Zoroastrian Texts: From Uniquely Oral to Uniquely Written
Three professors. One week. One strained brain. Orality is about transmitting texts in oral language. Written is in script, which isn't necessarily language with meaning or in its own language.
Some professors pack 2 terabytes of knowledge in one sentence. Others use a paragraph to share 1 kilobyte. While still others force us to wade through academic discourse to figure out just how much new knowledge we need to suck up.
Such was this week. I’m exhausted.
I fear the coming MCQ (multiple-choice question) test on the past two weeks. I had the odd experience of one part of my brain hearing the lecture and taking notes, while another part worked on understanding what I was hearing but in a lagging space-time continuum. Is it any wonder I’m exhausted?! So this post is drafted, revised once, and I apologize for the lack of links and images of the manuscripts we were shown from digital archives. Google is your friend, right? Right?!
So let’s break down the three lectures by SOAS Emeritus Reader Sarah Stewart, Prof. Albert de Jong of Leiden University, and Prof. Miguel Ángel André-Toledo of University of Toronto on oral texts and written transmission into what I found most fascinating.
Zoroastrian Texts Are Unique
Historically and currently, Western scholars ignore Zoroastrian texts because they don’t know what to do with them. They don’t follow the structure or time-based method of the usual Greek or Roman texts. They require one to view written texts in a different way than we’re used to.
By the way, texts means oral or written religious liturgies, prayers, hymns, songs, etc. and literary narratives, myths, legends, poetry, etc.
Authors
No one knows who composed Zoroastrian texts. Only the Gathas have a certain author: they are the revelation from God to Zarathushtra. On the other hand, some scribes who laboriously hand-wrote texts wrote down their names in the Colophons. One-page or multiple-page colophons appear at the end of a text to provide the reader with information about who copied the text (scribe’s name), where it was copied, when it was copied, and/or on which earlier copies it was based.
Titles
What are titles but a name for a piece of text, whether a story, an instruction, a chapter, or a book? Zoroastrian authors or scribes didn’t feel the need to title their written texts. The closest they got was that some scribes wrote as the first line, “This is the book of…” Scholars (or later scribe/translators?) would then transpose that line into a traditional type of title.
Exceptions
Two exceptions to this rule include the Dēnkard, which is a very large Middle Persian (Pahlavi) text with a title and the Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān, a legal text with a title (ī means “son of” or “of”). Prof. de Jong said it wasn’t entirely accidental that both these texts came out of a bureaucratic court rather than an anonymous (no identifiable author) community like most Zoroastrian texts.
Understandable Structure
Doesn’t exist in Zoroastrian texts, or at least ones that we’re familiar with. Instead, we could see structure as a communal narrative. A kind of collaboration through space-time.
Boundedness
It usually isn’t clear where one text ends and the next one begins. I read a long time ago that the Bible wasn’t written with chapter titles. It was translators who divided it into books and chapters in order to make it comprehensible to readers. Although Zoroastrian scribes would sometimes insert translations into already written Avestan texts, they didn’t seem to add structure to them like scribes did with the Bible where structure didn’t exist.
Predictable Contents
A reader cannot predict what will come next from what they’re reading. Being able to predict is part of reading comprehension, as I learnt after brain injury stole that ability from me. Not being able to predict what comes next as you read makes it harder to comprehend written text. That alone would frustrate Western scholars and give them an emotional, illogical reason to ignore these written works.
Chronology
Zoroastrian texts couldn’t care less about which texts were composed earlier and which came later. Chronology is irrelevant as they perceive all the texts as equally true. Since oral texts don’t allow for determining origin, and since we all want to know what came first in order to determine what is truest, this feature defies our mindset and forces us to see differently.
Prof. Stewart quoted Cantera (p. 3-4):
“The terms “original,” “text,” “author,” and “composition” mean completely different things when applied to oral literature from when applied to written literature. The term “original” implies a beginning, a “first” text, but, in a purely oral tradition, no such original can be determined on the basis of the extant texts, and an author in the modern sense is an indefinable concept when applied to ancient oral literature written down in modern times. Here we can only speak of performers and, later, about dictation and scribes. As for the term “text,” to us, this usually implies a set text, composed with certain rules in mind in the modern sense, which is not a concept that can be applied directly to oral literature.”
I don’t know why these differences led scholars to ignore Zoroastrian religious and literary writings. What do you think?
What Is Language, and What Is Script?
Language is not the symbols on the page that we read. Language is spoken and conveyed orally. I think it can involve facial expressions, gestures, and body language. Script is the written symbols representing language, ie, the letters on the page, whether the page is stone, paper, or tablets.
Language can exist long before its script is invented.
A script can be in a language that’s younger than the language it’s being used for.
Huh?
In other words, language can be written in a script that’s not its own.
For example, a scribe who doesn’t know Gujarati but listens to its sounds writes it down in Avestan script. Or an earlier scribe, living in a society that uses Pahlavi (Middle Persian) language, writes Pahlavi text in Avestan script because Avestan is a precise written script whereas Pahlavi script is ambiguous with many different meanings ascribed to one symbol (as I understood it). Prof. Toledo’s explanation of how difficult Pahlavi is to learn and write rather reminded me of English. English is full of homonyms and vowels that sound different depending on the consonants surrounding them, or sometimes, to be ornery, adds exceptions to the rule to change meaning. The worst for me is the word “read.” Did you read it in the present tense or the past tense? How do you know which tense I meant?
Whoever invented Avestan script began with the then-commonly used Pahlavi script. They added vowels and refined it to make it a precise script that allowed readers to precisely pronounce the sounds of the oral texts.
