AVESTA. – A. is the name given to the collection of the sacred and canonical books of the Mazdeans, that is, the followers of the religion of Ahuramazda. The meaning sometimes attributed to the term “avesta,” namely upasta, “fundamental text,” is not certain; the language in which the texts have been transmitted is Iranian, but there is no agreement as to the region in which it was in use. It is therefore designated, after the collection itself, as “Avestan,” while it was sometimes erroneously called zend, a term that rather indicates the commentary on the sacred books, which is written in a language different from Avestan, namely Middle Persian.
The present A. is only a small part of the ancient one, which has largely been lost; it is chiefly liturgical in character, serving to regulate the course of festive ceremonies, providing the prayers to be recited, setting forth the prescriptions to be followed, etc. It is divided into five parts, which bear the following names:
Yasna, “prayer,” is the most important nucleus, concerning the principal act of worship: the preparation and offering of the Haoma. In this function the whole of the Yasna, which comprises 72 chapters, must be recited, and it contains prayers and invocations to all the divinities in common. This part contains the oldest hymns of the Mazdean religion that have come down to us, namely the gāthā, extending from chap. 28, with some interruptions, through chap. 55.
Vispered, “all the chiefs,” is not a book in its own right, but rather an appendix to the preceding one; it contains invocations that were customarily recited especially on certain solemnities of the year, immediately after the recitation of the first.
It comprises several chapters, which are nevertheless divided in various ways: some distribute them into 27, while others into 23 or 24.
Vendidad, “law against the demons,” is legal in character and is a sort of priestly code, in which the prescriptions of legal purity, the rules for expiation, ecclesiastical penalties, and regulations concerning contracts and wages are set forth; it may therefore be regarded as the ecclesiastical, civil, and penal code. The book opens with two chapters whose content contrasts with that of the chapters that follow: the first concerns the creations of the good and evil principles, the second the legend of Yima, the flood, and Yima’s paradise. Originally the Vendidad constituted the nineteenth book of the A.
Yaft, “worship, sacrifice,” contains hymns, each of which is addressed to a particular divinity, especially to those from whom the days of the Mazdean month derive their names. They number 21 and are arranged according to the Mazdean calendar; the hymns for the remaining days of the month are therefore lacking. These hymns display greater poetic inspiration, with vivid touches and expressive color, and they sing of myths and heroic legends that reappear in the later Persian epic.
Khorda Avesta, “little A.,” is a prayer book, not composed entirely in Avestan, intended for the use of the laity.
These various parts of the A. were not composed all at once in a single historical period, but at different times separated by intervals of centuries. Nor is it easy to assign a date with certainty to the individual parts, since the texts contain no allusion to the time in which they were composed, and no other elements have so far been found to facilitate a chronological determination. Nevertheless, on the basis of morphological and syntactic, as well as linguistic, criteria, two parts of very different extent are distinguished today: the ancient A., which contains a few hymns, the gathā (cf. above), and the recent A.; the former is distinguished from the latter by its archaic forms. This distinction corresponds to a difference in style and above all in content: the style of the former is terse, concise, and abstract, and abounds in technical terms whose meaning is not always univocal, whereas that of the latter is descriptive, concrete, and at times vivid and plastic. The content of the ancient A. is profound, marked by an unusual purity of religious and moral ideas and by an elevated conception of divinity, which appears, in certain hymns, to be monotheistic; in the second, by contrast, the more developed polytheism predominates. The spirit that dominates in the one and the other is so different that, despite the constancy of the religious vocabulary, they seem to represent two different religious forms.
Text and origin. – Concerning the complete text that still existed in the ninth century A.D., the following information is available, especially from the Denhart, a Middle-Persian book. The text consisted of 21 books, and in addition there was a commentary on most of them. From the summary of each book that has come down to us, it can be inferred that at that time only book XI existed neither in text nor in commentary. Of these 21 books, only the Vendidad has come down to us in its entirety; of the others, only more or less lengthy passages remain. The ancient text contained not only strictly religious subjects and doctrines, but also accounts of both religious and profane events: for example, the life of Zarathustra, that of Kavi Vištaspa, his protector and follower, the history of the Iranian tribes and kingdoms and their respective rulers beginning with the creation, etc. The analogous narratives later found in the Iranian epic and in the Arab historians who deal with Persia derive from traditions transmitted by the A.
As for the origin of the A., the traditions likewise date from the ninth century, and are therefore recent and partly legendary. We are told that the A. (including even the commentary) was written by Kavi Vištaspa, a disciple of Zarathustra, while according to one variant Vištaspa ordered his minister Giamaspa to have it written. The text is said to have been fixed on 12,000 oxhides, in letters of gold and in two copies, each of which was kept in a different locality. Other, less precious copies were put into circulation. A different tradition attributes all this to the Achaemenid Darius III. During the invasion of Alexander the Great, one of these copies perished in the fire of Persepolis, while the other was carried off by the Greeks and subsequently translated into their language. When Iran shook off the Macedonian yoke, an Arsacid king, Vologeses, ordered searches to be made for the religious books and thus to reconstruct the ancient text. Five kings of the Arsacid dynasty bear the name Vologeses, and there is consequently debate as to which one is meant: some hold that it was Vologeses I, while others favor Vologeses II, who had a long and peaceful reign (148–91), and thus conditions favorable to such an undertaking. After the Arsacid dynasty was replaced by the Sassanid dynasty, its founder Ardashir (226–41) charged a certain priest, Tansar, with collecting the scattered parts of the A., assembling them into a whole, and, after examination, declaring them canonical; his son, Sapore I (241–71), then ordered that the parts concerning astronomy, medicine, and the sciences also be sought out. Sapore II (309–79), in order to set a limit to the schisms and heresies proliferating throughout the kingdom, ordered a definitive revision, which was carried out by Aturpat i Mahraspandan, who, after submitting himself to the ordeal of fire, once again declared the collection of books canonical.
After Iran fell under Arab rule, many of its inhabitants converted to Islam, and, as the number of the faithful became small, the ancient sacred books fell into disuse and were lost. In the ninth century, Atur Farnbag, the man who transmitted to us the information related above, once again set about gathering the scattered fragments of the text and its commentary in Middle Persian. But, as has been seen, very little of his collection has come down to us.
The report that Kavi Vištaspa wrote or had the A. written is a pure anachronism: in the time of Zarathustra the Iranians did not know writing, and the ancient hymns that have come down to us must have been transmitted through oral tradition; as for the rest, there are undoubtedly genuinely historical elements, but they are not always verifiable. That a copy was carried off by the Greeks is not implausible, all the more so since Pliny reports, Hist. nat., XXX, 1, 3, that Hermippus, librarian of the Library of Alexandria after Callimachus, wrote about and catalogued the writings of Zoroaster. And since he can hardly have known Persian, the sacred books of the Mazdeans must also have been translated.