The
Avestan alphabet is a writing system developed during Iran's
Sassanid eraThe Sassanid Empire or Sasanian Empire, known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr, was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty who reigned from 224 to 651 CE...
(226–651) to render the
Avestan languageAvestan is an Eastern Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name. The language must also at some time have been a natural language, but how long ago that was is unknown...
.
As a side effect of its development, the script was also used for Pazend, a method of writing
Middle PersianMiddle Persian is the Middle Iranian language/ethnolect of Southwestern Iran that during Sassanid times became a prestige dialect and so came to be spoken in other regions as well. Middle Persian is classified as Western Iranian language...
that was used primarily for the
Zend commentaries on the texts of the
AvestaThe Avesta is the primary collection of sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language.-Etymology:The etymology of the term Avesta itself is uncertain, but a derivation from Middle Persian meaning "praise", is a frequently noted possibility.-Age of the texts:The texts of the...
. In the texts of
ZoroastrianZoroastrianism is the religion and philosophy based on the teachings ascribed to the prophet Zoroaster , after whom the religion is named. The term Zoroastrianism is, in general usage, essentially synonymous with Mazdaism, i.e...
tradition, the alphabet is referred to as
din dabireh or
din dabiri, Middle Persian for "the religion's script."
The development of the Avestan alphabet was provoked by the need to correctly represent recited
Avestan languageAvestan is an Eastern Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name. The language must also at some time have been a natural language, but how long ago that was is unknown...
texts.
The
Avestan alphabet is a writing system developed during Iran's
Sassanid eraThe Sassanid Empire or Sasanian Empire, known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr, was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty who reigned from 224 to 651 CE...
(226–651) to render the
Avestan languageAvestan is an Eastern Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name. The language must also at some time have been a natural language, but how long ago that was is unknown...
.
As a side effect of its development, the script was also used for Pazend, a method of writing
Middle PersianMiddle Persian is the Middle Iranian language/ethnolect of Southwestern Iran that during Sassanid times became a prestige dialect and so came to be spoken in other regions as well. Middle Persian is classified as Western Iranian language...
that was used primarily for the
Zend commentaries on the texts of the
AvestaThe Avesta is the primary collection of sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language.-Etymology:The etymology of the term Avesta itself is uncertain, but a derivation from Middle Persian meaning "praise", is a frequently noted possibility.-Age of the texts:The texts of the...
. In the texts of
ZoroastrianZoroastrianism is the religion and philosophy based on the teachings ascribed to the prophet Zoroaster , after whom the religion is named. The term Zoroastrianism is, in general usage, essentially synonymous with Mazdaism, i.e...
tradition, the alphabet is referred to as
din dabireh or
din dabiri, Middle Persian for "the religion's script."
History
The development of the Avestan alphabet was provoked by the need to correctly represent recited
Avestan languageAvestan is an Eastern Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name. The language must also at some time have been a natural language, but how long ago that was is unknown...
texts. The various text collections that today constitute the canon of
Zoroastrian scriptureThe Avesta is the primary collection of sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language.-Etymology:The etymology of the term Avesta itself is uncertain, but a derivation from Middle Persian meaning "praise", is a frequently noted possibility.-Age of the texts:The texts of the...
are the result of a collation that occurred in the 4th century, probably during the reign of
Shapur IIShapur II the Great was the ninth King of the Persian Sassanid Empire from 309 to 379. During his long reign, the Sassanid Empire saw its first golden era since the reign of Shapur I .- Early childhood :...
(309–379). It is likely that the Avestan alphabet was an
ad hoc innovation related to this - "Sassanid archetype" - collation.
The enterprise, "which is indicative of a Mazdean revival and of the establishment of a strict orthodoxy closely connected with the political power, was probably caused by the desire to compete more effectively with Buddhists, Christians, and Manicheans, whose faith was based on a revealed book." In contrast, the Zoroastrian priesthood had for centuries been accustomed to memorizing scripture - following by rote the words of a teacher-priest until they had memorized the words, cadence, inflection and intonation of the prayers. This they passed on to their pupils in turn, so preserving for many generations the "correct" way to recite scripture. This was necessary because the priesthood considered (and continue to consider) precise and correct enunciation and cadence a prerequisite of effective prayer. Further, the recitation of the liturgy was (and is) accompanied by ritual activity that leaves no room to attend to a written text.
The ability to correctly render Avestan did however have a direct benefit: By the common era the Avestan language words had almost ceased to be understood, which led to the preparation of the
Zend texts (from Avestan
zainti "understanding"), that is commentaries on and translations of the canon. The development of the Avestan alphabet allowed these commentaries to interleave quotation of scripture with explanation thereof. The direct effect of these texts was a "standardized" interpretation of scripture that survives to the present day. For scholarship these texts are enormously interesting since they occasionally preserve passages that have otherwise been lost.
