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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The task of giving an account of the major aspects of the religion of Achaemenian Iran may be seen as consisting in large measure of bringing into coordination two main bodies of documentation, each representing an evolving situation.
The first body of documentation is the Avesta, written in a language which, for want of our knowing the original name, we call “Avestan”. The Avesta is a compilation of liturgy, dogma, prayers, spells, mythological lore and prescriptions. From the viewpoint of language and contents, the Avesta belongs predominantly to Eastern Iran, that is present-day Soviet Turkestan and Afghanistan. The corpus began to emerge in the 5th century B.C. out of a mass of heterogeneous but probably long interactive traditions spanning centuries; having evolved orally, it reached a definitive canonized form, so far as we can tell, only in the Sasanian period as the sacred scriptures of the newly institutionalized Zoroastrian state religion.
The Avesta may be analysed in terms of the following chief strata:
(I) The Gāthās of Zoroaster (Zarathushtra), the prophet whose see must have been somewhere in Afghanistan, and whom the Zoroastrian tradition dates in the first half of the 6th century B.C. They are composed in an Avestan dialect characterized by features of grammar and phonology more archaic than the dialect of most of the other Avestan texts, those mentioned under (3) and (4). The latter dialect is therefore called “Younger Avestan”, somewhat misleadingly because, in the absence of proof that it evolved from the Gathic dialect, it may well be as old as the Gāthās. However, the surviving texts themselves which are couched in “Younger Avestan” language have been dubbed the “Younger Avesta” with some justification, because their authors dilute Zoroaster's tenets with pre-Gathic beliefs rejected by him. The composition, as against the language, of the Younger Avesta, is therefore indeed “younger” than the Gāthās, whose metrical versification, moreover, resembles more that of the Vedas than that of the Younger Avesta.
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