• Profile half-length photograph of a man facing to the left wearing a dark jacket and tie, holding a cigarette in his hand, with a white handkerchief in his jacket breast pocket. The man has a prominent straight nose, slicked back hair and his tie forms a slight arch from the knot. In the background, on the left side of the image, there is another half-length frontal portrait of a man. He has white hair, also wears a jacket and tie, is looking to the right, and is smiling.

On translation and exegesis in the Zoroastrian religious tradition

The oldest layers of the surviving Zoroastrian texts are in Avestan language and commonly dated to the middle of the second millennium BCE. Exact dates and circumstances of composition, however, remain uncertain, so that little is known about the socio-political context from which these texts emerged. After two millennia of oral transmission, the texts were finally committed to writing, at a time when the language must have no longer been in active use.