Text · Zoroastrian scripture
The Avesta
The Zoroastrian scriptures, and the Rigveda's closest relative in any language. The Gāthās of Zarathushtra and the Rigvedic hymns are so near in grammar, metre and vocabulary that passages can be converted from one to the other almost word by word — Avestan daēva against Sanskrit deva, ahura against asura, haoma against soma, with the words for god and demon having swapped sides between them. They are two branches of one poetic and ritual tradition that separated, and each preserves what the other lost.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
The reversal is the most telling detail: what the Rigveda calls gods, the Avesta calls demons, and what the Avesta calls lords the Rigveda uses for its adversaries — which reads like the record of a religious quarrel inside a single community.
The date and place of the Gāthās, and whether the daēva-asura reversal reflects a real schism or independent semantic drift, are both debated.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueMitanni
Two pieces of evidence for the same thing from opposite directions. The Mitanni treaties of about 1380 BCE, sworn in northern Syria, invoke Mi-it-ra, Uru-wa-na, In-da-ra and the Na-ša-at-ti-ya — Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra and the Nāsatyas — and Mitanni horse-training texts use Indo-Aryan numerals, in a state whose ordinary language was Hurrian and unrelated. The Avesta shows the Iranian branch of the same inheritance. One is a Near Eastern ruling stratum's fossil vocabulary; the other is a living scripture.
- Scriptural inclusion inUdvada Atash Behram
The Avesta's surviving custody is Indian. When Zoroastrian refugees reached Gujarat the texts came with them, and the fire at Udvada — the Iranshah, held to have been carried from Sanjan and kept burning since — is the institutional centre of that continuity. Much of what survives of the Avesta survives because Parsi priests in India copied and recited it after the tradition contracted in Iran, and the nineteenth-century European reconstruction of Avestan grammar was done largely from Indian manuscripts.
- Sacred transplantSanjan
Sanjan is where the Qissa-i Sanjan puts the landing: Zoroastrian refugees from Iran coming ashore in Gujarat and asking a local king for refuge, and being given it on conditions. Whatever the account's date and accuracy, the outcome is not in doubt — the community established itself, kept its scripture and its fire, and was never expelled or forced to convert in a thousand years, which is the same pattern the Jewish arrivals in India followed.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Avesta”. Karl Hoffmann and Bernhard Forssman, Avestische Laut- und Flexionslehre; Michael Witzel on Indo-Iranian; Prods Oktor Skjærvø, The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (2011).
Open The Avesta in the repository →