What Was Lost: The Destruction of the Avesta and the Erasure of a Library That Took a Thousand Years to Build
The scale of the loss The Avesta, the sacred corpus of Zoroastrianism, is the oldest body of Indo-Iranian religious literature still in continuous use. In its Sasanian form — the form it had reached by the 6th century CE, after roughly a thousand years of accumulation, redaction, and commentary — it consisted of twenty-one nasks (books), organized by subject, covering ritual, law, cosmology, ethics, eschatology, history, medicine, astronomy, and the lives of the prophets and kings.
What this resource contributes
The scale of the loss The Avesta, the sacred corpus of Zoroastrianism, is the oldest body of Indo-Iranian religious literature still in continuous use. In its Sasanian form — the form it had reached by the 6th century CE, after roughly a thousand years of accumulation, redaction, and commentary — it consisted of twenty-one nasks (books), organized by subject, covering ritual, law, cosmology, ethics, eschatology, history, medicine, astronomy, and the lives of the prophets and kings. What survives today is approximately one quarter of that corpus. Three quarters of the Avesta was destroyed. The destruction happened in two phases, separated by nearly a thousand years. The first was the burning of Persepolis by Alexander of Macedon in 330 BCE, which destroyed the royal archives where one major recension of the religious literature was kept.
Topics and source signals
Primary sources detected
Yasna · Gathas · Avesta · Yashts · Vendidad · Bundahishn · Denkard