The Avesta in our possession is not a book whose contents have been haphazardly pruned by the passage of time, as Karl Hoffmann's approach may have suggested, but the direct and complete culmination of a liturgy of variable composition and, in all its variants, very ancient. The extent of this upheaval in Avestian philology and its impact on the reconstruction of Zoroastrian origins will be fully appreciated by comparing the opening lecture and the closing lecture. I wanted the latter to be devoted to future prospects, explaining that recent research had not yet produced a complete representation of the Avestic corpus, that it was both fraught with uncertainty and fraught with the possibility of future upheavals.
Closing lecture