Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Tag: Avestan

  • A newly discovered Yasna manuscript

    A newly discovered Yasna manuscript from Yazd, Iran

    Yasna
    © 2015 Saloumeh Gholami

    The newly discovered Avestan manuscript contains an illuminated Yasna ceremony and belongs to the Dinyār family in Yazd, Iran. Prof. Alberto Cantera has already confirmed that the new manuscript is a Yasna manuscript. The only other known Yasna manuscript of a comparable age is kept at the British Library.

    Even though the manuscript has no colophon, according to Alberto Cantera it is most probably by the hand of Mihrabān Anōšīrwān Wahromšāh and should be dated around 1630. The scribe’s hand as well as the illuminations also show a close relation to the Vīdēvdād Sāde of the same scribe, dated to 1647 CE / 1016 Y, kept today in the British Library.

    This manuscript is discovered and purchased by Vahid Zolfaghari and is now kept in his private collection. Prof. Alberto Cantera and his team at the Avestan Digital Archive (ADA) project seek to publish and make the manuscript available publicly.

    Yasna manuscripts contain the long liturgical text recited during the daily performance of the Yasna, the central ritual in Zoroastrianism. It was originally composed in the ancient Iranian language of Avestan between the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE. Different types of Yasna manuscripts are available, those transmitted with the Pahlavi translation (i.e. Pahlavi-Yasna), those without a translation (i.e. Yasna Sāde) and those with the Sankrit translation (i.e. Sanskrit Yasna). Among the manuscripts of the Pahlavi-Yasna one can distinguish two lines of transmission, namly the Indian Pahlavi-Yasna and the Iranian Pahlavi-Yasna.

  • Ideological archaeology of Zoroastrianism

    Ahmadi, Amir. 2015. The Daēva cult in the Gāthās: An ideological archaeology of Zoroastrianism (Iranian Studies 24). New York, NY: Routledge.

    Addressing the question of the origins of the Zoroastrian religion, this book argues that the intransigent opposition to the cult of the daēvas, the ancient Indo-Iranian gods, is the root of the development of the two central doctrines of Zoroastrianism: cosmic dualism and eschatology (fate of the soul after death and its passage to the other world).

    The daēva cult as it appears in the Gāthās, the oldest part of the Zoroastrian sacred text, the Avesta, had eschatological pretentions. The poet of the Gāthās condemns these as deception. The book critically examines various theories put forward since the 19th century to account for the condemnation of the daēvas. It then turns to the relevant Gāthic passages and analyzes them in detail in order to give a picture of the cult and the reasons for its repudiation. Finally, it examines materials from other sources, especially the Greek accounts of Iranian ritual lore (mainly) in the context of the mystery cults. Classical Greek writers consistently associate the nocturnal ceremony of the magi with the mysteries as belonging to the same religious-cultural category. This shows that Iranian religious lore included a nocturnal rite that aimed at ensuring the soul’s journey to the beyond and a desirable afterlife.

    Challenging the prevalent scholarship of the Greek interpretation of Iranian religious lore and proposing a new analysis of the formation of the Hellenistic concept of ‘magic,’ this book is an important resource for students and scholars of History, Religion and Iranian Studies.

    For ToC and haveing a look inside the book see here.

    About the Author:

    Amir Ahmadi is an Adjunct Researcher at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University. He has published in Philosophy, History of Religions and Iranian Studies.

  • Avestan text criticism

    Cantera, Alberto. 2014. The problems of the transmission of the Avesta and the tools for Avestan text criticism (TATEC). In Tara Andrews & C. Macé (eds.), Analysis of ancient and medieval texts and manuscripts: Digital approaches, 95-116. Brepols.

    The Avestan manuscripts contain the recitatives of several Zoroastrian liturgies that are today still celebrated. These Liturgies took shape around the sixth century BC, long before they were written down for the first time.

    Today we know of more than 300 manuscripts, including Avestan texts, but the true number is probably much higher since the tradition of producing manuscripts has continued until recently and the production of copies of parts of Avestan manuscripts is part of the instuction of Zoroastrian priests.

    Using the tools proposed in this article will offer a more realistic picture of the complex processes of the Avesta transmission, over and above the simplistic stemmata produced by Geldner solely on the basis of the agreement in error, since errors spread in the Avestan transmission not only through the process of copying from written sources, but also through the influence of ritual practices.

