The present volume contains at its core an edition of the Middle Persian (MP) translation of the Avestan ritual text Yasna Haptaŋhāiti (YH) or Middle Persian Yasn ī haft hād ‘ Yasna in Seven Chapters’. The Avetsan texts and their Middle Persian translations, known as Zand, bear no author attribution, and no absolute dates are available for either group of texts. The linguistic difficulties associated with the Zand have somewhat lead to its marginalisation in the study of Zoroastrianism. Contrary to previous work on various Zand texts, the present study attempts, to the extent possible, to understand the exegesis of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti as a text in its own right by extending the investigation to a wider range of MP texts and assuming a religio-cultural perspective in the approach to the Zand. For that reason, the examination of the translation technique employed in the Pahlavi translations of the Avestan Yasna Haptaŋhāiti is not the focus of the study.

In the decade since Stausberg (2008) observed that research on Zoroastrianism had witnessed considerable innovation, we have seen substantial progress in the study of Zoroastrian rituals, and major projects are now under way to produce new editions of Avestan rituals and texts. When a small, less visible discipline progresses rapidly and innovates seismically, it is perhaps advisable to introduce the primary sources briefly and remark on some issues concerning terminology before advancing the discussion.

THE AVESTA

The sacred texts of the Zoroastrians are collectively referred to as the Avesta, a heterogeneous collection of texts dating to the first and second millennia before the common era. On linguistic grounds, the Avesta is commonly divided into Old (OAv.) and Young Avestan (YAv.) compositions. The text of the Yasna ritual contains the 17 hāiti of the five Gāϑās (compositions commonly attributed to the figure of Zaraϑuštra), the seven hāiti of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti (YH), the yaϑā ahū vairiiō and airiiaman išiia prayers. These texts together constitute the OAv. corpus. Some scholars date the Older Avesta into the middle of the second millennium BCE on the basis of the archaic character of its language. The YAv. passages are believed to have been composed at a later date. Although the Avesta is often regarded as a book today, particularly by the practitioners of the religion, it must have existed only in form of an ‘oral scripture’ in the first stages of its transmission.