Iranian — The Iranologist

The Iranologist — the Avesta to the Achaemenid inscriptions, Old Iranian liturgy toward Middle Persian.

The Iranian-language lane, Zoroastrian canon at its heart: the TITUS Avesta (Old Iranian liturgy — grant-gated private research, not a public holding) and the Old Persian of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, which ride the ORACC and CDLI cuneiform shelves whole — their trilinguals’ Old Persian column the desk’s shared lane with the tablet world — classical Persian literature (Hafez’s Divan with its aligned English, perseus-farsilit) — and the Middle Iranian east: Skjærvø’s British Library Khotanese editions, the Invisible East catalog’s Khotanese/Sogdian/Bactrian/Judeo-Persian documents, and the trilingual ŠKZ inscription with its Parthian and Middle Persian columns.

The desk’s heart, the Avesta (TITUS, titus-avestan), is grant-gated PRIVATE research material — served locally under the owner’s personal grant of 2026-07-23 and credited on every serving surface (the grant’s own condition), but NOT a public library holding, so it is absent from the shelves table above and the footnote there says so. What the desk publicly holds is the Old Persian of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, riding the shared cuneiform corpora (ORACC’s ario, the CDLI catalog) whole — only their Old Persian column is Iranian.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these eight answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Private research materials under personal grants are not listed.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): sux 264,506 · akk 153,945 · fas 146,364 · und 74,258 · qpn 70,329 · akk-x-stdbab 24,517 · akk-x-neoass 18,750 · eng 15,418 · hit 14,678 · qpc 8,931 … and 43 more (nabu axis iranian lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• The Avestan text lane (ave): the TITUS Avesta — full-text search --lang ave and citation show across the Yasna, Yašts and the rest. It is a text edition, not a treebank, so there is no gold-lemma or morphology layer — --lemma, vocab and formulas do not apply to this desk. Every serving surface carries the verbatim TITUS credit line (the grant’s condition).
• The Old Persian Achaemenid lane (peo): the royal trilinguals — ORACC’s ario (Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions online) and the CDLI catalog carry the Old Persian column of the Bīsotūn / Naqš-e Rostam inscriptions. Reach them with a peo-scoped search or through the cuneiform desk (both are whole-source members — only their Old Persian lane is Iranian).
• Iranian comparanda through etym: StarLing’s PIE base carries Avestan (ae) and Other-Iranian reflex columns, reachable with nabu etym and the cognate lists — dual-tagging, so StarLing rides etym and its Iranian reflexes surface through the crosswalk rather than as a separate shelf here.

Working the iranian desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable iranian               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync iranian                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis iranian          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis iranian                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis iranian   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu show urn:nabu:titus-avestan:avest001:Y.0.1.a  # the frauuarāne creed (Y 0.1 a), the Avesta rendered with its verbatim TITUS credit line
nabu search mazda --lang ave          # Ahura Mazda across the Avestan lane (mazdaiiasnō, mazdā̊)
nabu show urn:nabu:titus-avestan:avest020:Y.19.1  # a citation prefix opens into every passage below it (Y.19.1.a, .b …)

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “Where does the Avesta invoke Ahura Mazdā?” → nabu_search "ahura mazda" (lang: ave) — Yasna and Yašt passages (Y.19.1, Y.58.8, Yt.3.2 …) served under their nc class with the TITUS/editors credit line riding every card — a personal research grant, honored in the payload.

Terminal setup

• Avestan (ave): the TITUS Avesta is a scholarly Latin transliteration with combining diacritics (ā̊, ϑ, ṣ̌, t̰, ə) — no dedicated font is needed; any Unicode font with extended-Latin coverage renders them, and Noto Sans Mono in the terminal’s non-ASCII slot gives uniform metrics. No RTL or CJK concerns.
• Old Persian (peo): the Achaemenid inscriptions ride ORACC and CDLI stored in Latin transliteration (the cuneiform desk’s convention), so no cuneiform font is needed.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.