Global Philology：An International Lecture Series

Philological Practices among the Zoroastrians: The Care of the Avestan Texts

Title: Philological Practices among the Zoroastrians: The Care of the Avestan Texts

Speaker: Alberto Cantera, Free University of Berlin

Moderator: Martin Kern, Princeton University

Time: 20:00-22:00 (GMT+8), September 28, 2022.

Zoom Meeting ID: 922 3991 6850 (Code: 1111)

Zoom Link:

https://zoom.us/j/92239916850?pwd=MnhBaGxZY1ZpQ3BGMWovRHR1U0h2QT09

About the Speaker:

Alberto Cantera is the director of the Institute for Iranian Studies of the FU Berlin, in charge of a long-term project funded by the DFG - the Corpus Avesticum Berolinense (https://cab.geschkult.fu-berlin.de), and the Avestan Digital Archive (https://ada.geschkult.fu-berlin.de). He also collaborates with the Universities of Bochum and Cologne in another long-term project: The Digital Corpus and Dictionary of Middle Persian. His research interests include the Zoroastrian texts from antiquity until the modern age, especially the Avestan texts, their reception in Late Antiquity, and their use in the Zoroastrian ritual until today. His major publications are: Vers une édition de la liturgie longue zoroastrienne: pensées et travaux préliminaires, Cahiers de Studia Iranica nr. 51, Leuven: Peeters, 2014; Introduction à l'avestique récent, Girona: Sociedad de Estudios Iraniosy Turanios, Supplementa didactica 2, 2019 (together with Céline Redard); some facsimiles of Avestan manuscripts in the series Avestan Manuscripts in Iran. As editor: The transmission of the Avesta, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012. In preparation: The performance of the Zorastrian Long Liturgy. Edition princeps of the Pahlavi nērang in the Iranian liturgical manuscripts, Brill, 2022.

Lecture Introduction:

Zoroastrian rituals are still performed in an Old Iranian language, Avestan. Their composition began in the second millennium BCE and was concluded by the middle of the 1st. Existing texts of Avesta were written down likely around the 6th century by people speaking Middle Persian, a South-Western Iranian language with a completely different phonological and morphological system. A series of tools were developed for the care and oral preservation of these texts. They partly resemble the ones we find in India for the transmission of the Vedic texts, including techniques for the memorization of the texts (with emphasis in the correct recitation), also for their analysis (e.g. resolution of the synalephas, repetition of the preverbs in tmesis, etc.) and understanding.

The invention of the Avestan script (likely around the 6th century) was turning point in the history of the transmission of the Avestan. The number of letters of the Avestan script (at least 54) reveals that the main interest was to create a script that can reproduce the correct recitation of the Avestan texts including very specific phonetic nuances without phonological relevance. The invention of the Avestan script did not put an end to the traditional oral transmission that have survived until modern times, but inaugurated an own scribal tradition (inheriting many traces form the Aramaic one). The oldest extant manuscript go back to the late 13th century and most copies were produced in the 17th century.