AVESTA. - The collection of the sacred and canonical books of the Mazdeans, that is, of the followers of the religion of Ahuramazda, is called the A. The meaning that is sometimes attributed to the term "avesta," namely upasta "fundamental text," is not certain; moreover, the language in which the texts are handed down is Iranian, but there is no agreement on the region in which it was in use; it is therefore designated by the collection itself as "Avestic," and sometimes it was erroneously called zend, a term that rather indicates the commentary on the sacred books, which is written in a language different from Avestic, namely in Middle Persian.
The present A. is nothing but a small part of the ancient one, largely lost; it is chiefly liturgical in character, serving to regulate the course of the festal ceremonies, giving the prayers to be recited, setting out the prescriptions to be followed, etc. It is divided into five parts, which have 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 Yasna must be recited, which comprises 72 chapters, and contains prayers and invocations to all the divinities in common. In this part are contained the oldest hymns that have come down to us of the Mazdean religion, namely the gāthā, which run from ch. 28 with some interruption up to ch. 55.
Vispered "all the chiefs," is not a book standing by itself, but rather an appendix to the preceding one; it contains invocations, which used to be recited especially on certain solemnities of the year, immediately after the recitation of the first.
It comprises several chapters, which however are customarily divided in various ways: some distribute them into 27, others instead into 23 or 24.
Vendidad "law against the demons," has a legal character, and is a kind of priestly code, in which are set out the prescriptions of legal purity, the norms for expiation, the ecclesiastical penalties, the rules for contracts and fees; it can therefore be considered as the ecclesiastical, civil and penal code. The book opens with two chapters whose content contrasts with that of the following chapters: the first on the creations of the good principle and the evil one, the second on the legend of Yima, on the flood, on the paradise of Yima. Originally the Vendidad constituted the 19th book of the A.
Yaft "adoration, sacrifice" contains canticles, each of which is addressed to a particular divinity, especially to those from which the days of the Mazdean month take their name. They are 21 in number, ordered according to the Mazdean calendar; the hymns for the remaining days of the month are therefore missing. In these hymns a greater poetic inspiration appears, with vividness of touches and color of expression, and myths and heroic legends are sung, which reappear in the later Persian epic.
Khorda Avesta "small A.," is a prayer book, not entirely composed in the Avestic language, for the use of the laity.
These various parts of the A. were not composed all at once in a single historical epoch but at different times with intervals of centuries. Nor is it easy to assign a date with certainty to the individual parts, since any allusion to the time in which they were composed is lacking in the texts, and no other elements have so far been found that would facilitate a chronological determination. Nevertheless, on the basis of a morphological and syntactic criterion, as well as a linguistic one, two parts are today distinguished, of very different extent: the ancient A., which contains few hymns: the gathā (cf. above), and the recent A.: the first stands apart from the second by its archaic forms. This distinction is matched by a diversity of style and especially of content: the style of the first is terse, concise, abstract and abounds in technical terms whose meaning is not always unambiguous, while that of the second is descriptive, concrete, sometimes colorful and plastic. The content, moreover, in the ancient A. is profound, of an unusual purity of religious and moral ideas, and of an elevated conception of the divinity, which appears, in certain hymns, monotheistic; in the second, on the other hand, the most developed polytheism dominates. The spirit that dominates in the one and in the other is so different that it seems to be a question, despite the constancy of the religious vocabulary, of two different religious forms.
Text and origin. - About the entire text that still existed in the 9th century A.D. we have the following information, especially from the Denhart, a Middle Persian book. The text consisted of 21 books, and besides it there was also a commentary on most of them. From the summary of each book that has come down to us, it emerges that only of book XI did there then exist neither the text nor the commentary. Of these 21 books only the Vendidad has come down to us in its entirety; of the others only more or less long fragments remain. The ancient text contained not only strictly religious matters and doctrines, but also narratives of events both religious and profane: for example, the life of Zarathustra, that of Kavi Vištaspa, his protector and follower, the history of the Iranian stocks and kingdoms and of their respective sovereigns beginning from the creation, etc. The analogous narratives that are later found in the Iranian epic and in the Arab historians who deal with Persia come from the traditions handed down by the A.
As for the origin of the A., the traditions are likewise of the 9th century, therefore of recent date and partly legendary. We are told that the A. (including even the commentary) would have been written by Kavi Vištaspa, a disciple of Zarathustra, while according to a variant Vištaspa would have given orders to write it to his minister Giamaspa. The text would have been fixed on 12,000 ox hides, with letters of gold and in duplicate copy, each of which was kept in two different localities. 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 burning of Persepolis, while the other was carried off by the Greeks and then translated into their language. When Iran shook off the yoke of the Macedonians, an Arsacid king, Vologeses, ordered a search for the religious books and the reconstruction in this way of the ancient text. In the Arsacid dynasty there appear five kings who bear the name Vologeses, and there is therefore discussion of which of these is meant: some hold that it is Vologeses I, others instead favor Vologeses II, who had a long and peaceful reign (148-91), and therefore conditions favorable to such a work. When the Arsacid dynasty was replaced by the Sassanid one, the founder of the latter, Ardashir (226-41), charged a certain priest Tansar with gathering the dispersed parts of the A., reuniting them into one body and, after examination, declaring them canonical; his son then, Shapur I (241-71), ordered a search also for the parts that concerned astronomy and medicine and the sciences. Shapur II (309-79), in order to set a barrier against the schisms and heresies swarming in the kingdom, ordered a definitive revision, which was carried out by Aturpat i Mahraspandan, who, after submitting to the ordeal of fire, once again declared the collection of books canonical.
When Iran fell under Arab dominion, many of its inhabitants converted to Islam, and, the number of the faithful having remained small, the ancient sacred books fell into disuse and were lost. And in the 9th century, Atur Farnbag, the one who has transmitted to us the information reported above, set himself once again to gathering the dispersed members of the text and the related 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 times of Zarathustra the Iranians did not know writing, and the ancient hymns that have come down to us must have been handed down by oral tradition; as for the rest, there are without doubt genuinely historical elements, but they are not always verifiable. That a copy was carried off by the Greeks is not improbable, all the more so since we have notice in Pliny, Hist. nat., XXX, 1, 3, that Hermippus, librarian of the library of Alexandria after Callimachus, wrote and made the catalogue of the writings of Zoroaster. And since he will hardly have known Persian, the sacred books of the Mazdeans must also have been translated.
Bibliography3 works
Giuseppe Messina