Corpus Avesticum II: A text-critical edition of the Zoroastrian rituals in Avestan language

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Alberto Cantera Glera
• Subject Area: Asian Studies
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 386179903

This is the application for the second period of Corpus Avesticum: eine text-kritische Edition der zoroastrischen Rituale in awestischer Sprache. Over the last thirty years, a complete renovation of our understanding of the Avestan texts has taken place stressing the importance of the performative aspects. However, this new perspective has not yet transformed the traditional way of editing Avestan texts that was based on exegetical manuscripts and ignores systematically performative information. Our edition draws the consequences of the new insights and tendencies in the Avestan studies. Corpus Avesticum Berolinense is the first edition, which presents all texts belonging to the Avestan ritual corpus and strictly according to the liturgical manuscripts. This perspective on the Avestan texts as liturgical text formations implies new requirements for the editorial practice:• the representation of the diversity and variability of the rituals;• the representation of the performative character of texts; • the representation of a historical-topical concreteness of the text.In the first period that ends in March 2021, we have developed the tool for a dynamic edition of the rituals in Avestan language There, the liturgies are not stored as static texts but are generated each time according to the performative context selected by the user (time, place, god). This implied an analysis of the performative variation on the basis of the manuscripts and other meta-ritual literature, especially the Persian Rewāyats. Furthermore, we have started the text critical edition of the first section of the Long Liturgy. In the case of the Short Liturgies, an analysis of the manuscripts transmission was a preliminary requisite for a text critical edition and G. König has carried it out over the last two years. For the Long Liturgy this preliminary work was prepared before the beginning of the project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants