Avestan Ke: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

The sound is a plain k, made by closing the back of the tongue against the soft palate and releasing it. It stands first among the consonants because the alphabet orders them by where in the mouth the sound is made, and its compilers chose to begin at the back. The velar letters stand at the head of the consonant section. The alphabet orders its consonants by where in the mouth the sound is made, beginning at the soft palate and working forward, so the k, the fricatives that go with it and the voiced sounds that answer to them all fall together at the start.

Within the series the plain sound comes first and the modified ones follow. It stands seventeenth in the alphabet as a whole and first of the thirty-eight consonants, between Avestan Uu and Avestan Xe. That position is not arbitrary. The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It served the Avesta and very little else, and the shape of its letter list follows the sounds of that one language rather than any general requirement of writing in Sasanian Iran. A reciter using this alphabet is not being taught the text. The priesthood that used it already knew the Avesta by heart, and the page served as a check on memory rather than as a substitute for it, which is why the script records fine detail a learner would never need.