Avestan – Introduction, Part 3
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Hintze, Almut
This lecture focuses on the literary transmission of the Avesta, as well as on the Avestan and Pahlavi scripts.
 Hello and welcome to the third lesson of our module on Avesten. Today we are going to discuss the transmission of the Avesten texts. In order to understand better how they were transmitted however, we first need to look at how they were composed. The Indo-Iranian people did not write. The culture was intrinsically oral and this feature characterizes both the Vedic and the Avesten traditions up to the present day. Even today aspiring Zoroastrian priests have to learn the recitation of the rituals by heart and they do so from early childhood onwards. Now in this slide here you see Zoroastrian boys memorizing the Yassna at one of the two remaining Zoroastrian priestly schools, the Dada Atonan Institute in Mumbai, which is a residential school. So the boys actually lived there and lived there from about age 7 onwards until they become, until their full initiation usually mid-15 or so. The boy on the right side here recites the texts he has just learned and he recites the text to his teacher after he has memorized it from the book. And you can see here on the left of the slide you can see the boys sitting and trying to learn the text and as they learn they don't sit there silently, they read it out aloud. So when you come into that room you hear what the teacher, the director of the school, Ramya Karanjia, how they put it, a cacophony of sounds, of noise. It's very noisy because each of them speaks the texts aloud even when reading it and then they have to come forward and recite it from memory to the teacher who listens and who corrects them when they make a mistake. So that's how they memorize the text even today. In earlier times however and certainly some 4,000 years ago the teaching was entirely oral so no written, no books were involved at all. Certainly very little information is available on the memorization techniques used in the Zoroastrian tradition over the Mylendia. But from the closely related Vedic tradition we know that the memorization followed a complex and sophisticated system designed to ensure that no changes were introduced into the texts. The hymns were learned by Rote not only in their linear arrangement as the words followed one another in a hymn but also forwards and backwards according to a fixed schema as you can see here in this slide. There are the different parters. There is the Samhita parter which is how the words fit together and just adapt to one another phonetically as the words are pronounced in context. Then there is the Pada parter which isolates the individual words from one another so they were memorized in both these two parters and then the words were also memorized in the Krama parter which is 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6 each number standing for the word. Then the Jata parter when the words were memorized 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, etc. and then the Ghana parter 1, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 3, 4, 5, etc. You can imagine that this really then sticks to the mind especially if you are 7 years old and they have these words very firmly rooted in their minds and in their hearts and then they use them when they perform the rituals, there are no books whatsoever involved, they know these words by heart and if they have forgotten a word then they have to arrange with a teacher and in a special situation when a wrongly spoken word can cause no harm then the teacher will remind them of the correct pronunciation. So this is what it was like in the Vedic tradition and we have evidence for it in our texts. Certainly we know very little about the techniques used in the Zoroastrian tradition but there is reason to doubt that anything like this ever developed within the Zoroastrian tradition and we shall get some confirmation for this view when we are going to look at the phonetics and phonology of the Avesta in the second part of our teaching of Avestan here in this course when we talk about phonology. So there are lots of influences of various dialects of the oral tradition constantly on the way the words of the Avesta are pronounced by the priests. Now this what we have just heard refers to fixed texts but how did these texts come about in the first place? So the texts which aspiring priests memorised then and memorised till today are fixed sequences of words which have to be recited unchanged and the tradition is all there to ensure that no changes are being introduced to the fixed words, words and words order. At the time of their composition however poetry formed part of a living culture of oral composition in performance. Each performance produced a new composition, a new song better than any previous songs and this is how these texts came about in the first place. Thus in the very first hymn of the first gata in Yasna 28 the singer announces that his compositions are without precedent and we find the same concept also in the hymns of the Rigveda. So let us look at first Yasna 28.3. There in the translation we read, I who want to extol you, good thought and the wise lord with rightness, that's Asha, in an unprecedented way. Akpurvim, something which has no precedent and then in the Rigveda here, Rigveda 10.23.6 the Vimadas which