Avesta
Manušcihr and the tradition of the Magi
According to the tradition, the oral transmission of the Avesta was ever accompanied by the written text corpus of the Avesta preserved in the Treasure of the kings and in the Castle of the archives of the Aryan land. The downfall of the Achaemenian kingship led to a lot of damages to the Mazdayasnian religion through the plunder and destruction of the palaces and libraries and massacre of the priests who were the repositories and communicators of the sacred wisdom. In the Arsacian period, some priests well-versed in phonetics fashioned anew an Avesta alphabet (Pers. dēn-dibīrīh) for reassembling the remains of the Avesta. They included the systematic provision of symbols for sounds peculiar to Avesta language, and especially the provision of symbols for vowels. The written corpus, the so-called “Sasanian archetype”, was presented by Tōsar to the founder of the Sasanian kingship, Ardsašēr. Journal of the K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai, 70/ 2010, 33-47.
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The traditional history of the Zoroastrian Scriptures
From the Dk iii There exists a statement about the fate of the scriptures of the Daēnā which extends till the first centuries of the onset of Islam. After collecting and arranging for the last time the fragments of the Dēnkird, Ādurbād son of Emēd son of Ašavahišt added it, at the end of the third book of the Dēnkird, as a historical record. Some excerpts of the Ēvēn-nāmag
From the fourth book of the Dēnkird The extant book iv of the Dēnkird contains passages selected by Ādurfarrōbay son of Farroxzād from the book Ēvēn-nāmag ‘Book of Institutes’ , an encyclopedia of various branches of knowledge compiled in the sixth century –precisely at the times of Xusrō Anōšervān (the text speaks of him thus: im bay ‘his present majesty’) –by some scribe(s) of the secretarial office of the Sasanians. Ibn Qutaiba, Ṯaʿālibi, and others have given a few information about it and have translated some passages of it. 
The women and children who saved the daēnā
(an account of the loss and recovery of the sacred texts) There is a gap between the first guides of the daēnā (Av. paoiryō.kaēša) and the Magi (OPers. magu) who flourished in Achaemenian Persia. Xanthus the Lydian states that after the expedition of Xerxes there was a long line of Magians in succession, with names like Ostanas, Astrampsychos, Gobryas, and Pazatas, down to the conquest of Persia by Alexander. The Magi must already have possessed a canonical form of the Avesta when they prepared standard copies of the Avesta text corpus (with 21 Nasks) for the Persian kings. A survey of the corpus of the Avesta texts
From the Dēnkird viii The Corpus of the Avesta comprised of twenty-one books, and was divided into three classes, “hymnic”, “scholastic”, and “legal”. A survey of the corpus of the Avesta texts
From Persian Reports (the so-called Rivāyāt) In the Persian Reports are found a few texts describing the contents of the books of the Avesta. From the Report of Bahman Punjyah From the Report of Kāma Bohra From the Report of Narimān Hōšang From the Report of Burzō Qawām-ud-dīn |
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