This book contains a critical edition of the Avestan language composition known as the Rašn Yašt, or ‘Hymn to Justice’. The text is accompanied by an English translation, philological commentary and glossary. In addition, the main themes of the Rašn Yašt are taken up for detailed discussion, covering the Zoroastrian deity Rašnu, ancient Iranian cosmography, and the use of ordeal rituals in pre-Islamic Iran.

The 13 chapters of this volume represent a selection of the papers presented at the “Third International Conference on Iranian Linguistics”, held in September 2009 at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. This series of conferences brings together scholars from all theoretical persuasions has established a tradition of interdisciplinary linguistic research on Iranian languages. This volume represent the dynamic and rapidly growing nature of Iranian linguistics, a field which has united linguists of all persuasions who share a strong commitment to the scientific investigation of Iranian languages, their structure, history and use.

This work is an edition and literary-critical study of a Manichaean text in Sogdian known as the Āzandnāmē, or Parable-Book. The first part is a new and expanded edition of the Sogdian text with English translation and philological commentary. The second part, and main contribution, is a literary-critical study of the individual parables of the Āzandnāmē as well as of the genre of parables with the framework of Manichaean literature as a whole.

Misbâh ul-arvâh, or The Lantern of Spirits, is a comparatively little known Sufi didactic Persian poem written in the 12th century by the next to unknown Shaikh Shams ud-dîn Muhammad b. Îl-Tughân Bardasîrî Kirmânî. It is not a very long poem, covering only 1099 double verses (bait), but it contains both a quite comprehensive compendium of Sufi teachings and a very interesting description of the soul’s journey to the Other World. The latter furnishes fascinating parallels with Dante’s Divina Commedia. The book gives a detailed description of the contents of the poem, with many examples of it’s eloquent verse in translation. The main part of the book, however, gives a critical edition of the Persian text, based on the twelve oldest known manuscripts that contain the poem, the eight oldest of which are dated, making a detailed reconstruction of the original text possible.

Dieser Band ehrt Mauro Maggi und würdigt seine Beiträge zur iranischen, indoarischen und zentralasiatischen Philologie und Linguistik. Er enthält neunundzwanzig Beiträge von Kollegen, ehemaligen Studenten und Freunden, die ein breites Spektrum von Sprachen und Texttraditionen abdecken, darunter Avestan, Khotanisch, Sogdisch, Tumshuqese, Mittel- und Frühneupersisch, Bashkardi, zentrale Dialekte des Iran, Sanskrit, Gāndhārī, Tocharisch, Chinesisch, Alt-Uigurisch, Tibetisch und Hebräisch. Die Artikel befassen sich mit philologischen und linguistischen Analysen, narrativen Motiven, Übersetzungstechniken und Untersuchungen religiöser und literarischer Traditionen und stellen eine wertvolle Quelle für Forscher und Studenten dar.

This volume presents papers demonstrating the current state of research on oral traditions among different groups in the Iranian-speaking cultural sphere. The articles offer from a variety of perspectives, encouraging the exchange of ideas between different academic disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, literature, religious studies and folklore studies concerning methods and models applied to studies of oral traditions in Iranian languages and cultures.