is a family of priests, of singers have begotten this praise for you, O Indra, praise unprecedented Akpurvim, best of many for the one of good gift. So here is a reference to the gift which is then due when the ritual is performed has been completed. So here this is a common inheritance in these two traditions, a new song without a precedent, better than anything else that has been recited before. Each recitation is a new composition, novel. That hymns composed more than 3000 years ago have survived up to the present day and it is first of all due to the fact that their wording became fixed at some point in prehistoric times. Subsequently these hymns then were transmitted verbatim from generation to generation. In the case of Avestan, different texts petrified at different times, the old Avestan texts being the first to do so. This is indicated by the fact that their language is more archaic than that of the rest of the Avesta. The old Avestan texts came to be recited with a fixed wording while simultaneously other middle and young Avestan texts continued to be composed in performance. In this process, older Avestan texts were not only reproduced verbatim as a whole, but parts of them were also quoted, reworked and elaborated on in the middle and young Avestan contexts which include numerous quotations and adaptations of old Avestan texts. As a result, the old Avestan texts came to be embedded in rituals whose language is heterogeneous. Some of texts are older, others are younger. An interpretive tradition of the prestigious old Avestan texts also developed then. The exegetical tradition of the Avesta does reach us back to Avestan times. Three exegetical texts in Avestan language are incorporated in the extant Yassna where they form chapters 19 to 21 and there are many other, though shorter, instances of Avestan exegesis in the extant Avesta. During the late Achaemenid period, the Avestan language became gradually obsolete and new Avestan texts ceased to be composed. Thus, as the spoken old Iranian languages evolved into middle Iranian idioms, the language of the exegesis too became middle Iranian. There were many centres of Zoroastrian learning all over Iranian lands from the Achaemenid period onwards. They include areas of eastern Iran, especially Sokdiana, Bakhtria, Drangiana and Arachosia. We shall see in the lesson on phonology that these local traditions have left traces in the extant Avesta. But on the whole, all that has survived to the present day is the religious tradition of the power, one of the big power centres, the province of Paas, which was the homeland of two of Iran's major ruling dynasties, the Achaemenids and the Cessanians. The Avestan script has two main features. One is that it is an artificial creation, which happened at a certain point in time. The second characteristic of the Avestan script is that it represents sound, not meaning. The script is phonetic, not phonemic. Those who invented the script strove to write what they heard, not what they understood, because they didn't understand much of the Avestan language anymore at that point. The Avestan alphabet has at least 53 letters and notes a great deal of phonetic variations. Twelve of the Avestan letters are directly taken from the cursive form of the book Pachlavi script, which was current at the time when the script was invented. By then, the Zoroastrian clergy had used the Pachlavi script for many centuries to write a wide range of texts in their own Middle-Persian language. They might well also have used it to write the Pachlavi translation, interpretation of the Avesta, and occasionally also Avestan words. Like the Pachlavi script, the Avestan script runs from right to left, in Semitic fashion. But in contrast to Pachlavi, the Avestan script is fully vocalised and the letters are not connected. The shapes of the letters of the Pachlavi script allow us to distinguish three phases of the Pachlavi script. One is inscribtional, the other one is a script of the solter, and the third one is book Pachlavi. And the book Pachlavi represents the most advanced stage of development. It's a very cursive form of the Pachlavi script in which lots of letters have just merged into one. The Pachlavi script of the solter is more similar to the script of the inscriptions than to the cursive structures of the Pachlavi books. Thus, the alphabet of the Pachlavi solter contains 18 distinct characters as compared to book Pachlavi, which is only 13. For example, in the solter script, the letter Dalet, this one here, is still different from Gimmel, which is this one here. See, it's distinct. And it's also different from Jodh, which is this letter here. Whereas in Pachlavi, they've all become the same. This one, they're all the same and indistinguishable, just a little hook. And in Avestan, this becomes a letter for I. Then also Khet, the letter Khet here in Buk Pachlavi, that is this letter here, is still different from Aleph, this letter here. Whereas in Buk Pachlavi, oh excuse me, I've made a mistake. This is not the Khet, this is the He, which becomes in Buk Buk Pachlavi, this letter. I must correct myself here. I meant this letter, this is the Khet. This is not the Khet, this is the letter He, it's a different letter. So this is the letter Khet and in the solter script Aleph and Khet are still distinct, but in Buk Pachlavi, the Khet and the Aleph have become indistinguishable. Whereas