The 9th–12th century texts of Zoroastrian tradition suggest that there was once a much larger collection of
written Zoroastrian literature, but these texts - if they ever existed - have since been lost, and it is hence not known what script was used to render them. The question of the
existence of a pre-Sassanid "Arsacid archetype" occupied Avestan scholars for much of the 19th century, and "[w]hatever may be the truth about the Arsacid
AvestaThe Avesta is the primary collection of sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language.-Etymology:The etymology of the term Avesta itself is uncertain, but a derivation from Middle Persian meaning "praise", is a frequently noted possibility.-Age of the texts:The texts of the...
, the linguistic evidence shows that even if it did exist, it can not have had any practical influence, since no linguistic form in the Vulgate can be explained with certainty as resulting from wrong transcription and the number of doubtful cases is minimal; in fact it is being steadily reduced. Though the existence of an Arsacid archetype is not impossible, it has proved to contribute nothing to Avestan philology."
Genealogy & script
The Pahlavi script, upon which the Avestan alphabet is based, was in common use for representing various
Middle Iranian languagesMiddle Iranian may refer to any of a group of the Indo-European Iranian languages spoken between the 4th century BC and the 9th century AD:Western:*Parthian*Middle PersianEastern:*Bactrian*Sogdian*Khwarezmian*Saka*Old Ossetic...
, but was not adequate for representing a religious language that demanded precision since Pahlavi was a simplified
abjadAn abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
syllabary with at most 22 symbols, most of which were ambiguous (i.e. could represent more than one sound).
In contrast, Avestan was a full alphabet, with explicit characters for vowels, and allowed for phonetic disambiguation of
allophoneIn phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word...
s. The alphabet included many characters from cursive Pahlavi, while some are characters that only exist in the Psalter Pahlavi variant (in cursive Pahlavi have the same symbol). Some of the vowels, such as appear to derive from Greek minuscules. Avestan
o is a special form of Pahlavi
l that exists only in Aramaic
ideogramAn ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...
s. Some letters (e.g. ), are free inventions.
Avestan script, like Pahlavi script and Aramaic script also, is written from right to left. In Avestan script, letters are not connected, and ligatures (the "standard" ones being ) are "rare and clearly of secondary origin." Fossey lists altogether 16 ligatures, but most are formed by the interaction of swash tails.
Words and the end of the first part of a compound are separated by a dot (point). Beyond that, punctuation is weak or non-existent in the manuscripts, and in the 1880s
Karl Friedrich GeldnerKarl Friedrich Geldner was a German linguist best known for his analysis and synthesis of Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit texts.-Biography:...
had to devise one for standardized transcription. In his system, which he developed based on what he could find, a triangle of three dots serves as a colon, a semicolon, an end of sentence or end of section; which is which is determined by the size of the dots and whether there is one dot above and two below, or two above and one below. Two above and one below signify - in ascending order of 'dot' size - colon, semicolon, end of sentence or end of section. One above and two below signify 'turned end of sentence' and 'turned end of section'.
Graphemes
In total, the Avestan alphabet has 37 consonants and 16 vowels. There are two main transcription schemes for Avestan, the older style used by Christian Bartholomae, and the newer style used by
Karl HoffmannKarl Hoffmann was a German linguist who specialized in Indo-European and Indo-Iranian studies. He is most recognized for his achievements in his studies of Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan and Old Persian languages.-Early life:...
.
The following list shows the letters as ordered and transcribed by Hoffmann (1996), based on Bartholomae:
Vowels (16):
Consonants (37):
Not represented in the above table are the semi-vocalic glides
ii and
uu, which in the Bartholomae system are transcribed as
y and
w. Later, when writing
Middle PersianMiddle Persian is the Middle Iranian language/ethnolect of Southwestern Iran that during Sassanid times became a prestige dialect and so came to be spoken in other regions as well. Middle Persian is classified as Western Iranian language...
in the script (i.e. Pazend), another consonant was added to it to represent the
[l] phoneme that didn't exist in the Avestan language.
Technical standards
The script has been proposed to be encoded in the Unicode Standard and the
Universal Character SetThe Universal Character Set , defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology Universal multiple-octet coded character set , is a standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based...
by
Michael EversonMichael Everson is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media...
and Roozbeh Pournader. It was accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee on 2 September 2007.
The set of characters was published in December 2008 as part of
Amendment 5 of the ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS). They will also be published as a part of the Unicode Standard 5.2, planned to be released on September-October 2009.
The character are encoded at U+10B00 through U+10B35 for letters (
ii and
uu are not represented as single characters, but a sequence of characters) and U+10B38 through U+10B3F for punctuation.
Further reading