THE STUDY OF THE AND ITS RELIGION AROUND THE YEAR 1900 AND TODAY

ANnERS HULTGAAD

INTRODUCTION

As with modern interpreters of the Avesta and its religion, the schol• ars who committed themselves to this subject around the year 1900 depended on the achievements of previous workers during a time span of almost a century. The landmarks of this earlier study of the Avesta must be briefly mentioned before we can address the issue of scholarship at the end of the 19th century and the begin• ning of the 20th century. Anquetil du Perron's French translation in 1771 made the Avesta known to a European public and can be taken as the starting-point for the serious study of the Avesta; it had, though, been preceded by a long reception history of the Zarathustra figure in Europe, which had been in continuous elaboration from the late antiquity period (Stausberg 1998). However, the Avesta of Anquetil was not a scholarly work according to modern standards and it soon became the object of an academic dispute concerning its reliability and was even looked upon as a forgery in many quarters. Not until the French orientalist Eugene Burnouf established the authenticity of the Avestan text by comparing it with the language of the Veda was the quar• rel over the Avesta of Anquetil setded. It became clear that only the knowledge of enabled scholars to decipher the Avesta. A closer understanding of the Avestan text itself was achieved not only by the help of Sanskrit but also by the comparative Indo-European philology which began to work in the first half of the 19th century. The most influential attempt to combine the philological progress with an interpretation of the Avesta as a religious document was made by Martin Haug in the middle of the century (Haug 1858-60). He distinguished certain passages of the from the rest of the Avesta and emphasized that these passages were the only part of the Avesta that disclosed the teaching of Zarathustra himself, which Haug summarized as monotheism at the theological level, philosophical 74 ANDERS HULTGAIm dualism and "a moral philosophy" moving in the framework of thought, word and deed (Haug 1878: 300). The main religio-his• torical problems were, through Haug, put on the agenda of 19th and 20th century research on . He maintained, for example, that "the Zoroastrian religion arose out of a vital struggle against the form which the Brahmanical religion had assumed at a certain early period" (Haug 1878: 287). The great religious reform carried out by Zarathustra had been prepared for centuries by the fire-priests of the -religion (Haug 1878: 294-295). The basis for a historical and critical study of the Avesta and its religion had been laid and with this in mind we can approach the issues to be discussed here.

Philological Progress in the Study if the Avesta Scholarly work on the religion of ancient in the years around 1900 was fortunate in the way that interpreters could profit from the remarkable philological progress in the study of the Avesta that had taken place in the preceding decade. Fundamental works which still have not been replaced or surpassed were produced by out• standing scholars in the field of ancient Iranian languages. The GrundrijJ der iranischen Philologie (1895-1904) summarized the results of the 19th century research on ancient Iranian languages. In 1892 Williams Jackson published his Avesta Grammar (Jackson 1892) which is still the best introduction to Avestan grammar. As to the text of the Avesta, the German philologist Karl Geldner collected and inves• tigated in detail all Avestan manuscripts that were known to him. Every single manuscript was evaluated and grouped according to genetic relationship and the results were presented in stemmata that can be said to be definite. This was an enormous effort which could barely be repeated today by one scholar working alone. The text of the Avesta which he established and published between the years 1886 and 1889 is the one that every scholar working on the Avesta has to rely upon (Geldner 1886, 1889). A similar monumental work was the lexicon of Christhian Bartholomae, entitled Altiranisches Wiirterbuch (Bartholomae 1904), which has not so far been replaced and which has been considered by experts the best lexicon ever published. 1

I So, for instance, Gershewitch 1995: 6: "in my opinion the best dictionary ever compiled for any language".