Avesta people. The term "Avesta" is from the 9th/10th-century works of Zoroastrian tradition in which the word appears as Zoroastrian Middle Persian "abestāg", Book Pahlavi "ʾp(y)stʾkʼ". In that context, "abestāg" texts are portrayed as received knowledge, and are distinguished from the exegetical commentaries (the "zand") thereof. The literal meaning of the word "abestāg" is uncertain; it is generally acknowledged to be a learned borrowing from Avestan, but none of the suggested etymologies have been universally accepted. The widely repeated derivation from *"upa-stavaka" is from Christian Bartholomae ("Altiranisches Wörterbuch", 1904), who interpreted "abestāg" as a contraction of a hypothetical reconstructed Old Iranian
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India is a 2009 travel book by William Dalrymple. Dalrymple's seventh book is about the lives of nine Indians, a Buddhist monk, a Jain nun, a lady from a middle-class family in Calcutta, a prison warden from Kerala, an illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan, and a devadasi among others, as seen during his Indian travels. The book explores the lives of nine such people, each of whom represent a different religious path in nine chapters. For the launch of the book