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Avesta appeared, he published a German translation of it, and also of Anquetil's historical dissertations 19. Then, in a series of dissertations of his own 20, he vindicated the authenticity |
of the Zend books. Anquetil had already tried to show, in a memoir on Plutarch, that the data of the Avesta fully agree with the account of the Magian religion |
given in the treatise on 'Isis and Osiris.' Kleuker enlarged the circle of comparison to the whole of ancient literature. He tried also to appeal to internal evidence, an attempt |
in which he was less successful. The strength of his defence was seldom greater than the strength of the attack. Meiners had pointed out the mythical identity of the Mount |
Alborg, of the Parsis with the Mount Meru of the Hindus, as a proof that the Parsis had borrowed their mythology from the Hindus: the conclusion was incorrect, but the |
remark itself was not so. Kleuker fancied that he could remove the difficulty by stating that Mount Alborg is a real mountain, nay, a doubly real mountain, since there are |
two mountains of that name, the one in Persia, the other in Armenia, whereas Mount Meru is only to be found in Fairyland. Seldom were worse arguments used in the |
service of a good cause. Meiners had said that the name of the Parsi demons was of Indian origin, as both languages knew them by the Latin name 'Deus.' This |
was an incorrect statement, and yet an important observation. The word which means 'a demon' in Persia, means quite the contrary in India, and that radical difference is just a |
proof of the two systems being independent of one another. Kleuker pointed out the incorrectness of the statement; but, being unable to account for the identity of the words, he |
flatly denied it. Kleuker was more successful in the field of philology: he showed, as Anquetil had done, that Zend has no Arabic elements in it, and that Pahlavi itself, |
which is more modern than Zend, does not contain any Arabic, but only Semitic words of the Aramean dialect, which are easily accounted for by the close relations of Persia |
with Aramean lands in the time of the Sassanian kings. He showed, lastly, that Arabic words appear only in the very books which Parsi tradition itself considers modern. Another stanch |
upholder of the Avesta was the numismatologist Tychsen, who, having begun to read the book with a prejudice against its authenticity, quitted it with a conviction to the contrary. 'There |
is nothing in it,' he said, 'but what befits remote ages, and a man philosophising in the infancy of the world. Such traces of a recent period as they fancy |
to have found in it, are either understandings, or belong to its later portions. On the whole there is a marvellous accordance between the Zend-Avesta and the accounts of the |
ancients with regard to the doctrine and institutions of Zoroaster. Plutarch agrees so well with the Zend books that I think no one will deny the close resemblance of doctrines |
and identity of origin. Add to all this the incontrovertible argument to be drawn from the language, the antiquity of which is established by the fact that it was necessary |
to translate a part of the Zend books into Pahlavi, a language which was obsolete as early as the time of the Sassanides. Lastly, it cannot be denied that Zoroaster |
left books, which were, through centuries, the groundwork of the Magic religion, and which were preserved by the Magi, as shown by a series of documents from the time of |
Hermippus. Therefore I am unable to see why we should not trust the Magi of our days when they ascribe to Zoroaster those traditional books of their ancestors, in which |
nothing is found to indicate fraud or a modern hand 21.' Two years afterwards, in 1793, was published in Paris a book which, without directly dealing with the Avesta, was |
the first step taken to make its authenticity incontrovertible. It was the masterly memoir by Sylvestre de Sacy, in which the Pahlavi inscriptions of the first Sassanides were deciphered for |
the first time and in a decisive manner. De Sacy, in his researches, had chiefly relied on the Pahlavi lexicon published by Anquetil, whose work vindicated itself--better than by heaping |
up arguments--by promoting discoveries. The Pahlavi inscriptions gave the key, as is well known, to the Persian cuneiform inscriptions, which were in return to put beyond all doubt the genuineness |
