great winter that was to ravage the world. The Avestan texts described above have reached us in a version that is, if not complete, at least continuous. They were edited by Geldner in his monumental edition of the Avesta. The entire Avesta, including all the fragments known to him, was translated into French by James Darmesteter.

As a rule, Wolff is more reliable than Darmesteter, whose translation follows the Pahlavi version. The fragments. In addition to the complete texts, more than twenty groups of fragments are known cf. Humbach and JamaspAsa. Geiger; JamaspAsa. Haug and West. Reichelt; Klingenschmitt. Westergaard, Zendavesta , pp. Westergaard, pp. Westergaard, p. JamaspAsa and H. Humbach, Wiesbaden, Zend-Avesta III, pp.

Gujastak Abalish , Paris, , pp. Madan, pp. Dresden, p. Brockhaus, Vendidad Sade , Leipzig, Fragments which are contained in the Pahlavi or Sanskrit translations of Avestan texts. Bartholomae, IndogermanischeForschungen 12, , pp. Careful analysis and sifting of the Pahlavi books would no doubt reveal much more material quoted from the Sasanian Avesta and Zand. The manuscripts of the Avesta. The entirety of the known handwritten tradition was the subject of a definitive analysis by Geldner in the Prolegomena to his critical edition, where the names of the manuscript families indicate the text Yasna , Visprad , etc.

We distinguish six manuscript families:. JamaspAsa, F11 and Br2 derive from Mf1. J9 and H2 contain a Sanskrit translation. The most important manuscript is F1 Nausari The Pt1 family gives a version that is independent of F1 in Yt. In this manuscript a source anterior to F1 shows through. D represents this tradition for Yt. The modern manuscript H4 , which probably influenced K40, gives an independent version of Yt.

History of Avestan studies. 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 then began to analyze the documents he had gathered and prepared a translation of the Avesta, which was published in 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. 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.

The scholars of that generation gave Avestan philology its great monuments, which still have not been superseded. The year 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. 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.

Progress in Avestan studies from until about was confined largely to the elucidation of particular facts, almost always from the etymological point of view. 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 , illustrate this point in a striking way. On the other hand, I. Gershevitch, in his edition of Yt. 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.

Historical criticism may regard this tradition, in many of its features, as mere fiction, or as a perversion of facts made for the purpose of transferring the blame for the loss of a sacred literature to other persons than those actually responsible for it.

We may, if we choose, absolve Alexander from the charge of vandalism of which he is accused, but the fact nevertheless remains, that he ordered the palace at Persepolis to be burned Diod. Even the statement as to the one or two complete copies of the Avesta may be given up as the invention of a later day.

Nevertheless the essential elements of the tradition remain unshaken, viz. The kernel of this native tradition - the fact of a late collection of older fragments - appears indisputable.

The character of the book is entirely that of a compilation. In its outward form the Avesta, as we now have it, belongs to the Sassanian period - the last survival of the compilers' work already alluded to. But this Sassanian origin of the Avesta must not be misunderstood: from the remnants and heterogeneous fragments at their disposal, the diasceuast or diasceuasts composed a new canon - erected a new edifice from the materials of the old. In point of detail, it is now impossible to draw a sharp distinction between that which they found surviving ready to their hand and that which they themselves added, or to define how far they reproduced the traditional fragments with verbal fidelity or indulged in revision and remoulding.

It may reasonably be supposed, not only that they constructed the external framework of many chapters, and also made some additions of their own - a necessary process in order to weld their motley collection of fragments into a new and coherent book - but also that they fabricated anew many formulae and imitative passages on the model of the materials at their disposal. In this consisted the " completion " of Tanvasar, expressly mentioned in the account of the Dinkard.

All those texts in which the grammar is handled, now with laxness and want of skill, and again with absolute barbarism, may probably be placed to the account of the Sassanian redactors. All the grammatically correct texts, together with those portions of the Avesta which have intrinsic worth, especially the metrical passages, are indubitably authentic and taken ad verbum from the original Avesta.

