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The Syntax and Sense of the Ahuna Vairiia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2012

AMIR AHMADI
AMIR AHMADI*
Affiliation:
Monash [email protected]
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Extract

One may conclude from the lull in publications on the Gāthic Ahuna Vairiia that a satisfactory understanding of the stanza is at hand. This is, however, not the case. The last substantial treatment of the stanza is from Humbach (1991 II) in his 1991 two-volume edition of the Old Avestan texts. Somewhat less extensive is the discussion we find in Kellens’ and Pirart's monumental three-volume edition and study of the Old Avestan texts (1991). In 1975, Insler published a detailed article on the Ahuna Vairiia. The late 1950s saw the appearance of four studies of the stanza by distinguished Avesta scholars: Benveniste, Humbach, Duchesne-Guillemin and Hinz. As for the number of translations there are, it virtually equals the number of scholars in the field. The source of the difficulties is the syntax of the stanza. The disagreements are due for the most part to the scholar's analysis of syntactic units. Thus the variety of translations may be reduced to a few basic types.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 22 , Issue 3-4 , October 2012 , pp. 519 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2012

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