DFG Projekt Nr. 532765934 (Alberto Cantera, Mihaela Timuş)

Polemical tools are verbal instruments used in a real or imaginary confrontation, a fight-like encounter with the other, defined as an opposing entity in the context of various types of discourse: religious, political, poetical, juridical. They are constituent elements of the art of speech.

Nowadays, one associates polemical tools with either public political debates or certain forms of music (hip-hop) and spontaneous poetry. Fields of neuroscience focus on the origins and motivations of the curse, which itself originates in insult and invective, two old and regularly practiced categories, in both European and Asian literatures.

Yet, polemical tools have been used in various contexts and periods since remotely distant times. Whenever two parties (individuals, groups, or tribes) were in conflict, polemical forms of expression occurred. One rhetorical means used in both ancient Mesopotamia and Iran, for instance, was the tenson, a form of poetic debate, based on dialogue, generally meant to support the superiority of one party against another (see the case of the Middle Iranian poem Draxt ī Asurīg / The Babylonian Tree).

The present project aims at describing in detail the polemical tools used in the Zoroastrian 9th-10th c. treatise Škand Gumānīg Wizār (ŠGW henceforth) / Breaking the doubtful interpretations. This treatise appears to be unique in at least two respects : 1. It gathers in a single work (possibly the result of multiple authors) individual treatises against different religions; 2. It uses different categories of polemical tools, sometimes even within the same chapter.

The main target of the present project is to circumscribe this polemical Zoroastrian treatise to the wider genre of polemical literature, currently circulating during Late Antiquity and the early Muslim Middle Ages, by pointing out common patterns as well as very specific features, and to contribute to a better knowledge of the polemical literary genre.

The objective of the present project is to identify the various forms (rhetorical, logical) of the polemical tools used in ŠGW to describe their specific function and to integrate them in a wider context. This is a new paradigm of research within Zoroastrian studies in general, and in particular in the case of ŠGW. The approach is inovating inasmuch as it aims at dealing with the treatise as a whole. The outcome of the project is a monograph. The method is threefold: philological, historical and comparaive. For the philological part, the project includes the transcription of the Pāzand version of the text, according to the manuscripts MH19 (Martin Haug, Munich) and PB3 (Eugène Burnouf, Paris). This work is done in cooperation with the Zoroastrian Middle Persian Digital Corpus and Dictionary (https://www.mpcorpus.org ).

An international workshop is planned for 2026.