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1a INTRODUCTION, I. . xvii Eighteen years later, a countryman of Hyde, George Boucher, received from the Parsis in Surat a copy of the Vendidad Sada, which was brought to England in 1723 by Richard Cobbe!. But the old manuscript was a sealed book, and the most that could then be made of it was to hang it by an iron chain to the wall of the Bodleian Library?, as a curiosity to be shown to foreigners. A few years later, a Scotchman, named Fraser, went to Surat, with the view of obtaining from the Parsis, not only their books, but also a knowledge of their contents. He was not very successful in the first undertaking, and utterly failed in the second. In 1754 a young man, twenty years old, Anquetil Duperron, a scholar of the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris, happened to see a facsimile of four leaves of the Oxford Vendidad, which had been sent from England, a few years before, to Etienne Fourmont, the Orientalist. He determined at once to give to France both the books of Zoroaster and the first European translation of them. Too impatient to set off, to wait for a mission from the government which had been promised to him, he enlisted as a private soldier in the service of the French East India Company ; he embarked at Lorient on the 24th of February, 1755, and after three years of endless adventures and dangers through the whole breadth of Hindustan, at the very time when war was waging between France and England, he arrived at last in Surat, where he stayed among the Parsis for three years more. Here began another struggle, not less hard, but more decisive, against the same mistrust and ill-will which had disheartened Fraser; but he came out of it victorious, and prevailed at last on the Parsis to part both with their books and their knowledge. He came back to Paris on the 14th of March, 1764, and deposited on the following day at the Bibliothéque Royale the whole of the Zend-Avesta and copies of several tradi- * It was entitled: ‘Leges sacrae ritus ex liturgia Zoroastri, . . . scripsit hunc libruam Tched Divdadi filius,’ Vendidad (Gat Dév Dat) being mistaken for a man’s name. The manuscript was written in the year 1050 of Yazdgard (1680-1681 A.D.) It is numbered nowadays, Orientalia, 322. [4] b XVill VENDIDAD. tional books. He spent ten years in studying the material he had collected, and published in 1771 the first European translation of the Zend-Avesta !.
2The manuscript was written in the year 1050 of Yazdgard (1680-1681 A.D.) It is numbered nowadays, Orientalia, 322. [4] b XVill VENDIDAD. tional books. He spent ten years in studying the material he had collected, and published in 1771 the first European translation of the Zend-Avesta !. A violent dispute broke out at once, as half the learned world denied the authenticity of the Avesta, which it pronounced a forgery. It was the future founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, William Jones, a young Oxonian then, who opened the war. He had been wounded to the quick: by the scornful tone adopted by Anquetil towards Hyde and a few other English scholars: the Zend-Avesta suffered for the fault of its introducer, Zoroaster for Anquetil. In a pamphlet written in French *, with a verve and in a style which showed him to be a good disciple of Voltaire, W. Jones pointed out, and dwelt upon, the oddities and absurdities with which the so-called sacred books of Zoroaster teemed. It is true that Anquetil had given full scope to satire by the style he had adopted : he cared very little for literary elegance, and did not mind writing Zend and Persian in French; so the new and strange ideas he had to express looked stranger still in the outlandish garb he’ gave them. Yet it was less the style than the ideas that shocked the contemporary of Voltaire®. His main argument was that books, full of such silly tales, of laws and rules so absurd, of descriptions of gods and demons so grotesque, could not be the work of a sage like Zoroaster, nor the code of a religion so much celebrated for its simplicity, wisdom, and purity. His conclusion was that the Avesta was a rhapsody of some modern Guebre. In fact the only thing in which Jones succeeded was to prove ina decisive manner that the ancient Persians were not equal to the lumiéres of the eighteenth century, and that the authors of the Avesta had not read the Encyclopédie. Jones’s censure was echoed in England by Sir John 1 ‘Zend-Avesta, ouvrage de Zoroastre, contenant les Idées Théologiques, Physiques et Morales de ce Législateur. . . . Traduit en Frangois sur l’Original Zend.’ Par M. Anquetil Du Perron, 3 vols. in 4°, Paris, 1771. 2 ‘Lettre 4 M. A*** du P***, dans laquelle est compris l’examen de sa traduction des livres attribués 4 Zoroastre.’ 5 Cf. Voltaire’s article on Zoroaster in the Dictionnaire philosophique. INTRODUCTION, I. xix
