Avesta

The Avesta acquired significance in Edward Said’s account not merely as an ancient body of religious writing, but as the text that redirected European scholarship toward civilizations beyond the Biblical and Greco-Roman inheritance. Anquetil-Duperron’s encounter with it in Surat led to a translation completed in 1759 and helped make Asia newly legible to Europe through its own texts, languages, and historical depth. That opening widened the intellectual map even as later scholarship, particularly William Jones’s, began to classify and delimit what it had revealed.

Discovery and Translation

Before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, Said identifies two major scholarly efforts to move beyond the comparatively sheltered Biblical Orient. The first was Anquetil-Duperron’s journey to Asia. He had set out to investigate claims about the primitive existence of a Chosen People and the Biblical genealogies, but his travels carried him farther east than that original purpose: at Surat he found a cache of Avestan texts and undertook their translation.

The project reached a major milestone in 1759, when Anquetil completed his translation of the Avesta at Surat. In 1786 he completed a translation of the Upanishads in Paris. The sequence connects an encounter with manuscripts in Asia to a wider intellectual transformation in Europe: the Avesta was not simply gathered as an exotic artifact, but became a means of comparing traditions and reconsidering how the distant past could be known.

A Wider Archive of Antiquity

Said presents the Avesta’s importance through the change it helped make possible in European historical understanding. Before Anquetil, information about the remote past was sought almost exclusively in the writings of Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic authors. The Bible, in this account, had been treated as a singular foundation, while vast lands of writing and knowledge remained largely unsuspected. Anquetil’s translation helped unsettle that isolation by showing that other textual traditions could bear historical and intellectual weight.

The effect was a widening of the inherited humanist frame. Rather than treating the Greco-Latin heritage as the only substantial archive of civilization, scholars could begin to confront numerous civilizations and literatures from earlier ages. Said, drawing on Raymond Schwab, describes Anquetil’s work as having opened a channel between the hemispheres of human genius and corrected and expanded Mediterranean humanism. The Avesta thus mattered both as a particular translated text and as evidence that the European account of the past had been too narrow.

This enlargement also altered the intellectual geography of Asia. For the first time, Said argues, the Orient was disclosed to Europe through the materiality of its texts, languages, and civilizations. Asia consequently gained a more precise intellectual and historical dimension, rather than remaining only a distant and vast space sustained by geographical myth. The translation joined the concrete presence of written sources to a broader revision of what Europe could regard as history.

Biblical Authority and Intellectual Consequences

Anquetil’s aims were entangled with the Biblical framework he sought to investigate. His journey began as an attempt to establish the early existence of a Chosen People and the genealogies associated with the Bible, but the Avestan material produced consequences that exceeded that purpose. In Schwab’s account, the discoveries associated with Anquetil soon helped prompt criticism of Biblical texts that had previously been regarded as revealed. The work therefore became consequential not because it confirmed the authority Anquetil had set out to support, but because the enlarged archive made that authority newly open to comparison and dispute.

The contrast with Voltaire makes this reversal especially sharp. Schwab characterizes Anquetil and Voltaire as temperamentally and ideologically opposed, while noting that both were interested in the Orient and the Bible: one approached the materials in order to make the Bible more indisputable, the other to make it more unbelievable. Ironically, Anquetil’s translations served purposes aligned with Voltaire’s critique. The Avesta’s European afterlife thus crossed the boundary between devotional inquiry and criticism, demonstrating that the same translated evidence could unsettle the assumptions that had first prompted its collection.

Opening and Containment

The intellectual opening associated with the Avesta did not remain the dominant pattern in Said’s account. Anquetil opened broad vistas; William Jones, the second major pre-Napoleonic scholarly project, subsequently narrowed and organized them through codification, tabulation, and comparison. Jones’s work in India sought to gather, delimit, and domesticate the Orient as a province of European learning. This contrast makes the Avesta’s significance twofold: its translation expanded the field of historical knowledge, while the scholarly structures that followed could turn that expanded field into an object of European classification.

The Avesta therefore marks both an expansion and a tension in the history Said traces. Its translation challenged the exclusivity of the old Mediterranean and Biblical archive by making other literatures visible, and it helped expose inherited claims to scrutiny. Yet the newly recognized Orient also became available for European study and ordering. Its importance lies in this double movement: the text widened the horizon of human history, while the knowledge built around it could begin to manage the very world it had helped disclose.