A. V. Williams Jackson

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Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson, L.H.D., Ph.D., LL.D. (1862-1937) was an American specialist on Indo-Iranian languages, born in New York City. He graduated from Columbia in 1883 and taught at Columbia University from 1895 to 1935. His grammar of Avestan, the language used in the Zoroastrian scriptures, is still considered to be the seminal work on the topic.

He traveled in India, Persia, and Central Asia between 1901 and 1918. He was the editor of History of Persia and published:

• A Hymn of Zoroaster (1888)

• An Avesta Grammar in Comparison with Sanskrit (1892)

• An Avesta Reader (1893)

• Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran (1898)

• Die iranische Religion (1900)

• From Constantinople to the Home of Omar Khayyam (1911)

• A Catalogue of the ... Persian Manuscripts Presented to the Metropolitan Museum ... by A. S. Cochran (1914), with A. Yohannan

• Early Persian Poetry (1920)