Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2012
One may conclude from the lull in publications on the Gāthic Ahuna Vairiia that a satisfactory understanding of the stanza is athand. This is, however, not the case. The last substantial treatment of thestanza is from Humbach (1991 II) in his 1991 two-volume edition of the OldAvestan texts. Somewhat less extensive is the discussion we find in Kellens’and Pirart's monumental three-volume edition and study of the Old Avestantexts (1991). In 1975, Insler published a detailed article on the Ahuna Vairiia. The late 1950s saw the appearance of fourstudies of the stanza by distinguished Avesta scholars: Benveniste, Humbach,Duchesne-Guillemin and Hinz. As for the number of translations there are, itvirtually equals the number of scholars in the field. The source of thedifficulties is the syntax of the stanza. The disagreements are due for themost part to the scholar's analysis of syntactic units. Thus the variety oftranslations may be reduced to a few basic types.