  • The Pahlavi Yasna of the Gāθās and Yasna Haptaŋhāiti

    Malandra, William W. & Pallan Ichaporia (eds.). 2013. The Pahlavi Yasna of the Gāthās and Yasna Haptaŋhāiti. Wiesbaden: Reichert. 2nd ed., corrected.

    As the title suggests the book is a study of the Pahlavi Yasna, a Middle Persian (Pahlavi) gloss on the liturgical text, the Yasna. The study is restricted to the Gāthās or Hymns of Zarathustra (Zoroaster) and to the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, a prose text composed in the same dialect of Avestan. There are three main sections: Introduction, The Text, and Glossary. In addition there are two Appenices: I Parallel Text of the Avestan and Pahalvi Gloss; II The ašәm vohū and its Variants in the Dēnkart. The Introduction is a text-critical study of the Pahlavi Yasna which addresses the main issues of the nature of the text, its authorship and dating, and its relationship to parallels in the Dēnkard. In the presentation of the text, the position is taken that the fundamental text is a nearly word-by-word gloss on the original Avestan. That is, it is not a translation as we might understand the term. Interspersed in the gloss are miscellaneous comments inserted by later hands to illuminate certain words and passages. Appendix I is provided to portray how the glosses line up with the Avestan, ignoring the later comments. The text itself is based on the 1946 critical edition of B. N. Dhabhar given in the Pahlavi script and to which we have provided many improvements. In footnotes we have cited all the parallel passages from the Dēnkard. These reveal that there were exegetical traditions other than the official Pahlavi Yasna. Although Dhabhar’s edition included a glossary, it is not up to the philological standards of current scholarship. There is deliberately no translation into English, as a running gloss of this sort does not lend itself to a coherent translation.
    The contribution to the fields of Middle Persian and Zoroastrian studies is really threefold: 1) to establish a reliable text in Roman transliteration; 2) to provide an extensive glossary of all lexical items; 3) to contribute to an understanding of the nature and formation of the text. The intended readership is primarily scholars and students who have some acquaintance with Pahlavi and have an interest in the history of Zoroastrianism.

    For more information see the ToC and read both the Preface to this volume as well as a Sample Chapter.
    About the authors:
    William W. Malandra is Associate Professor of Indo-Iranian Philology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
    Pallan R. Ichaporia has BA in Avesta/Pahlavi from Bombay University and attended Columbia University for Post Graduate Study in Iranian Languages under James Russell. He obtained doctorate in Business Administration from Oklahoma.

  • Corpus Avesticum meeting: “Ḫorde Avesta”

    Corpus Avesticum | Meeting in Berlin 22–23 May 2015

    Institute of Iranian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

    The Project of Corpus Avesticum (CoAv) is a pan-European Co-operation that aims at making the Zoroastrian Texts, called the Avesta accessible in a new Edition. The current one stems from 1896 and is erroneous with regard to many crucial aspects, the most important of which is the amalgamation of the liturgical and exegetical text witnesses.

    The next meeting of the European research network Corpus Avesticum will take place in Berlin. 22. and 23. May 2015 researchers from Spain, Germany, Italy and the UK will meet at Free University of Berlin to discuss various projects in preparation of a new edition of the Avesta.

    This meeting is dedicated to the research questions mainly regarding to a new edidion of the Ḫorde Avesta/Khorde Avesta.

    Program:

    • Paul Widmer/Florian Sommer: “Vortrag zur Fehlertypologie in den Yašt-Handschriften bzw. den Einfluss derselben auf das Verständnis der Grammatik”.
    • Almut Hintze: “The Vištāsp Yašt and an obscure word in the Hadoxt Nask”.
    • Leon Goldman: “On the Sanskrit Yasna manuscript S1″.
    • Alberto Cantera: “On the wāz gīrišnīh”.
    • Mehrbod Khanizadeh: “A Preliminary Study on the Relationships Between the Pahlavi Version of the Exegetic Yasna Manuscripts”.
    • Celine Redard: “On the Paris Mss”.
    • Antonio Panaino: “The corpus of the Yašts and their Pahlavi Translations. Considerations about a Textual Loss and its Reasons”.
    • Götz König: “Research on the Bayān Nask. State of the Art”.
    • Miguel Ángel Andrés Toledo: “The Drōn Frawardin Yašt Ceremony in the Avestan Manuscripts”.

    The other members of the research group CoAv are also Arash Zeini (London), Kianoosh Rezania (Bochum), Salome Gholami (Frankfurt), David Buyaner and Shervin Farridnejad (Berlin).

