Guarding the Avesta in Manuscript

Everything that survives of the Avesta reaches us through this script. The oldest extant manuscripts are medieval, copied by priestly scribal families in Iran and in the Parsi settlements of Gujarat, and their colophons let scholars reconstruct chains of copying running back centuries earlier. The manuscripts transmit the Yasna, the liturgy whose seventy-two chapters include the Gathas attributed to Zarathustra himself, along with the Visperad, the Vendidad, and the shorter prayers of daily and calendrical use, often interleaved with Pahlavi translation and commentary, the zand.

For the priesthood the script has remained a working tool: students memorise the liturgy by ear as their predecessors always did, but the written text stands as the checkrail of accuracy, and printed prayer books in Avestan letters, sometimes with transliteration, serve lay devotion in both the Iranian and Parsi communities. European scholarship met the script in the eighteenth century when Abraham Anquetil-Duperron studied with Parsi teachers and published a translation of the corpus, and the script's precision has made the Avesta a cornerstone for the comparative study of the Indo-Iranian languages ever since. The alphabet remains what it was made to be, the guardian of an exactly pronounced liturgy.