Avesta Avesta The Avesta is the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the otherwise unrecorded Avestan language. The Avesta texts fall into several different categories, arranged either by dialect, or by usage. The principal text in the liturgical group is the "Yasna", which takes its name from the Yasna ceremony, Zoroastrianism's primary act of worship, and at which the "Yasna" text is recited. The most important portion of the "Yasna" texts are the five Gathas, consisting of seventeen hymns attributed to Zoroaster himself. These hymns, together with five other short Old Avestan texts that are also part of
The Sacred Band of Stepsons by only one letter from Abaris, a priest from the North said by Herodotus (Book IV) to have visited Greece. In Tempus's Band, heterosexual Stepsons and Sacred Band pairs fight side by side. There is no requirement to be part of a couple to serve among the Stepsons, and single mercenaries initially outnumbered the Sacred Band pairs. The Stepsons are principally a cavalry (hippeis) squadron, not heavy infantry (hoplites) as the Theban Sacred Banders primarily were. While the three-hundred-strong Theban Sacred Band was constituted by Theban law-givers and maintained by the Theban state (according to Plutarch's "Life" of Pelopidas), the