Two volumes in three, 4to, (255 x 198 mm). Vol I: 1 ff., 36 pp. ([vi]-xxxvj), 1 ff., 542 pp., 4 folding plates; Vol. II: 2 ff.,120 pp., 431 pp., 1 folding plate; Vol. III: 2 ff., 810 pp., 5 plates, 3 folding plates. Fine 19th century red morocco by Francis Bedford, boards with gilt tooling, raised bands to spine, tooled and lettered in gilt, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers. Occasional foxing but otherwise excellent throughout.

Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), fascinated by Oriental languages and manuscripts, travelled to India in the 1750s specifically to obtain and study Zoroastrian texts. At Surat he worked with Parsi priests and scholars, acquiring manuscripts and the linguistic and religious knowledge upon which his Zend-Avesta was based. The resulting publication combined translations of Avestan and Pahlavi texts with his Indian travel narrative, an account of Oriental manuscripts, a life of Zoroaster, a translation of the Bundahišn, and substantial observations on Parsi religion and customs.

Its importance was considerable. Before Anquetil, European ideas about Zoroaster and ancient Persian religion derived primarily from classical authors, later Persian traditions and travellers’ accounts. The Zend-Avesta for the first time provided European scholars with a substantial body of what were understood to be Zoroastrian sacred texts, opening to investigation their cosmology, ritual, purity laws, morality, concepts of good and evil and eschatology.

The work consequently became an important landmark in the developing field of comparative religion. Zoroastrianism could now be compared with Judaism, Christianity and other ancient religious traditions from textual evidence rather than principally through classical descriptions. It also introduced new material into Enlightenment debates concerning the antiquity and chronology of religions, revelation, morality and the civilizations of Asia.

Anquetil's achievement was particularly significant because he sought information not solely from European collections but from the Parsis themselves. He attempted to understand the texts through the community that had preserved them, consulting priests, collecting manuscripts and recording contemporary religious practice. The work is therefore simultaneously an early contribution to Iranian philology and an important eighteenth-century record of Parsi culture in India.

The publication provoked immediate controversy. Most famously, William Jones questioned the authenticity of Anquetil's materials, and the reliability of his translations was vigorously debated. Subsequent advances in Avestan philology revealed many deficiencies in his interpretations, but confirmed the fundamental authenticity of the textual tradition he had brought to European attention. The importance of the Zend-Avesta is thus foundational rather than definitive: it established the Avesta as an object of European philological study and provided the materials from which later Iranian scholarship developed.

Anquetil also documented the process by which this knowledge reached Europe. His account of his travels, manuscript collecting and encounters in India makes the work an important document in the history of Oriental scholarship itself: a record of the movement of manuscripts and knowledge from Indian religious communities into the libraries and intellectual culture of Enlightenment Europe.

The work was issued as two tomes in three physical volumes, the first tome divided into two parts. Beyond the Avesta itself, the extensive supplementary material treats Parsi history and customs, Oriental manuscripts, Indian commerce, coinage and natural history, giving the publication a breadth considerably greater than its familiar title suggests.

Anquetil later performed a comparable service for Indian philosophy with his Oupnek’hat (1801–02), which introduced the Upanishads to a much wider European readership and later influenced Schopenhauer. The Zend-Avesta, however, was his pioneering achievement: the work that opened the sacred literature of ancient Iran to sustained European study.

Brunet V, 1540; J. Duchesne-Guillemin, The Western Response to Zoroaster, Oxford, 1958, pp. 11 ff.; Raymond Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, suivie des Usages civils et religieux des Parses, Paris, 1934.