Burnouf Turns From Buddhist Manuscripts to the Avesta

Old Iranian philology studies the language of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture, and of the Old Persian royal inscriptions, reconstructing their grammar through comparison with related Indo-Iranian and wider Indo-European languages. Eugène Burnouf, the same scholar who founded Buddhist studies, turned to the Avesta in the early 1830s and published his Commentaire sur le Yaçna in 1833, subjecting Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron's pioneering but linguistically uncertain 1771 translation to the first rigorous comparative grammatical analysis, correcting many of its readings and giving Old Iranian philology a properly linguistic foundation.

The Avesta was transmitted orally for many centuries before being committed to writing, and Old Iranian philology's central achievement is distinguishing the archaic Old Avestan language of the Gathas, the hymns tradition attributes directly to Zoroaster, from the linguistically later Younger Avestan of the surrounding liturgical material. That linguistic layering is the primary evidence for what within Zoroastrian scripture may plausibly reach back toward Zoroaster's own lifetime, distinct from the substantial younger material that later tradition treats as equally ancient, and the atlas follows that distinction wherever it dates a specific Zoroastrian teaching.