Thesis Title: “The orthography and the recitation in the Avestan manuscripts”.

Abstract: The aim of the thesis is to make a complete description of the orthograpic conventions governing the Avestan manuscripts, identificating specific orthographical rules depending on the place of copy (India vs. Iran), time and priestly school. Since, as Cantera has prooved, a great source of variation is the recitation and the oral transmission of the Avestan texts, the conventions must be linked to the mother tongue of the priests, that is Persian in Iran and Gujarati in India. Finally, some editorial choices by Spiegel, Westergaard and Geldner, must be questioned and revised, once a great number of new manuscripts (especially Iranian) has been unearthed by the Avestan Digital Archive (see. e.g. Martínez Porro, 2016).