The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Avestan is a member of the Indo-European language family. It is the most richly attested ancient member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subgroup of that family. As such, it is closely related to the Sanskrit language (which represents the most archaic member of the Indic subgroup of Indo-Iranian; see Ch. 2). For those who hold that the centum–satem division (fundamentally an east/west bifurcation in the Indo-European language family) is a matter of subgrouping, Indo-Iranian (and therefore Avestan) is a member of the satem group (indeed, it is the Avestan word for “100,” satәm, which gives that group its name).

There are uncertainties regarding both the dating and the geographical provenance of the surviving Avestan texts. The oldest manuscript is quite young (manuscript K7a, dating from AD 1278) and therefore of little assistance in resolving these matters. The issue of chronology is usually linked to the problems surrounding the dates of the founder of Zoroastrianism, the prophet Zarathuštra.Current scholarly consensus places his life considerably earlier than the traditional Zoroastrian sources are thought to, favoring a birth date before 1000 BC. Since the Gāθās are recognized as being the work of Zarathuštra, these Old Avestan texts appear to date fromaround that time. Precise dating of the Young Avestan texts, many of which appear to have a long oral transmission history, is in most cases impossible.