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
Avesta in the royal archives ("Dk" 4B, 5). Following Alexander's conquest, the Avesta was then supposedly destroyed or dispersed by the Greeks after they translated the scientific passages that they could make use of ("AVN" 7–9, "Dk" 3B, 8). Several centuries later, one of the Parthian emperors named Valaksh (one of the Vologases) supposedly then had the fragments collected, not only of those that had previously been written down, but also of those that had only been orally transmitted ("Dk" 4C). The "Denkard" also transmits another legend related to the transmission of the Avesta. In that story, credit for collation and