of the Zend language. Tychsen, in an appendix to his Commentaries, pointed to the importance of the new discovery: 'This,' he writes, 'is a proof that the Pahlavi was used |
during the reign of the Sassanides, for it was from them that these inscriptions emanated, as it was by them--nay, by the first of them, Ardeshîr Bâbagân--that the doctrine of |
Zoroaster was revived. One can now understand why the Zend books were translated into Pahlavi. Here, too, everything agrees, and speaks loudly for their antiquity and genuineness.' About the same |
time Sir William Jones, then president of the Royal Asiatic Society, which he had just founded, resumed in a discourse delivered before that Society the same question he had solved |
in such an off-hand manner twenty years before. He was no longer the man to say, 'Sied-il à un homme né dans ce siècle de s’infatuer de fables indiennes?' and |
although he had still a spite against Anquetil, he spoke of him with more reserve than in 1771. However, his judgment on the Avesta itself was not altered on the |
whole, although, as he himself declared, he had not thought it necessary to study the text. But a glance at the Zend glossary published by Anquetil suggested to him a |
remark which makes Sir William Jones, in spite of himself, the creator of the comparative grammar of Sanskrit and Zend. 'When I perused the Zend glossary,' he writes, 'I was |
inexpressibly surprised to find that six or seven words in ten are pure Sanscrit, and even some of their inflexions formed by the rules of the Vyácaran 22, as yushmácam, |
the genitive plural of yushmad. Now M. Anquetil most certainly and the Persian compiler most probably, had no knowledge of Sanscrit, and could not, therefore, have invented a list of |
Sanscrit words; it is, therefore, an authentic list of Zend words, which has been preserved in books or by tradition; it follows that the language of the Zend was at |
least a dialect of the Sanscrit, approaching perhaps as nearly to it as the Prácrit, or other popular idioms, which we know to have been spoken in India two thousand |
years ago 23.' This conclusion, that Zend is a Sanskrit dialect, was incorrect, the connection assumed being too close; but it was a great thing that the near relationship of |
the two languages should have been brought to light. In 1798 Father Paulo de St. Barthélemy further developed Jones's remark in an essay on the antiquity of the Zend language |
24. He showed its affinity with the Sanskrit by a list of such Zend and Sanskrit words as were least likely to be borrowed, viz. those that designate the degrees |
of relationship, the limbs of the body, and the most general and essential ideas. Another list, intended to show, on a special topic, how closely connected the two languages are, |
contains eighteen words taken from the liturgic language used in India and Persia. This list was not very happily drawn up, as out of the eighteen instances there is not |
a single one that stands inquiry; yet it was a happy idea, and one which has not even yet yielded all that it promised. His conclusions were that in a |
far remote antiquity Sanskrit was spoken in Persia and Media, that it gave birth to the Zend language, and that the Zend-Avesta is authentic: 'Were it but a recent compilation,' |
he writes, 'as Jones asserts, how is it that the oldest rites of the Parsis, that the old inscriptions of the Persians, the accounts of the Zoroastrian religion in the |
classical writers, the liturgic prayers of the Parsis, and, lastly, even their books do not reveal the pure Sanskrit, as written in the land wherein the Parsis live, but a |
mixed language, which is as different from the other dialects of India as French is from Italian?' This amounted, in fact, to saying that the Zend is not derived from |
the Sanskrit, but that both are derived from another and older language. The Carmelite had a dim notion of that truth, but, as he failed to express it distinctly, it |
was lost for years, and had to be re-discovered. The first twenty-five years of this century were void of results, but the old and sterile discussions as to the authenticity |
of the texts continued in England. In 1808 John Leyden regarded Zend as a Prakrit dialect, parallel to Pali; Pali being identical with the Magadhi dialect and Zend with the |
Sauraseni 25. In the eyes of Erskine Zend was a Sanskrit dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never spoken in Persia 26. His main argument was |
