Zoroastrian tradition sets four short Avestan texts above all others, the Ahuna Vairya, the Ashem Vohu, the Yenghe Hatam and the Airyaman Ishya, and of the four it is the last that is least known outside the community. It is preserved as Yasna 54.1, composed in the same archaic Gathic dialect as the hymns of Zarathushtra himself, and it stands immediately after the final Gatha in the liturgy, closing the oldest stratum of the Avesta. The prayer asks that longed for Airyaman come to the support of the men and women of Zarathushtra's community, to the support of the good mind, and that the ancient promise of reward be fulfilled. Airyaman is the divinity of friendship, community and healing, and his name is cognate with the Vedic god Aryaman, one of the clearest threads connecting the Avestan and Vedic worlds. In the ritual books the prayer carries great weight.
The Vendidad names Airyaman as the healer who answered when the diseases of the world were to be cured, and the liturgical tradition assigns the Airyaman Ishya a place of honour in the Yasna ceremony, where its recitation binds the community's oldest poetry to its continuing worship. The nineteenth century translations of the Yasna in the Sacred Books of the East made the text accessible to scholarship, where it remains central to study of the Gathic corpus.