The Criteria of the Poetic Text in the Recent Avesta

Comparative study of Indo-European poetry has been popular among Indo-Europeanists since the nineteenth century. This field, the main subject of which is the reconstruction of ancient literary texts, poetic texts, and the “Indo-European poetic language,” has been under the influence of modern literary theory, especially formalism. According to the formalistic definition, the main characteristic of a poetic text is the “poetic diction” rather than its composition in metrical form. Moreover, the antithesis of a poetic speech is an ordinary text or idiomatic speech rather than prose. Indo-Europeanists argue that there is not a clear difference between poetry and prose in illiterate societies. However, for the early Avestan scholars, like Karl Friedrich Geldner, Avestan poetic texts are identical with Avestan metrical texts. In this paper, it is demonstrated that neither the meter nor the deviance in the ordinary speech is an appropriate criterion to distinguish poetic texts from non-poetic ones in the Younger Avesta, but the best criterion is comparing the poetic devices and the common poetic-text features in the Indo-European cognate languages.