that Zend is not mentioned among the seven dialects which were current in ancient Persia according to the Farhang-i Jehangiri 27, and that Pahlavi and Persian exhibit no close relationship |
with Zend. In Germany, Meiners had found no followers. The theologians appealed to the Avesta in their polemics 28, and Rhode sketched the religious history of Persia after the translations |
of Anquetil 29. Erskine's essay provoked a decisive answer 30 from Emmanuel Rask, one of the most gifted minds in the new school of philology, who had the honour of |
being a precursor of both Grimm and Burnouf. He showed that the list of the Jehangiri referred to an epoch later than that to which Zend must have belonged, and |
to parts of Persia different from those where it must have been spoken; he showed further that modern Persian is not derived from Zend, but from a dialect closely connected |
with it; and, lastly, he showed what was still more important, that Zend was not derived from Sanskrit. As to the system of its sounds, Zend approaches Persian rather than |
Sanskrit; and as to its grammatical forms, if they often remind one of Sanskrit, they also often remind one of Greek and Latin, and frequently have a special character of |
their own. Rask also gave the paradigm of three Zend nouns, belonging to different declensions, as well as the right pronunciation of the Zend letters, several of which had been |
incorrectly given by Anquetil. This was the first essay on Zend grammar, and it was a masterly one. The essay published in 1831 by Peter von Bohlen on the origin |
of the Zend language threw the matter forty years back. According to him, Zend is a Prakrit dialect, as it had been pronounced by Jones, Leyden, and Erskine. His mistake |
consisted in taking Anquetil's transcriptions of the words, which are often so incorrect as to make them look like corrupted forms when compared with Sanskrit. And, what was worse, he |
took the proper names in their modern Parsi forms, which often led him to comparisons that would have appalled Ménage. Thus Ahriman became a Sanskrit word ariman, which would have |
meant 'the fiend;' yet Bohlen might have seen in Anquetil's work itself that Ahriman is the modern form of Angra Mainyu, words which hardly remind one of the Sanskrit ariman. |
Again, the angel Vohu-manô, or 'good thought' was reduced, by means of the Parsi form Bahman, to the Sanskrit bâhuman, 'a long-armed god.' At last came Burnouf. From the time |
when Anquetil had published his translation, that is to say, during seventy years, no real progress had been made in knowledge of the Avesta texts. The notion that Zend and |
Sanskrit are two kindred languages was the only new idea that had been acquired, but no practical advantage for the interpretation of the texts had resulted from it. Anquetil's translation |
was still the only guide, and as the doubts about the authenticity of the texts grew fainter, the authority of the translation became greater, the trust reposed in the Avesta |
being reflected on to the work of its interpreter. The Parsis had been the teachers of Anquetil; and who could ever understand the holy writ of the Parsis better than |
the Parsis themselves? There was no one who even tried to read the texts by the light of Anquetil's translation, to obtain a direct understanding of them. About 1825 Eugène |
Burnouf was engaged in a course of researches on the geographical extent of the Aryan languages in India. After he had defined the limits which divide the races speaking Aryan |
languages from the native non-brahmanical tribes in the south, he wanted to know if a similar boundary had ever existed in the north-west; and if it is outside of India |
that the origin of the Indian languages and civilisation is to be sought for. He was thus led to study the languages of Persia, and, first of all, the oldest |
of them, the Zend. But as he tried to read the texts by help of Anquetil's translation, he was surprised to find that this was not the clue he had |
expected. He saw that two causes had misled Anquetil: on the one hand, his teachers, the Parsi dasturs, either knew little themselves or taught him imperfectly, not only the Zend, |
but even the Pahlavi intended to explain the meaning of the Zend; so that the tradition on which his work rested, being incorrect in itself, corrupted it from the very |