3Anquetil Du Perron, 3 vols. in 4°, Paris, 1771. 2 ‘Lettre 4 M. A*** du P***, dans laquelle est compris l’examen de sa traduction des livres attribués 4 Zoroastre.’ 5 Cf. Voltaire’s article on Zoroaster in the Dictionnaire philosophique. INTRODUCTION, I. xix Chardin and Richardson, in Germany by Meiners. Richardson tried to give a scientific character to the attacks of Jones by founding them on philological grounds}. That the Avesta was a fabrication of modern times was shown, he argued, by the number of Arabic words he fancied he found both in the Zend and Pahlavi dialects, as no Arabic element was introduced into the Persian idioms earlier than the seventh century; also by the harsh texture of the Zend, contrasted with the rare euphony of the Persian ; and, lastly, by the radical difference between the Zend and Persian, bothin words and grammar. To these objections, drawn from the form, he added another derived from the uncommon stupidity of the matter. In Germany, Meiners, to the charges brought against the newly-found books, added another of a new and unexpected kind, namely, that they spoke of ideas unheard of before, and made known new things. ‘Pray, who would dare ascribe to Zoroaster books in which are found numberless names of trees, animals, men, and demons unknown to the ancient Persians ; in which are invoked an incredible number of pure animals and other things, which, as appears from the silence of ancient writers, were never known, or at least never worshipped, in Persia? What Greek ever spoke of Hém, of Jemshid, and of such other personages as the fabricators of that rhapsody exalt with every kind of praise, as divine heroes ? ?’ Anquetil and the Avesta found an eager champion in the person of Kleuker, professor in the University of Riga. As soon as the French version of the Avesta appeared, he published a German translation of it, and also of Anquetil’s historical dissertations *. Then, in a series of dissertations of his own *, he vindicated the authenticity of the Zend ' *A Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations,’ Oxford, 1777. 3 * De Zoroastris vita, institutis, doctrina et libris,’ in the Novi Commentarii Societatis Regiae, Goettingen, 1778-1779. 3 *Zend-Avesta ...nach dem Franzoesischen des Herr Anquetil Du Perron,’ 3 vols, in 4°, 1776. * * Anhang zum Zend-Avesta,’ 2 vols. in 4°, 1781. b 2 xx VENDIDAD. 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.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
Romanised transliteration as printed by the translator, not the original script. This is what we hold.
1a INTRODUCTION, I. . xvii Eighteen years later, a countryman of Hyde, George Boucher, received from the Parsis in Surat a copy of the Vendidad Sada, which was brought to England in 1723 by Richard Cobbe!. But the old manuscript was a sealed book, and the most that could then be made of it was to hang it by an iron chain to the wall of the Bodleian Library?, as a curiosity to be shown to foreigners. A few years later, a Scotchman, named Fraser, went to Surat, with the view of obtaining from the Parsis, not only their books, but also a knowledge of their contents. He was not very successful in the first undertaking, and utterly failed in the second. In 1754 a young man, twenty years old, Anquetil Duperron, a scholar of the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris, happened to see a facsimile of four leaves of the Oxford Vendidad, which had been sent from England, a few years before, to Etienne Fourmont, the Orientalist. He determined at once to give to France both the books of Zoroaster and the first European translation of them. Too impatient to set off, to wait for a mission from the government which had been promised to him, he enlisted as a private soldier in the service of the French East India Company ; he embarked at Lorient on the 24th of February, 1755, and after three years of endless adventures and dangers through the whole breadth of Hindustan, at the very time when war was waging between France and England, he arrived at last in Surat, where he stayed among the Parsis for three years more. Here began another struggle, not less hard, but more decisive, against the same mistrust and ill-will which had disheartened Fraser; but he came out of it victorious, and prevailed at last on the Parsis to part both with their books and their knowledge. He came back to Paris on the 14th of March, 1764, and deposited on the following day at the Bibliothéque Royale the whole of the Zend-Avesta and copies of several tradi- * It was entitled: ‘Leges sacrae ritus ex liturgia Zoroastri, . . . scripsit hunc libruam Tched Divdadi filius,’ Vendidad (Gat Dév Dat) being mistaken for a man’s name. The manuscript was written in the year 1050 of Yazdgard (1680-1681 A.D.) It is numbered nowadays, Orientalia, 322. [4] b XVill VENDIDAD. tional books. He spent ten years in studying the material he had collected, and published in 1771 the first European translation of the Zend-Avesta !.