the letter He is used only in Aramaic words from which all these scripts derive. Then we also have the letter Waf in the solter script, which is here. That is a little bit a line, this letter here. It's a vertical line which bends a little bit to the right, a little similar to here, the inscriptional portion form. Whereas in Buk Pachlavi, it's simply a vertical stroke and that Buk Pachlavi letter is just the same vertical stroke as we have it for the letter Nun. Whereas here we have in the solter script still a distinct form and the iron which has already become identical as a vertical stroke also in the solter. A script and the Rish as well, all of them just end up as a vertical stroke. So it is the letter Nun and the letter Waf which are still distinct in the solter script, whereas in the Buk Pachlavi script, they have ended up as vertical strokes, just as the letters iron and Waf. So we have four different functions for a vertical stroke in the Buk Pachlavi script. It can be a W, it can be a Nun, it can be a Rish and it can be an iron. And in addition also the vertical stroke in the Pachlavi script is used as a word final marker, just a vertical stroke to indicate the end of a word after a letter which doesn't connect to the left. So it is also highly ambiguous, a terrible script and Neil Mackenzie once called the Pachlavi Buk script Arrimanik. It causes lots of problems, whereas a language is not so difficult. But you can see also why the Zoroastrian priests of the Sasanian period considered the Buk Pachlavi script as unsuitable to write down the sound of a language. So they felt the import, the pressing need to develop a fully vocalized script which represented all the individual phonetic variations to ensure that the recitation of the Avesta is reproduced accurately in written form. And that's what they invented the Avesta script for. Since the Avesta, Pachlavi alphabet only has certain letters, the priests who invented the Avesta script had to procure additional letters. Now, how did they proceed? In principle, they proceeded in two different ways. One was by adding diacritic marks to existing letters of the Pachlavi script. Both of the Buk Pachlavi script. The other method was by borrowing letters from other scripts. And here they also altered some of the letters to produce more signs. Now, let us have a little closer look to this, how they proceeded. The vowels of the Avesta, let us first look at the vowels of the Avesta script. The Avesta alphabet has a full inventory of signs for vowels, 16 all together. The signs for the letters A and E are directly taken from the Pachlavi script. So here that's our aleph, which as we have seen is exactly the one of the Pachlavi script. And the letter for E, the yord is also that of the Pachlavi script. Then the sign for aleph in turn then forms the basis for three more letters to denote variations, phonetic variations of the vowel R. And also vowel lengths. They produce by adding an additional hook to the letter aleph, they produce the sign for a long R. And the combination of a short R here and a long R respectively with this letter E, produced these signs here to denote R and R respectively. The sign for O is that of the special sign of the Pachlavi letter L, when used in the Aramaic heterogram, spelled Ayn L, this one here. This is actually not a letter but a word. It reads O here, phonetically. It's an Aramaic word, L, Iyn L, read O in Pachlavi and it means two. It was a very common word and Karl Hofmann who has studied in great detail the relationship between sign and sound of the Avesta script and how the Avesta script was developed. He has suggested that here the inventor of the script used the spelling of this very common Pachlavi word O which means two and used it for writing the sound O of the Avesta language by putting the vertical stroke which in the Pachlavi Aramaic spelling, Iyn L, precedes the letter L, he put that stroke below the letter for L here. And this then produced our sound O. So according to Hofmann, this vertical stroke here is the Iyn of the word L put below the L. And this was then you produced a single letter O which presented the sound O, no longer a word, O which means two in Pachlavi but the sound O. And he further suggests that then this vertical stroke put below the L became a diacritic marker for other signs by omitting this vertical stroke below the L, a letter for the short O was produced. This here is our Pachlavi L without the vertical stroke preceding in without the sign for Iyn. And here it simply used then as a letter for a short O for the vowel O. To produce signs for the sound O and A, there were no precedents for this in the Pachlavi Lang script, whereas for I and for A there were because Aleph and the sign for I for I could also have vocaliic value, but here the letters O and A, they were completely developed from scratch in the Avesta script and it seems both of these letters are based on Pachlavi words. Before we talk about the letter A, let us just have a look at the signs I and O and their equivalents, long I and long O. So we have already seen that the sign for the short I is that of the Pachlavi script, the sign I here. And the sign for the long I also makes use of this vertical stroke, which marks the long O. So the long I is equally marked with a little vertical stroke put below the letter for I. The short O, this one here, is then the