Alphabet Letters

Avestan Hme 𐬩

Avestan Letters

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Avestan Hme 𐬩." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/alphabet-letters/avestan-hme.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Avestan Hme 𐬩. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/alphabet-letters/avestan-hme

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-avestan-hme,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Avestan Hme 𐬩},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/alphabet-letters/avestan-hme},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Origin Devised in the Sasanian period, commonly placed in the fifth or sixth century CE, long after the Avestan texts themselves were composed.

Hme is a single letter for the sequence of h followed by m, treated by the script as one unit rather than written with two signs. The Avestan alphabet is otherwise strict about one sign to one sound, so a letter that covers a cluster is unusual and tells you that a reciter produced the sequence as a single articulation. The manuscripts are consistent in using it where that sequence occurs. The order of the letters follows the phonetic analysis behind the script rather than an inherited Semitic sequence. The vowels come first, in short and long pairs, and the consonants follow by place of articulation. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It serves the Avesta and little else, which is why its repertoire tracks the sounds of that language and no other.

Facts

Identity

Script Type

An alphabet in the strict sense: its vowels are full letters standing in the line, not marks hung on a consonant, which is the sharpest break it makes with the Book Pahlavi writing it was drawn from. 1The Avestan script

Position

Twenty-sixth of the thirty-eight consonant letters of the Avestan alphabet, which are ordered by where in the mouth the sound is made 2The Avestan script

How the Letter Joins

Written right to left, with each sound kept to its own distinct sign. The Book Pahlavi hand behind it had let several sounds fall together into shared shapes, and undoing that ambiguity is what the Avestan alphabet was made for. 1The Avestan script

Attributions

Associated Sound

A single sign for the sequence of h followed by m, treated by the script as one articulation 1Avestan phonology

Origins

Origin Period

Devised in the Sasanian period, commonly placed in the fifth or sixth century CE, long after the Avestan texts themselves were composed. 1The Avestan script

Place of Origin

Sasanian Iran, where the Zoroastrian priesthood assembled the written Avesta. 1The Avestan script

Origin of the Name

Named directly for the single sequence it writes, hme, the h-plus-m cluster the script treats as one unit; the name states the sequence itself rather than an inherited word. 1

Sense of the Name

a single sign for the sequence h and m 1The Avestan script

Transmission

Manuscript Tradition

No Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century CE, so every witness to the script is many centuries younger than the script itself, and the script is younger again than the words it carries. 4Zoroastrianism

Practice

Liturgical and Scriptural Role

The script exists to fix the sound of the Avesta, which is recited in Zoroastrian worship, a living practice with a small community. Its precision serves the requirement that the recited word be pronounced as it has been received. 3Zoroastrianism

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Encoded at U+10B29 AVESTAN LETTER HME in the Avestan block, which lies wholly above the Basic Multilingual Plane. 2The Avestan script

Meaning in the Attesting Source

The Avesta was transmitted orally by priests for centuries before any script existed to hold it. This alphabet records a recitation, not a composition, and the gap between the two is the central fact about it. 4Zoroastrianism

Learn More

Avestan Hme: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This letter writes h and m together as a single sign, treating the sequence as one articulation rather than as two letters set side by side. A script that otherwise insists on one sign to one sound here makes an exception, and the exception is itself evidence about how the sequence was heard. The nasals are where the alphabet's habit of building in series is easiest to see. The velar nasal has palatalised and rounded partners exactly as the velar fricative does, and the dental nasal has a palatal partner and a positionally restricted one, so the group is a small grid rather than a list. It stands forty-second in the alphabet as a whole and twenty-sixth of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Me and Avestan Yye. Nothing in that placement was handed down. The sequence was arranged by whoever assembled the alphabet, and it records their view of how the sounds of the language stand in relation to one another. Nothing about this letter was forced by the writing it came from.

The shapes are Pahlavi, but the inventory, the ordering and the decision to write vowels in full are the work of whoever assembled the alphabet, and they are decisions taken about a text rather than about a language. Whoever devised the alphabet is not recorded. The script can be dated and placed with reasonable confidence, but no source names the person or the group responsible, and the atlas records that absence rather than filling it.

Avestan Hme and the One Exception to the Rule

A single sign for a sequence of two sounds is the one place where this alphabet departs from its own principle of one letter to one sound. The departure is instructive, because it suggests the sequence was heard as a unit in recitation. The shapes come from Pahlavi and the inventory does not. Whoever assembled this alphabet worked from an analysis of the recitation, added signs where the parent hand had none, and ordered the result by place of articulation instead of by the letter sequence that lay behind everything else written in Iran at the time.

Modern editions preserve the distinctions the manuscripts make, including the ones that look redundant, and transliterate them with accents, dots and length marks so that nothing collapses on the page. The apparatus of marks in a scholarly Avestan text is a direct consequence of how many separate signs the alphabet carries. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B29 AVESTAN LETTER HME. The block covers the letters together with a small set of punctuation marks used in the manuscripts. Standardising it settled, for digital purposes at least, a question the printed editions had answered in several different ways, which is how many letters the alphabet has. What this alphabet holds is a performance. The atlas describes it and does not instruct in it: the recitation belongs to the community that maintains it, and the interest here is in what the script was built to do and how well it did it.

Cross-Tradition Connections