To this class, above all, belong the Gathas and the nucleus of the greater Yashts. Opinions differ greatly as to the precise age of the original texts brought together by subsequent redactors: according to some, they are pre-Achaemenian; according to Darmesteter's former opinion, they were written in Media under the Achaemenian dynasty; according to some, their source must be sought in the east, according to others, in the west of Iran.

But to search for a precise time or an exact locality is to deal with the question too narrowly; it is more correct to say that the Avesta was worked at from the time of Zoroaster down to the Sassanian period. Its oldest portions, the Gathas, proceed from the prophet himself. This conclusion is inevitable for every one to whom Zoroaster is an historical personality, and who does not shun the labour of an unprejudiced research into the meaning of those difficult texts cf.

The rest of the Avesta, in spite of the opposite opinion of orthodox Parsees, does not even claim to come from Zoroaster. As the Gathas now constitute the kernel of the most sacred prayer-book, viz. The language in which Zoroaster taught, especially a later development of it, remained as the standard with his followers, and became the sacred language of the priesthood of that faith which he had founded; as such it became, so to speak, absolved from the ordinary conditions of time and space.

Taught and acquired as an ecclesiastical language, it was enabled to live an artificial life long after it had become extinct as a vernacular - in this respect comparable to the Latin of the middle ages or the Hebrew of the rabbinical schools.

The priests, who were the composers and repositories of these texts, succeeded in giving them a perfectly general form. They refrained from practically every allusion to ephemeral or local circumstances. Thus we search vainly in the Avesta itself for any precise data to determine the period of its composition or the place where it arose. The original country of the religion, and the seat of the Avesta language,.

But neither the spiritual literature nor the sacred tongue remained limited to the east. The geography of the Avesta points both to the east and the west, particularly the north-west of Iran, but with a decided tendency to gravitate towards the east.

The vivid description of the basin of the Hilment Yasht 1 9, is peculiarly instructive. The language of the Avesta travelled with the Zoroastrian religion and with the main body of the priesthood, in all probability, that is to say, from east to west; within the limits of Iran it became international.

As has been already stated, the Avesta now in our hands is but a small portion of the book as restored and edited under the Sassanians. A most meagre proportion only of the real religious and ritual writings, the sacerdotal law and the liturgy, has been preserved to our time. The great bulk - over threef ourths of the Sassanian contents - especially the more secular literature collected, has fallen a prey to oblivion.

The understanding of the older Avesta texts began to die away at an early period. The need for a translation and interpretation became evident; and under the Later Sassanians the majority of the books, if not the whole of them, were rendered into the current Pahlavi.

A thorough use of this translation will not be possible until we have it in good critical editions, and acquaintance with its language ceases to be the monopoly of a few privileged individuals. For the interpretation of the older texts it is of great value where they are concerned with the fixed, formal statutes of the church.

But when they pass beyond this narrow sphere, as particularly in the Gathas, the Pahlavi translator becomes a defective and unreliable interpreter.

The Parsee priest, Neryosangh, subsequently translated a portion of the Pahlavi version into Sanskrit. The MSS. The oldest is the Pahlavi Vispered in Copenhagen, dated Next come the four MSS. Generally speaking, the MSS. The first European scholar to direct attention to the Avesta was Hyde of Oxford, in his Historia Religionis Veterum Persarum eoramque Magorum , which, however, failed to awake any lasting interest in the sacred writings of the Parsees.

The merit of achieving this belongs to the enthusiastic orientalist Anquetil Duperron, the fruit of whose prolonged stay in India and his acquaintance with the Parsee priests was a translation certainly very defective of the Zend-Avesta. The foundation of a scientific exegesis was laid by Burnouf. The interpretation of the Avesta is one of the most difficult problems of oriental philology.

To this very day no kind of agreement has been reached by conflicting schools, even upon some of the most important points.