long O without the vertical stroke. And this could then have been the origin of the vertical stroke becoming a mark for vowel lengths, as is seen in the signs for long I and long O, these ones here, which also have both of them are marked with a vertical stroke below the sign. Like O, the sign for A could also have its origin in a Pachlavi word. Hoffman suggests that a likely candidate is the common Pachlavi word for A1, which is also pronounced A. The Avestan sign for short A indeed looks like the Pachlavi word A1 without the initial hook. So here we have the Avestan sign for A and this is the Pachlavi word, the sign for the Pachlavi word A. And with the omission of the initial hook of the Pachlavi word, we get our sign for A. The long I, Hoffman further suggests, would then be based on the sign for the short I by extending the vertical stroke on the left to run to the right below the sign. So here by adding this vertical horizontal stroke extending it further here, then we get the letter for the long I. The full writing of vowels marks a radical break with the Pachlavi script, which leaves vowels unmarked and seems to follow the example of the Greek alphabet, which had been available in Iran since Hellenistic times and which had been adopted by some Iranian tribes, in particular by the Bactrians. That the Greek script played a role in the creation of the Avestan alphabet is also suggested by the shape of the Avestan sign for A. This sign could have been taken wholesale from the Greek epsilon. The sign is then provided with a diacritic mark to produce the sign for the long I, this one here. In addition to the Greek alphabet, the more archaic form of the Pachlavi script used in the Pachlavi Psalter also provided additional letters. Iranian Christians employed this form of the Pachlavi script to write the Middle Persian translations of the Bible. The slide here shows one of the 12 surviving folios of the Pachlavi Psalter, which was discovered in 1905 in Bülayik near Turfan, that is here on our map. The archaic form of the Pachlavi script is also attested elsewhere in Christian Iranian monuments from Central Asia, but is found nowhere else. However, the fact that the Avestan script incorporates some of its signs indicates that the Pachlavi script, that the Psalter script, must have been known also in the province of Phars, the power centre of the Zoroastrian priesthood during the Sasanian period, and the area where the Avestan script was presumably created. The use of letters of the Pachlavi Psalter illustrates well how the inventor of the Avestan script proceeded. Let us have a look at the Avestan letters for the voiceless stop k and the voiced fricative r. The Avestan sign for k, this one here, is the sign of the Pachlavi book script, directly taken from there. While the sign for the voiced fricative, that is this one here, is the sign for k of the Pachlavi Psalter. Now, the Pachlavi sign for k stands for both the vela voiceless stop and the vela voiced fricative, which had regularly developed in post-vocalic position from k via g in Pachlavi. The historical spelling of the Pachlavi script does not account for this phonetic development, so that in the Pachlavi script the letter k came to have two phonetic values, a voiceless stop k and a voiced fricative r. The Avestan language too has a voiced fricative r, which developed in young Avestan from the voiced stop k, in certain positions, especially between vowels. Now, in the case of k, the creator of the Avestan alphabet had two Pachlavi signs for k, one of the Pachlavi book script, this one here, and one of the Pachlavi Psalter, this sign here. He used the letter k of the Pachlavi book script for the Avestan sound k, the voiceless stop, and the sign of the Pachlavi Psalter for the voiced fricative r. As to the letters for the palatal africuts, it was the form of tsadeh as written in the Pachlavi Psalter, which came to represent the Avestan voiced palatal africut d. So this letter here. It seems that here the horizontal line running to the right below the letter was considered to be a marker for the voiced variant, just as it was the case with the voiced fricative r. The sign for the voiced palatal africut then formed the basis for the voiceless counterpart, tshe, which was created by omitting this horizontal line. This one here. So here this is, so this one here is from the Psalter script, and this sign tshe is a new creation on the basis of the sign for tsadeh in the Psalter script. While the original sign of the book Pachlavi script of the tsadeh is not used at all. We have seen earlier that in the book Pachlavi script the signs for the voiced stopsg, d, and j, had all coalesced into one form which came to be used to represent the vowel i in the Avestan script. The Psalter script however has preserved a more archaic form of the sign d, which was still distinct from g and j, and this is this sign here. The inventor of the Avestan script used the sign d of the Pachlavi Psalter to represent the Avestan sound d. The discussion of Avestan signs could be continued, but the examples given here today should suffice to illustrate how the creators of the script proceeded. The Avestan alphabet is clearly an artificial creation. I hope you enjoyed this video. You can now join us in the fourth lesson in which we shall talk about the written transmission of the Avestan.
