Avestan

The Avestan script is a deliberate act of phonetic engineering. The Avesta, the liturgical corpus of Zoroastrianism, had been transmitted orally by priestly schools for something like a thousand years, in a language that had long ceased to be spoken, before the script was created to fix it in writing, most likely between the fourth and sixth centuries CE under the Sasanian dynasty, whose priesthood was then consolidating the canon.

The base material was the Pahlavi cursive of administrative use, a notoriously ambiguous script, but the designers inverted its vices: where Pahlavi wrote many sounds with one sign, the Avestan alphabet wrote one sound per sign, expanding to more than fifty letters, with distinct characters for fine shades of vowels and consonants that ordinary scripts ignore. The reason is theological.

In Zoroastrian ritual the recited sound of the sacred words, the manthra, is itself operative, so a text that fixed the words but not their exact pronunciation would have missed the point. Written right to left like its Aramaic-descended relatives, the script is called din dabireh, the religion writing, in the tradition, and it was used for essentially nothing except the sacred corpus and its ritual apparatus, one of the purest special-purpose scripts ever devised.

Everything that survives of the Avesta reaches us through this script. The oldest extant manuscripts are medieval, copied by priestly scribal families in Iran and in the Parsi settlements of Gujarat, and their colophons let scholars reconstruct chains of copying running back centuries earlier. The manuscripts transmit the Yasna, the liturgy whose seventy-two chapters include the Gathas attributed to Zarathustra himself, along with the Visperad, the Vendidad, and the shorter prayers of daily and calendrical use, often interleaved with Pahlavi translation and commentary, the zand.

For the priesthood the script has remained a working tool: students memorise the liturgy by ear as their predecessors always did, but the written text stands as the checkrail of accuracy, and printed prayer books in Avestan letters, sometimes with transliteration, serve lay devotion in both the Iranian and Parsi communities. European scholarship met the script in the eighteenth century when Abraham Anquetil-Duperron studied with Parsi teachers and published a translation of the corpus, and the script's precision has made the Avesta a cornerstone for the comparative study of the Indo-Iranian languages ever since. The alphabet remains what it was made to be, the guardian of an exactly pronounced liturgy.