    *Image: An illustrated copy of the Avestan Wīdēvdād Sāde. Copied in Yazd, Iran, in 1647 ( © British Library RSPA 230, ff. 151v–152r). Published in: Farridnejad, Shervin. 2014. The Avestan Manuscript 4060 (RSPA230), Videvdad Iranian Sade of the British Library. (Avestan Digital Archive Series 75). Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.

  • Books as material and symbolic artifacts in religious book cultures

    Books as Material and Symbolic Artifacts in Religious Book CulturesBooks as Material and Symbolic Artifacts in Religious Book Cultures

    Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum: 28 & 29 May 2015

    The Käte Hamburger Kolleg Workshop on Books as Material and Symbolic Artifacts in Religious Book Cultures will analyze the connections between books and manuscripts as material artifacts and the formation of religious book cultures before the printing era. It will also explore the ways in which, in religious book production, the medium, in its forms of “human and institutional interactions,” influences the transmission of the religious message, allowing for the material format to receive further alterations from the religious message itself. Finally, this workshop will investigate interactions between modern religious groups and the very academic books which describe them.

    Programm of The KHK Workshop on Books as Religious Artifacts (May 28-29, 2015)

    Thursday, 28 May 2015

    • Costantino Moretti (Paris): “Non-Textual Uses in Buddhist Medieval China”
    • Grégoire Espesset (Bochum): “Petitioning in Pre-Modern Taoist Liturgy”
    • Vladimir Glomb (Bochum): “Sagehood for Young Boys: Confucian Primers in Traditional Korea”
    • Shervin Farridnejad (Berlin): “The Zoroastrian “Holy Book”: The Understanding and Construction of the Avesta as a Book in Zoroastrian Tradition and Oriental Studies”
    • Kianoosh Rezania (Bochum): “The Zoroastrian “Pahlavi Book”: The Genesis of the Dēnkard in the Early Abbasid Period”
    • Marie Efthymiou (Aix-Marseille): “Suras Collections in Central Asia: From Manuscripts Used in Daily Devotions to Teaching Subject in Quranic Schools”

    Friday, 29 May 2015

    • Ksenia Pimenova (Bochum): “Ethnographers, Their Books, and Their Shamans: The Scripturalization of Post-Soviet Tuvan Shamanism”
    • Mareile Haase (Bochum): “The Zagreb Mummy Wrappings: An Etruscan Linen Book from Egypt”
    • AnneMarie Luijendijk (Princeton): “Put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time (Jer. 32:14): On Saving and Discarding Sacred Books”
    • Flavia Ruani (Ghent): “Books of Protection, Books of Perdition: Book Imagery in Ephrem the Syrian’s Heresiology”
    • Eduard Iricinschi (Bochum): “No one in Rome really has time to attend readings (Pliny, Letters, 3.18.4): The Anxiety of Publishing Books in Late Antiquity”

  • Amǝṣ̌as Spǝṇtas

    Kellens, Jean. 2014. Sur l’origine des Amǝṣ̌as Spǝṇtas. Studia Iranica 43(2). 163-175.

    The group of the seven Aməšas Spəṇtas of the Young Avesta is not yet constituted in Old Avesta, but its members are joined together once in each polyhâtic Gāthā as a special phase of the liturgical process by the intervention of certain mediatory entities.

  • Avestan research 1991–2014

    The first part of a survey by Almut Hintze on Avestan research from 1991 to 2014:

    Hintze, Almut. 2014. Avestan research 1991–2014. Part 1: Sources and phonology. Kratylos 59. 1–52.

    For more information and a PDF, see here.

  • Review: The transmission of the Avesta

    Piras, Andrea. 2014. Review of Alberto Cantera (ed.): The transmission of the Avesta. Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 104. 365–368.

    Read the review here. More information on the volume is available here.

  • Introduction to Avestan

    This is an English translation of the introduction, which was first published in 2001 in Spanish.

    Martínez, Javier & Michiel de Vaan. 2014. Introduction to Avestan (Brill Introductions to Indo-European Languages I). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Translated from Spanish by Ryan Sandell.

    This Introduction to Avestan provides a concise grammar of the Avestan language, the language of the followers of the Iranian prophet Zarathustra. The grammar focuses on spelling, phonology and morphology, but also includes a chapter on syntax. Abundant information on the historical development of the language is included, which renders the grammar very useful for students of Indo-Iranian and Indo-European. Also, a small number of selected Avestan texts is added, with a complete glossary, so that students can practise reading Avestan.

    From the book’s description.

    See here for more volumes in the series.