He was a descendant of an old Marburg family of theologians, pastors, and scholars. From 1856 on, he devoted his time to linguistic and Oriental studies in Marburg and, during the year 1859/60, in Göttingen. The most influential among his teachers were Johannes Gildemeister in Marburg and Heinrich Ewald, the Indo-Europeanist Theodor Benfey, as well as the historian Georg Waitz in Göttingen. To these people Justi owed his most exact philological method. Having submitted a doctoral thesis about the formation of nominal compounds in the Indo-European languages, he was graduated at Marburg in 1861. Later in the same year an enlarged version of the same work (see Justi, 1861) was approved by the Marburg faculty as Habilitationsschrift, so that Justi quite soon was qualified as a university lecturer. In 1865 he was appointed extraordinary professor of comparative grammar and German philology in his hometown, and from 1869 he taught there as a full professor. He was a member of the Prussian and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, and in 1887/88 he held the office of the Rector of Marburg University.
After his early studies in the wider Indo-European field, ending with the lecturer’s inaugural address on the Eddaic song about Fjölsviðr, he turned nearly without exception to Oriental, and in particular to Iranian, studies. But his work in this field is characterized by its wide range and covers all aspects of the entire Iranian world: at first, Avestan and, more generally, Zoroastrian studies came to the fore, but soon work on the history of ancient Iran and on historical geography were added, and for some time Justi dealt also with modern Iranian languages. By his publications, which are characterized by their precision in details as well as their author’s farsightedness and which therefore became of the utmost significance at the end of the 19th century, Justi deserved well of Iranian studies. He was without doubt one of the leading Iranian scholars of his time and in particular was rightly regarded as the great expert of ancient Iranian history.
His doctoral dissertation about Indo-European nominal compounds (Justi, 1861) was considered among experts as an outstandingly good and important first work, although it had not dealt with its subject in a really exhaustive manner. Regarding the type and structure of the compounds, Justi clearly distinguished three stages of development: (i) old juxtapositions (like OPers. Aura-mazdā- [vs. Av. Ahura- Mazdā-] or dvandva compounds or similar), (ii) real compounds composed only of two word-stems, and (iii) improper compounds containing an additional compositional vowel or suffix. Moreover, Justi dealt with the form of the stems which appear in nominal composition, with the phenomenon of the compositional vowel, and with the accent of the various types of compounds, where it is marked at all. The meaning of the compounds and their classification according to such criteria were discussed only in the expanded version, which he completed after having gained his doctorate.
Only three years later Justi, then 27 years old, appeared in print with his Handbuch der Zendsprache (Justi, 1864), which was practically the first linguistic treatment devoted to both grammar and lexicon of the Avestan language (which at that time usually was still called “Zend”). This substantial and epoch-making work, to which deservedly the Volney Prize was awarded by the Institut de France, was dedicated to his teacher Gildemeister. Its main part (pp. 1-335) was a complete dictionary, the first one ever attempted, recording all the words found in the corpus of Avestan texts as contained in N. L. Westergaard’s edition of 1852-54. It presented as many quotations as necessary, listing all occurrences only in cases of more rarely attested or for some reason problematic words and not for the entire lexicon, as later Bartholomae did in his Altiranisches Wörterbuch (Strassburg, 1904), which eventually replaced Justi’s work. (At that time Justi examined this successor lexicon closely in a detailed review of nearly fifty pages [IF Anzeiger für indogermanische Sprach- und Altertumskunde 17, 1905, pp. 84-131].) The Handbuch also listed quite exactly the inflected forms attested and even referred to etymologically cognate words of other Indo-Iranian languages, where doing so seemed appropriate and meaningful. By this work, which was to become the first useful Avestan dictionary, Justi actually became the founder of Avestan lexicography. But this book inevitably had also its weaknesses, owing to its pioneering character, especially because it continued to use the stubborn way of transcribing the Avestan letters established by Eugène Burnouf. In an appendix the Avestan vocabulary was rendered accessible by a Latin–Avestan index.
Wilferd Ferdinand Madelung
