The book under review presents an outline and summary of the ongoing work on the Avesta in Salamanca, which has become a major hub of Avestan studies under the direction of Alberto Cantera. While there are already several articles by A. Cantera and his team, this is the first book-length presentation of the research. The aim of the investigations that led to this book is stated clearly from the outset: a new edition of the Avestan texts is needed, in the present case the Long Liturgy. Even a cursory glance reveals that these are not mere Vorarbeiten but a text that deserves to be ranked alongside Geldner's prolegomena in importance.
The book is divided into four main chapters of unequal length (plus a fifth serving as summary and outlook), each dealing with certain aspects of the Avestan manuscript tradition. In addition, the book features numerous images after the main text, and six appendices (one an example of how a new edition of the text will look).
Chapter 1 (pp. 33–76) is devoted to the history of Avestan studies with a focus on questions related to the editions of the texts in the nineteenth century. The second chapter (pp. 77–185) deals with the manuscripts of the long liturgy, their history and their scribes. Chapter 3 (pp. 187–271) provides a detailed analysis of the data concerning the age of the long liturgy and its ritual and the changes they underwent over the centuries. The last major chapter (pp. 273–360) takes up the linguistic side of the transmission of the Avesta.
In his approach to the Avestan tradition, the author adeptly combines two research strains of recent decades and takes them to a completely new level. On the one hand, Cantera stresses the importance of the manuscripts in contrast to the text edited by Geldner, something that has been the hallmark of the Erlangen school since the first works in this vein by Karl Hoffmann. Scholars such as Almut Hintze have taken studies of this kind beyond the apparatus and manuscript editions of Geldner, which were still the main tools for Hoffmann, by again highlighting the importance of manuscript work for Avestan studies. Cantera has now systematically been gathering manuscripts which can in part be accessed via the internet platform www.avesta-archive.com. On the other hand, the author recognizes the importance of ritual practice for Avestan, something that has figured prominently in the work of the French scholar Jean Kellens in recent years. That ritual practice and the recitation of Avestan have had major repercussions for the development of the texts and the writing of manuscripts has not, until now, been a topic of intense research.
While this combination can be considered a major methodological breakthrough in itself, the author goes even further on several occasions as can be seen in the fascinating observations on the sociological conditions for manuscript production in chapter 2.
Cantera raises serious doubts about the existence of a unified text during Sasanian times (the “Sasanian archetype” of the Erlangen school) and clearly states that even if it existed, its reconstruction would be impossible on methodological grounds (cf. p. 360). Instead he aims for a far less remote point in time for the text to be established, resting on the attested readings of the manuscripts. Given the diachronic and diatopic variation of the manuscripts, the editor has to make a choice about which point in space and time his text should represent. Cantera opts for the early Iranian manuscripts (p. 362), which have been inadequately represented in the older editions. While one might wonder if the ultimate consequence of such a line of argument would not be to refrain from editing a text at all and to publish only facsimiles of single manuscripts, Cantera allows for “obvious modernizations” (p. 363) to be corrected on linguistic grounds.
The methodological centrepiece is of course the contextualization of the manuscripts within the tradition. This is approached mainly through evidence from three independent fields: the information provided by the colophons of the manuscripts; palaeographical and orthographical investigations; and the quantitative degree of agreement between single manuscripts. However, these “indices de coïncidence” should be taken with caution, since they are not as straightforward as their matter-of-fact presentation in various tables suggests. It would have been fair to provide the reader with a detailed account of how these numbers came about. For example, it is not made clear what the basic counting unit is. While this might be a problem more of exposition than of method, the interpretation of the data seems more problematic. Attributes such as high degree of agreement seem to be assigned basically on personal knowledge of the manuscripts, and the boundary between qualitative and quantitative analysis is blurred to some extent. Modern statistics would have provided sophisticated tools for handling the data and testing their significance. The results thus acquired could then have served as a starting point for discussion and interpretation.
After reading the book, no one will have any doubts that we really do need a new edition of the long liturgy and that scholars are now in a far better position to achieve a more balanced view of the Avesta than Geldner was. It is to be hoped that the new edition will be essentially a digital one. This is not to say that a traditional edition in the shape of a book would not be an additional benefit, but only an electronic edition could do justice to the complicated circumstances of the transmission. Furthermore, it would be less cumbersome to use for systematic research on the texts and more accessible in general than a printed text with a massive apparatus like the one in the example edition (cf. Appendix 6).
Vers une édition de la liturgie longue zoroastrienne is definitely a must-read for everyone working on Avestan: linguists, scholars of religion and Iranologists alike.