 Hello and welcome to the third lesson of our module on Avesten.  Today we are going to discuss the transmission of the Avesten texts.  In order to understand better how they were transmitted however,  we first need to look at how they were composed.  The Indo-Iranian people did not write.  The culture was intrinsically oral and this feature characterizes both  the Vedic and the Avesten traditions up to the present day.  Even today aspiring Zoroastrian priests have to learn the recitation of the rituals by heart  and they do so from early childhood onwards.  Now in this slide here you see Zoroastrian boys memorizing the Yassna  at one of the two remaining Zoroastrian priestly schools,  the Dada Atonan Institute in Mumbai, which is a residential school.  So the boys actually lived there and lived there from about age 7 onwards  until they become, until their full initiation usually mid-15 or so.  The boy on the right side here recites the texts he has just learned  and he recites the text to his teacher after he has memorized it from the book.  And you can see here on the left of the slide you can see the boys sitting  and trying to learn the text and as they learn they don't sit there silently,  they read it out aloud.  So when you come into that room you hear what the teacher, the director of the school,  Ramya Karanjia, how they put it, a cacophony of sounds, of noise.  It's very noisy because each of them speaks the texts aloud even when reading it  and then they have to come forward and recite it from memory to the teacher who listens  and who corrects them when they make a mistake.  So that's how they memorize the text even today.  In earlier times however and certainly some 4,000 years ago the teaching was entirely oral  so no written, no books were involved at all.  Certainly very little information is available on the memorization techniques used  in the Zoroastrian tradition over the Mylendia.  But from the closely related Vedic tradition we know that the memorization followed  a complex and sophisticated system designed to ensure that no changes were introduced into the texts.  The hymns were learned by Rote not only in their linear arrangement  as the words followed one another in a hymn but also forwards and backwards  according to a fixed schema as you can see here in this slide.  There are the different parters. There is the Samhita parter which is how the words fit together  and just adapt to one another phonetically as the words are pronounced in context.  Then there is the Pada parter which isolates the individual words from one another  so they were memorized in both these two parters  and then the words were also memorized in the Krama parter which is  1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6 each number standing for the word.  Then the Jata parter when the words were memorized  1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, etc.  and then the Ghana parter 1, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 3, 4, 5, etc.  You can imagine that this really then sticks to the mind especially if you are 7 years old  and they have these words very firmly rooted in their minds and in their hearts  and then they use them when they perform the rituals, there are no books whatsoever involved, they know these words by heart  and if they have forgotten a word then they have to arrange with a teacher  and in a special situation when a wrongly spoken word can cause no harm  then the teacher will remind them of the correct pronunciation.  So this is what it was like in the Vedic tradition and we have evidence for it in our texts.  Certainly we know very little about the techniques used in the Zoroastrian tradition  but there is reason to doubt that anything like this ever developed within the Zoroastrian tradition  and we shall get some confirmation for this view when we are going to look at the phonetics and phonology of the Avesta  in the second part of our teaching of Avestan here in this course when we talk about phonology.  So there are lots of influences of various dialects of the oral tradition constantly  on the way the words of the Avesta are pronounced by the priests.  Now this what we have just heard refers to fixed texts but how did these texts come about in the first place?  So the texts which aspiring priests memorised then and memorised till today are fixed sequences of words  which have to be recited unchanged and the tradition is all there to ensure that no changes are being introduced to the fixed words, words and words order.  At the time of their composition however poetry formed part of a living culture of oral composition in performance.  Each performance produced a new composition, a new song better than any previous songs  and this is how these texts came about in the first place.  Thus in the very first hymn of the first gata in Yasna 28 the singer announces that his compositions are without precedent  and we find the same concept also in the hymns of the Rigveda.  So let us look at first Yasna 28.3.  There in the translation we read, I who want to extol you, good thought and the wise lord with rightness, that's Asha, in an unprecedented way.  Akpurvim, something which has no precedent and then in the Rigveda here, Rigveda 10.23.6  the Vimadas which is a family of priests, of singers have begotten this praise for you, O Indra,  praise unprecedented Akpurvim, best of many for the one of good gift.  