Avestan

In a fire temple in Yazd, a priest in white, his mouth covered by a cloth so that his breath does not touch the fire, recites prayers whose words were already ancient when Darius carved his inscriptions. The language is Avestan, named after the Avesta, the body of Zoroastrian scripture. It is known from no other source. No Avestan inscription, letter or coin has ever been found. The language survives because generations of priests learned it by heart.

Avestan is an Old Iranian language, a sister rather than an ancestor of Old Persian. Scholars distinguish two stages. Old Avestan, sometimes called Gathic, is the language of the Gāthās, seventeen hymns that tradition attributes to Zarathustra himself, and of a short liturgy called the Yasna Haptanghāiti. Young Avestan is the language of most of the rest: hymns to divinities, the Yashts; the liturgy of the Yasna; and the purity laws of the Vendidād. The geography of the texts points towards the east of the Iranian world, to the lands of present-day Afghanistan and Central Asia, and the oldest layer is very archaic, close in grammar to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda.

From memory to manuscript

For many centuries the Avesta was passed on orally. It was written down only under the Sasanians, probably in the fifth or sixth century CE, when priests devised a special alphabet for it, based on the Pahlavi script but far more precise, with separate letters for many fine distinctions of vowel and consonant, so that not a syllable of the sacred sound would be lost. The Sasanian Avesta was much larger than what survives: a Middle Persian summary describes twenty-one books, and only a fraction of the whole came through the following centuries. The oldest surviving manuscripts date from the fourteenth century.

A living liturgy

Zoroastrians in Iran and India still pray in Avestan, five times a day for the devout. The short prayers are learned in childhood: the Ashem Vohu, which begins ashem vohu vahishtem asti, ‘truth is the best good’, and the Yathā Ahū Vairyo. Children recite them at the sedreh-pushi or navjote, when they are first invested with the sacred shirt and cord. Most worshippers know the meaning of the prayers through translation rather than by understanding Avestan grammar, as many Muslims recite Arabic and many Christians once recited Latin.

Avestan reached European scholarship through the French orientalist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who studied with Parsi priests in Surat and published a translation in 1771. Words from it run deep into Persian: Ahura Mazdā became Hormoz and Ormazd, the fravashi guardian spirits gave their name to the month of Farvardin, and the amesha spenta, the ‘bounteous immortals’, still name half the months of the Iranian calendar.