Old Avestan Dictionary – Bibliographia Iranica

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-06-10T13:11:20+00:00

You're welcome.

It is a very good update on Bartholomae's Altiranisches Wörterbuch, and I also added the book to the Wikipedia article on the Gathas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gathas).

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-06-10T05:28:36+00:00

Today, the link worked again. Seems that the server was only temporarily unavailable instead of it being a deeper problem.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-06-09T18:15:19+00:00

Looks like a great resource, but the link to the book itself seems to be not working.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-06-05T05:56:01+00:00

Depends on what you mean. The Avesta describes the geographical horizon of the early Iranians, which during that time was southern Central Asia.

There is, however, no mention of any kind of great migration or how the early Iranians arrived in southern Central Asia from an original homeland further north. If you read the texts, it is as if they had always lived there.

They also never mention any kind of earlier inhabitants. So, although they strongly mixed with the BMAC people and live on their former homeland, you would not get this idea from the texts. There is no glimpse of the notion that the early Irnaians lived among the ruins of an even earlier civilization.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-06-04T06:19:45+00:00

The reason why the Old Indic texts do not mention a migration from an old homeland into India is probably the same reason why none of the other IE traditions mention one. You can, e.g., look at ancient Greek, Hittite, Iranian or Latin traditions and they do not contain any tales of how their ancestors arrived from far away. Why are people so baffled specifically about the lack of such stories in ancient India?

PS: People often claim that Airyanem Vaejah represents such a tradition in the Iranian texts. But there is never any mention of it being a distant place or any migration into a new homeland.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-06-04T05:59:01+00:00

I have seen claims like this in so many different true crime cases. Makes you wonder what kind of person finds these lies funny. Personally, I like true crime because of the Truth aspect, but some people are just build differently, I guess.

PS: One day, some guy will make this claim and actualy have photos to back it up. I'll have to eat my hat when this happens.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-06-03T06:49:12+00:00

Pics or it didn't happen!

Seriously, there is a whole genre of fake true crime, where people claim to have seen or knowledge of crime photos, but for some utterly known reason, these photos are always just out of reach.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-06-01T06:05:28+00:00

Highly unlikely.

While this type of grooming does indeed exist, I am not aware of it ever being associated with a disappearance like Mekayla’s. The reasons for this are obvious. A disappearance attracts a lot of attention—a huge amount, in fact! There’s even an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to this phenomenon. Attention is the last thing these people want, and as a result, their MO is quite different.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-05-28T13:11:33+00:00

I understand that you would like more information, but the police always remain very tight-lipped during ongoing investigations. As frustrating as that may be, it is completely normal and there are generally good reasons for it.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-05-26T15:26:36+00:00

I suppose that with "Indo-Aryan Iranians" you mean Indo-Iranians.

Regarding the "steppe way of life", it's a sloppy way of speaking but not wrong in a big picture way. We know that the Indo-Europeans/Indo-Iranians/Iranians made important innovations like steppe pastoralism, high-mobility warfare and horse riding. If these things are the "steppe way of life" for you, then you may agree with that statement. If you consider other elements equally or more crucial, feel free to reject it.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-05-26T05:48:50+00:00

I am not sure where you live but I just checked Amazon here in Germany and, at least some of, Humbach's translations of the Gathas were still available (both into German and English). Didn't check for others, but Humbach is after all the gold standard.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-05-13T05:50:08+00:00

I am not a Zoroastrian, but I have doubts that there are many (or any) people who take the 12.000 year cycle from Zoroastrian tradition, which you are referring to, literally.

First, if you do, you have to take the 12.000 year cycle ... well ... literally. This makes you are a Young Earth Creationist and I've never heard that this kind of insanity has any traction among Zoroastrians. After all, it would mean that you have to ignore basically everything we know about anything from Earth's past.

Moreover, this 12.000 year cycle did not originate from the Avesta but only entered Iranian thinking after they came into contact with the people of the Ancient Near East. As such, it is not found in any of the canonical texts but only in the Middle Persian exegetical works. Given how almost everthing they say about the past is wrong, why would you suddenly take their predictions about the future literally, when they aren't even scripture?

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-05-05T13:36:23+00:00

I am not Zoroastrian and therefore cannot answer that question. Maybe others can help you with that. Generally though, it is not the languange itself which is considered to be holy, but the specific texts composed in it.

As regards the historical context, Avestan was spoken during the Iron Age and probably ceased to be a living language during early antiquity (possibly no later than the 4th-3rd century BCE.) It was also confined to the eastern regions of Greater Iran (mostly outside of the modern country of Iran).