So here is a reference to the gift which is then due when the ritual is performed has been completed.  So here this is a common inheritance in these two traditions, a new song without a precedent,  better than anything else that has been recited before.  Each recitation is a new composition, novel.  That hymns composed more than 3000 years ago have survived up to the present day  and it is first of all due to the fact that their wording became fixed at some point in prehistoric times.  Subsequently these hymns then were transmitted verbatim from generation to generation.  In the case of Avestan, different texts petrified at different times, the old Avestan texts being the first to do so.  This is indicated by the fact that their language is more archaic than that of the rest of the Avesta.  The old Avestan texts came to be recited with a fixed wording while simultaneously other middle and young Avestan texts  continued to be composed in performance.  In this process, older Avestan texts were not only reproduced verbatim as a whole,  but parts of them were also quoted, reworked and elaborated on in the middle and young Avestan contexts  which include numerous quotations and adaptations of old Avestan texts.  As a result, the old Avestan texts came to be embedded in rituals whose language is heterogeneous.  Some of texts are older, others are younger.  An interpretive tradition of the prestigious old Avestan texts also developed then.  The exegetical tradition of the Avesta does reach us back to Avestan times.  Three exegetical texts in Avestan language are incorporated in the extant Yassna where they form chapters 19 to 21  and there are many other, though shorter, instances of Avestan exegesis in the extant Avesta.  During the late Achaemenid period, the Avestan language became gradually obsolete  and new Avestan texts ceased to be composed.  Thus, as the spoken old Iranian languages evolved into middle Iranian idioms,  the language of the exegesis too became middle Iranian.  There were many centres of Zoroastrian learning all over Iranian lands from the Achaemenid period onwards.  They include areas of eastern Iran, especially Sokdiana, Bakhtria, Drangiana and Arachosia.  We shall see in the lesson on phonology that these local traditions have left traces in the extant Avesta.  But on the whole, all that has survived to the present day is the religious tradition of the power,  one of the big power centres, the province of Paas, which was the homeland of two of Iran's major ruling dynasties,  the Achaemenids and the Cessanians.  The Avestan script has two main features.  One is that it is an artificial creation, which happened at a certain point in time.  The second characteristic of the Avestan script is that it represents sound, not meaning.  The script is phonetic, not phonemic.  Those who invented the script strove to write what they heard, not what they understood,  because they didn't understand much of the Avestan language anymore at that point.  The Avestan alphabet has at least 53 letters and notes a great deal of phonetic variations.  Twelve of the Avestan letters are directly taken from the cursive form of the book Pachlavi script,  which was current at the time when the script was invented.  By then, the Zoroastrian clergy had used the Pachlavi script for many centuries to write a wide range of texts in their own Middle-Persian language.  They might well also have used it to write the Pachlavi translation, interpretation of the Avesta, and occasionally also Avestan words.  Like the Pachlavi script, the Avestan script runs from right to left, in Semitic fashion.  But in contrast to Pachlavi, the Avestan script is fully vocalised and the letters are not connected.  The shapes of the letters of the Pachlavi script allow us to distinguish three phases of the Pachlavi script.  One is inscribtional, the other one is a script of the solter, and the third one is book Pachlavi.  And the book Pachlavi represents the most advanced stage of development.  It's a very cursive form of the Pachlavi script in which lots of letters have just merged into one.  The Pachlavi script of the solter is more similar to the script of the inscriptions than to the cursive structures of the Pachlavi books.  Thus, the alphabet of the Pachlavi solter contains 18 distinct characters as compared to book Pachlavi, which is only 13.  For example, in the solter script, the letter Dalet, this one here, is still different from Gimmel, which is this one here.  See, it's distinct. And it's also different from Jodh, which is this letter here.  Whereas in Pachlavi, they've all become the same. This one, they're all the same and indistinguishable, just a little hook.  And in Avestan, this becomes a letter for I.  Then also Khet, the letter Khet here in Buk Pachlavi, that is this letter here, is still different from Aleph, this letter here.  Whereas in Buk Pachlavi, oh excuse me, I've made a mistake. This is not the Khet, this is the He, which becomes in Buk Buk Pachlavi, this letter.  I must correct myself here. I meant this letter, this is the Khet. This is not the Khet, this is the letter He, it's a different letter.  So this is the letter Khet and in the solter script Aleph and Khet are still distinct, but in Buk Pachlavi, the Khet and the Aleph have become indistinguishable.  Whereas the letter He is used only in Aramaic words from which all these scripts derive.  