English translation of Holy Zend Avesta − Yasna i. Table of Contents YASNA 20 − ZAND, OR COMMENTARY, ON THE ASHEM VOHU.49 YASNA 21 − CATECHETICAL ZAND, OR. Lo Zend-Avesta, in italiano. Download with Google Download with Facebook or download with email. Lo Zend-Avesta, in italiano.

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The Avesta/əˈvɛstə/ is the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the otherwise unrecorded Avestan language.^[1]

The Avesta texts fall into several different categories, arranged either by dialect, or by usage. The principal text in the liturgical group is the Yasna, which takes its name from the Yasna ceremony, Zoroastrianism's primary act of worship, and at which the Yasna text is recited. The most important portion of the Yasna texts are the five Gathas, consisting of seventeen hymns attributed to Zoroaster himself. These hymns, together with five other short Old Avestan texts that are also part of the Yasna, are in the Old (or 'Gathic') Avestan language. The remainder of the Yasna's texts are in Younger Avestan, which is not only from a later stage of the language, but also from a different geographic region.

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Extensions to the Yasna ceremony include the texts of the Vendidad and the Visperad.^[2] The Visperad extensions consist mainly of additional invocations of the divinities (yazatas),^[3] while the Vendidad is a mixed collection of prose texts mostly dealing with purity laws.^[3] Even today, the Vendidad is the only liturgical text that is not recited entirely from memory.^[3] Some of the materials of the extended Yasna are from the Yashts,^[3] which are hymns to the individual yazatas. Unlike the Yasna, Visperad and Vendidad, the Yashts and the other lesser texts of the Avesta are no longer used liturgically in high rituals. Aside from the Yashts, these other lesser texts include the Nyayesh texts, the Gah texts, the Siroza, and various other fragments. Together, these lesser texts are conventionally called Khordeh Avesta or 'Little Avesta' texts. When the first Khordeh Avesta editions were printed in the 19th century, these texts (together with some non-Avestan language prayers) became a book of common prayer for lay people.^[2]

The term Avesta is from the 9th/10th-century works of Zoroastrian tradition in which the word appears as Zoroastrian Middle Persianabestāg,^[4]^[5]Book Pahlaviʾp(y)stʾkʼ. In that context, abestāg texts are portrayed as received knowledge, and are distinguished from the exegetical commentaries (the zand) thereof. The literal meaning of the word abestāg is uncertain; it is generally acknowledged to be a learned borrowing from Avestan, but none of the suggested etymologies have been universally accepted. The widely repeated derivation from *upa-stavaka is from Christian Bartholomae (Altiranisches Wörterbuch, 1904), who interpreted abestāg as a contraction of a hypothetical reconstructed Old Iranian word for 'praise-song' (Bartholomae: Lobgesang); that word is not actually attested in any text.

2Structure and content

Historiography[edit]

The surviving texts of the Avesta, as they exist today, derive from a single master copy produced by collation and recension in the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE). That master copy, now lost, is known as the 'Sassanian archetype'. The oldest surviving manuscript (K1)^{[n 1]} of an Avestan language text is dated 1323 CE.^[1] Summaries of the various Avesta texts found in the 9th/10th century texts of Zoroastrian tradition suggest that a significant portion of the literature in the Avestan language has been lost.^[2] Only about one-quarter of the Avestan sentences or verses referred to by the 9th/10th century commentators can be found in the surviving texts. This suggests that three-quarters of Avestan material, including an indeterminable number of juridical, historical and legendary texts, have been lost since then. On the other hand, it appears that the most valuable portions of the canon, including all of the oldest texts, have survived. The likely reason for this is that the surviving materials represent those portions of the Avesta that were in regular liturgical use, and therefore known by heart by the priests and not dependent for their preservation on the survival of particular manuscripts.

A pre-Sasanian history of the Avesta, if it had one, is in the realm of legend and myth. The oldest surviving versions of these tales are found in the ninth to 11th century texts of Zoroastrian tradition (i.e. in the so-called 'Pahlavi books'). The legends run as follows: The twenty-one nasks ('books') of the Avesta were created by Ahura Mazda and brought by Zoroaster to his patron Vishtaspa (Denkard 4A, 3A).^[6] Supposedly, Vishtaspa (Dk 3A) or another Kayanian, Daray (Dk 4B), then had two copies made, one of which was stored in the treasury, and the other in the royal archives (Dk 4B, 5).^[7] Following Alexander's conquest, the Avesta was then supposedly destroyed or dispersed by the Greeks after they translated the scientific passages that they could make use of (AVN 7–9, Dk 3B, 8).^[8] Several centuries later, one of the Parthian emperors named Valaksh (one of the Vologases) supposedly then had the fragments collected, not only of those that had previously been written down, but also of those that had only been orally transmitted (Dk 4C).^[8]

The Denkard also transmits another legend related to the transmission of the Avesta. In that story, credit for collation and recension is given to the early Sasanian-era priest Tansar (high priest under Ardashir I, r. 224–242, and Shapur I, r 240/242–272), who had the scattered works collected, and of which he approved only a part as authoritative (Dk 3C, 4D, 4E).^[9] Tansar's work was then supposedly completed by Adurbad Mahraspandan (high priest of Shapur II, r. 309–379) who made a general revision of the canon and continued to ensure its orthodoxy (Dk 4F, AVN 1.12–1.16).^[10] A final revision was supposedly undertaken in the 6th century under Khosrow I (Dk 4G).^[11]

In the early 20th century, the legend of the Parthian-era collation engendered a search for a 'Parthian archetype' of the Avesta. In the theory of Friedrich Carl Andreas (1902), the archaic nature of the Avestan texts was assumed to be due to preservation via written transmission, and unusual or unexpected spellings in the surviving texts were assumed to be reflections of errors introduced by Sasanian-era transcription from the Aramaic alphabet-derived Pahlavi scripts.^{[n 2]} The search for the 'Arsacid archetype' was increasingly criticized in the 1940s and was eventually abandoned in the 1950s after Karl Hoffmann demonstrated that the inconsistencies noted by Andreas were actually due to unconscious alterations introduced by oral transmission.^[12] Hoffmann identifies^[13] these changes to be due^[14] in part to modifications introduced through recitation;^{[n 3]} in part to influences from other Iranian languages picked up on the route of transmission from somewhere in eastern Iran (i.e. Central Asia) via Arachosia and Sistan through to Persia;^{[n 4]} and in part due to the influence of phonetic developments in the Avestan language itself.^{[n 5]}

The legends of an Arsacid-era collation and recension are no longer taken seriously.^[18] It is now certain that for most of their long history the Avesta's various texts were handed down orally,^[18] and independently of one another, and that it was not until around the 5th or 6th century that they were committed to writt

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