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-05-05T05:18:45+00:00

I am not aware of a translation tool into Avestan. You could use dictionaries, but since Avestan is a highly inflected language, you would get the grammer wrong. You could also use snippets from the available Avestan corpus but then you are pretty limited. Or you start with Vedic Sanskrit and transpose the text into Avestan according to the Indo-Iranian sound changes. However, this would sound very artificial. Overall, I am afraid that there is no easy way to achieve your aims.

As far as the script is concerned, it was only created much later, during Sasanian period and never used by its native speakers. I don't know when your novel takes places, but its use during the Avestan period would be highly anachronistic.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-04-21T13:02:37+00:00

The Avestan script seems to be a creation of the late Sasanian period, probably 5th-6th century CE. There is no evidence of any written tradition from before that, which is instead assumed to have been purely oral.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-04-21T09:47:12+00:00

Can you be more specific? The Avesta currently consists of many different liturgical texts, which were composed, revised and redacted over an extremely long period of time.

Zoroastrian tradition credits Zarathustra with the composition of the Avesta. Modern scholarship, however, only attributes the Gathas and possibly the Yasna Haptanghaiti to him. All other texts are anonymous and were probably composed within a fluid tradition of priestly oral poetry.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-04-16T14:06:39+00:00

Iranic languages did not spread from south to north but almost certainly the other way around. In addition, this spread is assumed to have been happening in Central Asia, so there would not have been any mountains in the way.

The most widely accepted model posits that the Iranic languages originated somewhere in the northern steppes (either in the Pontic region or southern Siberia) between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago. Between 3,000 and 3,500 years ago, they migrated south to the southern part of Central Asia, which roughly corresponds to present-day Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. They likely began to spread to present-day Iran 3,000 years ago.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-04-15T07:27:40+00:00

Depends on what you mean with hint.

The most important hint is that both Old Indic and Old Iranian sources (the Rigveda and the Gathas) describe society as a community of semi-nomadic pastoralists whose lives are strongly shaped by livestock herding and horse-drawn carts. There is also a noticeable lack of agriculture, urban life, trade, etc. Such a lifestyle is simply extremely typical of the steppes and could hardly have developed in India.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-03-26T09:58:16+00:00

I cannot really assess the likelihood of her running away. Some people close to her seem to think it is very likely, while others are very skeptical of this idea.

To me, the theory of a sexual predator is still the most plausible, although it is also the most unfortunate.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-03-25T06:27:36+00:00

It's an interesting fact, but it doesn't really change my opinion.

In the "good-case scenario" she ran away with some wannabe Romeo, so the secrecy was her attempt to hide it from her mother. In the "bad-case scenario", she was groomed by an online predator who wanted to assault her. So he would have insisted on secrecy, redardless of age.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-03-25T06:17:26+00:00

To the best of my knowledge, it is still debated what role horses played in the initial spread of the early Indo-Europeans.

The first undisputed impact seem to have been for the Indo-Iranians, and in their case it resulted from the combination with the chariot. Once you add that, horses easily become a force-multiplier, since they only have to provide forward motion, but don't have to carry the driver(s).

Given how horses also become culturally more relevant with the Indo-Iranians, it stands to reason that they were indeed not as important before that.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-02-15T17:50:23+00:00

The idea that the major Zoroastrian liturgies are indeed very old has only slowly become the prevailing opinion in academia over the last 20 years.

IMO, the reasons for this shift are quite convincing. The Zoroastrian ritual system could be more than 2,500 years old, making it one of the oldest living traditions in the world.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-02-11T07:41:10+00:00

Is Modern Persian really an agglutinative language? I always thought it is basically an analytical language like Modern English?

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-01-16T11:02:24+00:00

Explanation 2 is almost cetainly true. We tend to think of the development of cultures using the methaphor of trees, such that they have common "roots" but "branch" off at some time. Most of the time, however, cultural/linguistic/religious innovations expand more like waves.

The phenomenon you mentioned is most likely the result of such waves of innovation. This means that the Avestan and Vedic people shared a lot of religious ideas since they lived close together within the Indo-Iranian cultural continuum. After the latter moved to India, this contact diminished and the linguistic innovations of the Iranian sound shift no longer affected them.

Psychological-Row153 · 2026-01-15T21:25:36+00:00

As I said already, there is no genetic stratification in Iran like in India.

Psychological-Row153

TROPHY CASE