Then we also have the letter Waf in the solter script, which is here.  That is a little bit a line, this letter here. It's a vertical line which bends a little bit to the right, a little similar to here, the inscriptional portion form.  Whereas in Buk Pachlavi, it's simply a vertical stroke and that Buk Pachlavi letter is just the same vertical stroke as we have it for the letter Nun.  Whereas here we have in the solter script still a distinct form and the iron which has already become identical as a vertical stroke also in the solter.  A script and the Rish as well, all of them just end up as a vertical stroke.  So it is the letter Nun and the letter Waf which are still distinct in the solter script, whereas in the Buk Pachlavi script, they have ended up as vertical strokes, just as the letters iron and Waf.  So we have four different functions for a vertical stroke in the Buk Pachlavi script.  It can be a W, it can be a Nun, it can be a Rish and it can be an iron.  And in addition also the vertical stroke in the Pachlavi script is used as a word final marker, just a vertical stroke to indicate the end of a word after a letter which doesn't connect to the left.  So it is also highly ambiguous, a terrible script and Neil Mackenzie once called the Pachlavi Buk script Arrimanik.  It causes lots of problems, whereas a language is not so difficult.  But you can see also why the Zoroastrian priests of the Sasanian period considered the Buk Pachlavi script as unsuitable to write down the sound of a language.  So they felt the import, the pressing need to develop a fully vocalized script which represented all the individual phonetic variations to ensure that the recitation of the Avesta is reproduced accurately in written form.  And that's what they invented the Avesta script for.  Since the Avesta, Pachlavi alphabet only has certain letters, the priests who invented the Avesta script had to procure additional letters.  Now, how did they proceed?  In principle, they proceeded in two different ways.  One was by adding diacritic marks to existing letters of the Pachlavi script.  Both of the Buk Pachlavi script.  The other method was by borrowing letters from other scripts.  And here they also altered some of the letters to produce more signs.  Now, let us have a little closer look to this, how they proceeded.  The vowels of the Avesta, let us first look at the vowels of the Avesta script.  The Avesta alphabet has a full inventory of signs for vowels, 16 all together.  The signs for the letters A and E are directly taken from the Pachlavi script.  So here that's our aleph, which as we have seen is exactly the one of the Pachlavi script.  And the letter for E, the yord is also that of the Pachlavi script.  Then the sign for aleph in turn then forms the basis for three more letters to denote variations, phonetic variations of the vowel R.  And also vowel lengths.  They produce by adding an additional hook to the letter aleph, they produce the sign for a long R.  And the combination of a short R here and a long R respectively with this letter E,  produced these signs here to denote R and R respectively.  The sign for O is that of the special sign of the Pachlavi letter L,  when used in the Aramaic heterogram, spelled Ayn L, this one here.  This is actually not a letter but a word.  It reads O here, phonetically.  It's an Aramaic word, L, Iyn L, read O in Pachlavi and it means two.  It was a very common word and Karl Hofmann who has studied in great detail the relationship between sign and sound of the Avesta script  and how the Avesta script was developed.  He has suggested that here the inventor of the script used the spelling of this very common Pachlavi word O which means two  and used it for writing the sound O of the Avesta language by putting the vertical stroke which in the Pachlavi Aramaic spelling,  Iyn L, precedes the letter L, he put that stroke below the letter for L here.  And this then produced our sound O.  So according to Hofmann, this vertical stroke here is the Iyn of the word L put below the L.  And this was then you produced a single letter O which presented the sound O, no longer a word,  O which means two in Pachlavi but the sound O.  And he further suggests that then this vertical stroke put below the L became a diacritic marker for other signs  by omitting this vertical stroke below the L, a letter for the short O was produced.  This here is our Pachlavi L without the vertical stroke preceding in without the sign for Iyn.  And here it simply used then as a letter for a short O for the vowel O.  To produce signs for the sound O and A, there were no precedents for this in the Pachlavi Lang script,  whereas for I and for A there were because Aleph and the sign for I for I could also have vocaliic value,  but here the letters O and A, they were completely developed from scratch in the Avesta script  and it seems both of these letters are based on Pachlavi words.  Before we talk about the letter A, let us just have a look at the signs I and O and their equivalents,  long I and long O. So we have already seen that the sign for the short I is that of the Pachlavi script,  the sign I here. And the sign for the long I also makes use of this vertical stroke,  which marks the long O. So the long I is equally marked with a little vertical stroke put below the letter for I.  The short O, this one here, is then the long O without the vertical stroke.  