Colophons, more than a scribe’s memorial

By offering this article, I intend to show the relevance of colophons for human sciences. Different kinds of information in colophons can clarify many aspects of Zoroastrian culture and history. One of the most relevant types of information is genealogical, which can be used to reconstruct the family trees of Zoroastrian families and which can then help us follow the story of transmission of Avestan manuscripts. In the present article, I discuss some of these aspects. The other important point presented here deals with the structure of a colophon and the type of information that it contains. For this purpose, I present the colophon of a manuscript, discovered in October 2012 in Yazd, as a sample and then show the typical structure of colophons in Iranian manuscripts. This article presents an example of what we can do and how we can start with research using colophons.