beginning; on the other hand, as Sanskrit was unknown to him and comparative grammar did not as yet exist, he could not supply the defects of tradition by their aid. |
Burnouf, laying aside tradition as found in Anquetil's translation, consulted it as found in a much older and purer form, in a Sanskrit translation of the Yasna made in the |
fifteenth century by the Parsi Neriosengh in accordance with the old Pahlavi version. The information given by Neriosengh he tested, and either confirmed or corrected, by a comparison of parallel |
passages and by the help of comparative grammar, which had just been founded by Bopp, and applied by him successfully to the explanation of Zend forms. Thus he succeeded in |
tracing the general outlines of the Zend lexicon and in fixing its grammatical forms, and founded the only correct method of interpreting the Avesta. He also gave the first notions |
of a comparative mythology of the Avesta and the Veda, by showing the identity of the Vedic Yama with the Avesta Yima, and of Traitâna with Thraêtaona and Ferîdûn. Thus |
he made his 'Commentaire sur le Yasna' a marvellous and unparalleled model of critical insight and steady good sense, equally opposed to the narrowness of mind which clings to matters |
of fact without rising to their cause and connecting them with the series of associated phenomena, and to the wild and uncontrolled spirit of comparison, which, by comparing everything, confounds |
everything. Never sacrificing either tradition to comparison or comparison to tradition, he knew how to pass from the one to the other, and was so enabled both to discover facts |
and explain them. At the same time the ancient Persian inscriptions at Persepolis and Behistun were deciphered by Burnouf in Paris, by Lassen in Bonn, and by Sir Henry Rawlinson |
in Persia. Thus was revealed the existence, at the time of the first Achæmenian kings, of a language closely connected with that of the Avesta, and the last doubts as |
to the authenticity of the Zend books were at length removed. It would have required more than an ordinary amount of scepticism to look still upon the Zend as an |
artificial language, of foreign importation, without root in the land where it was written, and in the conscience of the people for whom it was written, at the moment when |
a twin language, bearing a striking likeness to it in nearly every feature, was suddenly making itself heard from the mouth of Darius, and speaking from the very tomb of |
the first Achæmenian king. That unexpected voice silenced all controversies, and the last echoes of the loud discussion which had been opened in 1771 died away unheeded 31. Click on |
footnote numbers to return to the text above 1 At the battle of Nihâvand (642 A.C.) 2 Ahura Mazda. 3 They settled first at Sangân, not far from Damân; thence |
they spread over Surat, Nowsâri, Broach, and Kambay; and within the last two centuries they have settled at Bombay, which now contains the bulk of the Parsi people, nearly 150,000 |
souls. 4 A century ago, it is said, they still numbered nearly 100,000 souls; but there now remain no more than 8000 or 9000 souls, scattered in Yezd and the |
surrounding villages (Dosabhoy Framjee, The Parsees). 5 Diogenes Laertius, Prooemium 8. 6 Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXX, 1, 2. Cf. infra, III, 11. 7 Dinon, Theopompus, Hermodorus, Heraclides Cumanus. 8 See |
Nicolaus Damazcenus, Didot, Fragm. Hist. III, 409. 9 Fabricius, Graeca Bibliotheca, fourth ad. p. 309 seq. 10 Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata I. Cf. infra, III, 11, and Porphyrius, de vita Plotini, |
§ 16. 11 'De regio Persarum principatu libri tres,' Paris, 1590. The second book is devoted to the religion and manners of the ancient Persians. 12 'Veterum Persarum et Parthorum |
et Medorum, religionis historia,' Oxford, 1700. 13 Thus he recognised in Abraham the first lawgiver of ancient Persia, in Magism a Sabean corruption of the primeval faith, and in Zoroaster |
a had learnt the forgotten truth from the exiled Jews in Babylon. 14 'Zend-Avesta, ouvrage de Zoroastre, contenant les Ideés Théologiques, Physiques et Morales de ce Législateur. . . . |
sa traduction des livres attribués Zoroastre.' 16 Cf. the article on Zoroaster in the Dictionnaire philosophique. 17 'A Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations,' Oxford, 1777. |
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