And this could then have been the origin of the vertical stroke becoming a mark for vowel lengths,  as is seen in the signs for long I and long O, these ones here,  which also have both of them are marked with a vertical stroke below the sign.  Like O, the sign for A could also have its origin in a Pachlavi word.  Hoffman suggests that a likely candidate is the common Pachlavi word for A1, which is also pronounced A.  The Avestan sign for short A indeed looks like the Pachlavi word A1 without the initial hook.  So here we have the Avestan sign for A and this is the Pachlavi word, the sign for the Pachlavi word A.  And with the omission of the initial hook of the Pachlavi word, we get our sign for A.  The long I, Hoffman further suggests, would then be based on the sign for the short I by extending the vertical stroke on the left to run to the right below the sign.  So here by adding this vertical horizontal stroke extending it further here, then we get the letter for the long I.  The full writing of vowels marks a radical break with the Pachlavi script,  which leaves vowels unmarked and seems to follow the example of the Greek alphabet,  which had been available in Iran since Hellenistic times and which had been adopted by some Iranian tribes, in particular by the Bactrians.  That the Greek script played a role in the creation of the Avestan alphabet is also suggested by the shape of the Avestan sign for A.  This sign could have been taken wholesale from the Greek epsilon.  The sign is then provided with a diacritic mark to produce the sign for the long I, this one here.  In addition to the Greek alphabet, the more archaic form of the Pachlavi script used in the Pachlavi Psalter also provided additional letters.  Iranian Christians employed this form of the Pachlavi script to write the Middle Persian translations of the Bible.  The slide here shows one of the 12 surviving folios of the Pachlavi Psalter, which was discovered in 1905 in Bülayik near Turfan, that is here on our map.  The archaic form of the Pachlavi script is also attested elsewhere in Christian Iranian monuments from Central Asia, but is found nowhere else.  However, the fact that the Avestan script incorporates some of its signs indicates that the Pachlavi script, that the Psalter script, must have been known also in the province of Phars, the power centre of the Zoroastrian priesthood during the Sasanian period,  and the area where the Avestan script was presumably created.  The use of letters of the Pachlavi Psalter illustrates well how the inventor of the Avestan script proceeded.  Let us have a look at the Avestan letters for the voiceless stop k and the voiced fricative r.  The Avestan sign for k, this one here, is the sign of the Pachlavi book script, directly taken from there. While the sign for the voiced fricative, that is this one here, is the sign for k of the Pachlavi Psalter.  Now, the Pachlavi sign for k stands for both the vela voiceless stop and the vela voiced fricative, which had regularly developed in post-vocalic position from k via g in Pachlavi.  The historical spelling of the Pachlavi script does not account for this phonetic development, so that in the Pachlavi script the letter k came to have two phonetic values, a voiceless stop k and a voiced fricative r.  The Avestan language too has a voiced fricative r, which developed in young Avestan from the voiced stop k, in certain positions, especially between vowels.  Now, in the case of k, the creator of the Avestan alphabet had two Pachlavi signs for k, one of the Pachlavi book script, this one here, and one of the Pachlavi Psalter, this sign here.  He used the letter k of the Pachlavi book script for the Avestan sound k, the voiceless stop, and the sign of the Pachlavi Psalter for the voiced fricative r.  As to the letters for the palatal africuts, it was the form of tsadeh as written in the Pachlavi Psalter, which came to represent the Avestan voiced palatal africut d.  So this letter here.  It seems that here the horizontal line running to the right below the letter was considered to be a marker for the voiced variant, just as it was the case with the voiced fricative r.  The sign for the voiced palatal africut then formed the basis for the voiceless counterpart, tshe, which was created by omitting this horizontal line.  This one here.  So here this is, so this one here is from the Psalter script, and this sign tshe is a new creation on the basis of the sign for tsadeh in the Psalter script.  While the original sign of the book Pachlavi script of the tsadeh is not used at all.  We have seen earlier that in the book Pachlavi script the signs for the voiced stopsg, d, and j, had all coalesced into one form which came to be used to represent the vowel i in the Avestan script.  The Psalter script however has preserved a more archaic form of the sign d, which was still distinct from g and j, and this is this sign here.  The inventor of the Avestan script used the sign d of the Pachlavi Psalter to represent the Avestan sound d.  The discussion of Avestan signs could be continued, but the examples given here today should suffice to illustrate how the creators of the script proceeded.  The Avestan alphabet is clearly an artificial creation.  I hope you enjoyed this video.  You can now join us in the fourth lesson in which we shall talk about the written transmission of the Avestan.
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