Avestan

Avestan is the Old Iranian language of the Avesta, the sacred corpus of Zoroastrianism. Its oldest layer, the Gathas attributed to Zarathustra, is among the most archaic Indo-Iranian poetry known, close kin to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda; a younger layer carries the liturgy and the law, including the Vendidad, whose first chapter lists the sixteen Aryan lands and so preserves some of the earliest names of the eastern Iranian world. Avestan was an eastern Iranian tongue with no single homeland securely fixed, though its geography points to Bactria, Margiana, and the lands of the Oxus.

The Avestan alphabet itself is far younger than the language: it is a phonetically precise script, derived from cursive Pahlavi and written right to left, that Zoroastrian priests devised in the Sasanian period (around the fifth and sixth centuries CE) to record with exactness a liturgy that had until then been transmitted orally for a millennium or more. Modern scholarship most often cites Avestan in the romanized transliteration of Geldner and Hoffmann; the original alphabet, though encoded in Unicode, appears only rarely in digital texts, and forms given here in Avestan script follow the standard letter-by-letter correspondence with that transliteration. Avestan preserves no name for itself as a language, the term Avesta being a later Middle Persian word; in its place the self-designation given here is airiiana (Airyana, “Aryan”), the adjective of the homeland Airiianəm Vaējah of Vendidad 1.1 and the ultimate source of the name Iran, written in its stem form by the same letter-by-letter construction.

@misc{onomastikon-avestan,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Avestan},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/avestan}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}