• Fashion plate depicting two women with parasols against a backdrop of roses and trees. The woman on the left is seated on a garden bench and holding an opened lilac parasol, displaying its white lining. The woman on the right is standing beside her and holding a closed blue parasol.

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.