Alphabet Letters
Avestan An 𐬄
Avestan Letters
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Origin Devised in the Sasanian period, commonly placed in the fifth or sixth century CE, long after the Avestan texts themselves were composed.
An writes a nasalised a, a vowel carried partly through the nose. The script provides two signs for a nasal a and this is the first of them; editors distinguish the two in transliteration and preserve the distinction the manuscripts make. Nasalisation is exactly the sort of feature that survives in careful recitation and vanishes in ordinary writing, and its presence here shows what the alphabet was made to capture. No Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century, so every copy in existence is far younger than the script, and the script is far younger than the words it carries. The gap between composition and writing is the central fact about this alphabet. It records with great care a language nobody had spoken for centuries by the time the first pen was cut for it.
Facts
Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet in the strict sense: its vowels are full letters standing in the line, not marks hung on a consonant, which is the sharpest break it makes with the Book Pahlavi writing it was drawn from. 1Tradition: The Avestan script PositionFifth of the sixteen vowel letters of the Avestan alphabet, which are set out in pairs of short and long before the consonants begin 2Tradition: The Avestan script How the Letter JoinsWritten right to left, with each sound kept to its own distinct sign. The Book Pahlavi hand behind it had let several sounds fall together into shared shapes, and undoing that ambiguity is what the Avestan alphabet was made for. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Attributions
Associated SoundA nasalised a, carried partly through the nose; the first of the two nasal a signs the script provides 1Tradition: Avestan phonology Origins
Origin PeriodDevised in the Sasanian period, commonly placed in the fifth or sixth century CE, long after the Avestan texts themselves were composed. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Place of OriginSasanian Iran, where the Zoroastrian priesthood assembled the written Avesta. 1Tradition: The Avestan script Origin of the NameNamed directly for the nasalised a it writes, an, following the same transliteration convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namea nasalised a 1Tradition: The Avestan script Transmission
Manuscript TraditionNo Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century CE, so every witness to the script is many centuries younger than the script itself, and the script is younger again than the words it carries. 4Tradition: Zoroastrianism Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script exists to fix the sound of the Avesta, which is recited in Zoroastrian worship, a living practice with a small community. Its precision serves the requirement that the recited word be pronounced as it has been received. 3Tradition: Zoroastrianism Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceEncoded at U+10B04 AVESTAN LETTER AN in the Avestan block, which lies wholly above the Basic Multilingual Plane. 2Tradition: The Avestan script Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe Avesta was transmitted orally by priests for centuries before any script existed to hold it. This alphabet records a recitation, not a composition, and the gap between the two is the central fact about it. 4Tradition: Zoroastrianism Learn More
Avestan An: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet
The sound is an a carried partly through the nose, the soft palate lowered so that the air escapes by both routes at once. Avestan has two signs for a nasal a and this is the first of them. The sixteen vowel letters come first in the sequence, before any consonant, and they are set out in pairs of short and long. The arrangement is inherited from nowhere. The tradition that supplied the letterforms had no such vowel series and no reason to order one this way, so the pattern comes from an analysis of the language the script was built to hold. It stands fifth in the alphabet as a whole and fifth of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan Aao and Avestan Aan. That position is not arbitrary.
The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound. The tradition calls the script din dabireh, the religion writing. It served the Avesta and very little else, and the shape of its letter list follows the sounds of that one language rather than any general requirement of writing in Sasanian Iran. The alphabet is often described as one of the most phonetically exact writing systems of the ancient world. The description is fair, and the reason for it is narrow: the script had one job, and that job rewarded precision far more than it rewarded speed.
Avestan An and What Recitation Preserves
Nasalisation is among the first things to go when a language is written down casually. It survives in careful recitation and disappears from careless spelling, and a script that writes it is telling you which of the two it was built for. Vowel writing is the innovation that separates this alphabet from everything else written in Iran at the time. The letterforms are Pahlavi and the right to left direction is Pahlavi. The vowels are not: they are full letters, and they come first in the order.
No Avestan manuscript survives from earlier than the thirteenth century of the common era. Every copy in existence is therefore many centuries younger than the alphabet, and the alphabet is many centuries younger again than the words. What reaches a modern edition has passed through both gaps. In the digital record the letter is encoded at U+10B04 AVESTAN LETTER AN. The Avestan block sits wholly in the supplementary planes, and every letter in it takes four bytes in the encoding most of the web runs on. That is the practical reason Avestan text is still uncommon online, and why a page carrying it depends on the reader having a font that covers the range. Zoroastrianism is a living religion with a small community, and the Avesta is its liturgy rather than its archive. The letters of this alphabet are therefore not an antiquarian matter. They record sounds a priest is still expected to produce.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The two signs the alphabet provides for a nasalised a. The manuscripts keep them apart and editors follow, though the second is much the rarer of the two.
The second, rarer of the two signs the alphabet provides for a nasalised a, kept apart in the manuscripts from the first.
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