Zoroastrian languages include in chronological order:
Avestan — 2nd to 1st millennium BCE
Pahlavi (Middle Persian) — 3rd to 19th century CE
Sogdian — 8th to 9th century CE
Sanskrit — 12th to 14th century CE
New Persian — 15h century CE to today
Gujarati — 15th century CE to today.
New Persian and Gujarati are the two modern languages and scripts still in use today. The rest appear as script or as part of oral transmissions of traditional texts.
What Is Sacred Language?
I got confused about this. It’s useful when you have another professor in another lecture who you can ask when you ran out of time to ask in the previous lecture.
Avestan was a common language 4,000 years ago, spoken in a broad region with many different dialects, though, like with Spanish or English around the world, speakers could understand each other. Zarathushtra lived in a community whose common language was Avestan, and he composed the Gathas in Avestan. At that time, Avestan was strictly an oral language.
Although they had other scripts in other languages at the time, they chose not to write down the Revelation from Ahura Mazda. They chose not to write down any of the Zoroastrian texts until about 500 BCE, not because they didn’t know how to write, but (partly) because, as I wrote earlier, they viewed oral transmission as pure and written as desecrating the texts.
They chose to locate their texts in the brains of specialists aka priests instead of on parchment or stone or paper. That meant that Zoroastrians had a longer oral tradition than the Vedics in India.
When they chose to invent an Avestan script and write down the religious texts, they didn’t change them.
By the time they developed a script, no one was left who knew Avestan as an understood language. They only understood the sounds. This loss of understanding happened over the centuries. And that may be why that concurrent with the loss, people developed the concept that Avestan texts were sacred. Avestan went from being the common language to being a sacred language used by God that no human can understand. This gradual change also narrowed its scope from being a language belonging to many peoples in a broad region to being exclusively Zoroastrian.
The Western corollary would be Latin, which at one time was a common language but today is seen as the language of a particular religion and language of culture.
Five Kings Who Shaped Written Transmission
According to post-Sasanian Pahlavi sources, these five kings preserved written copies of the Avesta, ie, the Gathas. Alexander1 in conquering some of these kings, put at risk the transmission of the Avesta. But locating the oral texts in the brains of specialists helped to mitigate some of that risk.
Kauui Vīštāspa — a mythical king whom Zarathushtra converted to Zoroastrianism (see my post on Zoroastrian Literature). Legend is he inscribed the Religion (Avestan, Gathas) on tablets with gold ink. He’s the first king to have written down the Avesta. Alexander burned and threw the tablets into the sea. It’s part of the truth behind the legend.
Darius III, 336-330 BCE — During the Achaemenid Period (see previous post on Empires). He’s the first to preserve the written Avesta with its commentary, the Zand, placing the original in the Satrapal Treasury and copies in the Fortress of Writing. Alexander burned the information in the Fortress of Writing but translated the one in the Satrapal Treasury. Scholars do not know if this Greek translation was transmitted or not.
Walaxš (unknown which one, assumed I), 51-78 CE — He was the first king to canonize or cystallize the Avesta. According to native sources, this was a new element in the written transmission. Whatever was orally transmitted, ie, the Gathas, remained authoritative. The rest was consciously chosen by what priestly authorities determined was kosher, discarding the rest. We do not know what was discarded. Although it’s not the same as what Christians did in the 4th century in their Councils, when they determined which books to keep and which to discard, it had a similar effect, I think. But we have the Nag Hammadi of written texts that we can look at through a perspective shaped by 2,000 years of Christianity and decide if the Council was right or erred in some ways.
Ardaxšīr I, 224-240 CE — The most important Sasanian king consigned the most important copy to the Satrapal Treasury and disseminated copies. He, too, had a priest deciding what belonged to tradition and what to discard.
Šābuhr I, 240-270 CE — The first to bring in foreign texts from India, the Greeks, etc. These texts were from scattered books of the Religion. He was open to different traditions of the Religion, to take into account knowledge of neighbouring cultures, and to incorporate them into the Avesta.
Quotations
Pahlavi texts contain a large number of quotations, eg, “It is said in the Tradition…” These quotations come from unknown sources. There are no existing physical manuscripts that contain the text the scribes are quoting.
For reasons I really don’t understand, most Western scholars ignore these quotations. Apparently, they’re too hard to deal with. Give me a break. I learnt in Friday’s class by Prof. André-Toledo that scholars will pore over how a single letter symbol is hand-written in order to parse its sound and location in space and time. That’s an enormous feat of concentration and much harder, I would think, than dealing with quotations.
The New Testament contains quotations that are acknowledged and seen as quoting text from the Old Testament, even when it seems to me they’re not word for word. Scholars also believe that the evidence suggests that Jesus’s last words aren’t only the first few lines but are a reference to the entire Psalm as that was the tradition back then. Thus the only difference between New Testament quotations and those in Zoroastrian texts is that we still have the original material. But if we acknowledge that humans in one religion can be relied upon to quote from previous material, we can acknowledge that humans in other religions can do so as well, including Zoroastrianism. It isn’t the scribes’ fault that Alexander and the Islamic conquerors burned and destroyed much of the extant written texts, leaving us with a fragment. Open-minded scholars believe these quotations point to what existed earlier, like the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew and Luke point to Q. Q is lost to us and can only be reconstructed from studying these Gospels.
The difference between Q and whatever we want to call the earlier Zoroastrian texts is that Q is small whereas the quotations point to a very large amount of text. Yet we could use these quotations to reconstruct the lost text in the same way scholars are doing for Q.
Who we know classically as Alexander the Great, Zoroastrians describe him as accursed, scoundrel, wretched, wrathful, counter-creation, heretic, liar, evil-doer. What do you think? Did the scribes who used these descriptors hate him or not? Revile him? Despise him? I think he was a barbarian because only barbarians destroy the writings of another culture or religion as Alexander did.