The Gatha s, a Forgotten Masterpiece

Abstract Here we follow the history of the Old Avestan Gatha s ( Gāthā s), traditionally ascribed to Zarathustra (Zoroaster), from their origin in second‐millennium bce Central Asia to their afterlife in the Young Avesta (early first millennium bce ), the inscriptions of the Achaemenids and the Sasanians, and the post‐Sasanian (Pahlavi) literature, as well as their reception in the West from the classical period to their first Western translations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and from then until today, when they progressed from “sermons” of the religious reformer Zarathustra to anonymous products of oral literature.