2The manuscript was written in the year 1050 of Yazdgard (1680-1681 A.D.) It is numbered nowadays, Orientalia, 322. [4] b XVill VENDIDAD. tional books. He spent ten years in studying the material he had collected, and published in 1771 the first European translation of the Zend-Avesta !. A violent dispute broke out at once, as half the learned world denied the authenticity of the Avesta, which it pronounced a forgery. It was the future founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, William Jones, a young Oxonian then, who opened the war. He had been wounded to the quick: by the scornful tone adopted by Anquetil towards Hyde and a few other English scholars: the Zend-Avesta suffered for the fault of its introducer, Zoroaster for Anquetil. In a pamphlet written in French *, with a verve and in a style which showed him to be a good disciple of Voltaire, W. Jones pointed out, and dwelt upon, the oddities and absurdities with which the so-called sacred books of Zoroaster teemed. It is true that Anquetil had given full scope to satire by the style he had adopted : he cared very little for literary elegance, and did not mind writing Zend and Persian in French; so the new and strange ideas he had to express looked stranger still in the outlandish garb he’ gave them. Yet it was less the style than the ideas that shocked the contemporary of Voltaire®. His main argument was that books, full of such silly tales, of laws and rules so absurd, of descriptions of gods and demons so grotesque, could not be the work of a sage like Zoroaster, nor the code of a religion so much celebrated for its simplicity, wisdom, and purity. His conclusion was that the Avesta was a rhapsody of some modern Guebre. In fact the only thing in which Jones succeeded was to prove ina decisive manner that the ancient Persians were not equal to the lumiéres of the eighteenth century, and that the authors of the Avesta had not read the Encyclopédie. Jones’s censure was echoed in England by Sir John 1 ‘Zend-Avesta, ouvrage de Zoroastre, contenant les Idées Théologiques, Physiques et Morales de ce Législateur. . . . Traduit en Frangois sur l’Original Zend.’ Par M. Anquetil Du Perron, 3 vols. in 4°, Paris, 1771. 2 ‘Lettre 4 M. A*** du P***, dans laquelle est compris l’examen de sa traduction des livres attribués 4 Zoroastre.’ 5 Cf. Voltaire’s article on Zoroaster in the Dictionnaire philosophique. INTRODUCTION, I. xix
3Anquetil Du Perron, 3 vols. in 4°, Paris, 1771. 2 ‘Lettre 4 M. A*** du P***, dans laquelle est compris l’examen de sa traduction des livres attribués 4 Zoroastre.’ 5 Cf. Voltaire’s article on Zoroaster in the Dictionnaire philosophique. INTRODUCTION, I. xix Chardin and Richardson, in Germany by Meiners. Richardson tried to give a scientific character to the attacks of Jones by founding them on philological grounds}. That the Avesta was a fabrication of modern times was shown, he argued, by the number of Arabic words he fancied he found both in the Zend and Pahlavi dialects, as no Arabic element was introduced into the Persian idioms earlier than the seventh century; also by the harsh texture of the Zend, contrasted with the rare euphony of the Persian ; and, lastly, by the radical difference between the Zend and Persian, bothin words and grammar. To these objections, drawn from the form, he added another derived from the uncommon stupidity of the matter. In Germany, Meiners, to the charges brought against the newly-found books, added another of a new and unexpected kind, namely, that they spoke of ideas unheard of before, and made known new things. ‘Pray, who would dare ascribe to Zoroaster books in which are found numberless names of trees, animals, men, and demons unknown to the ancient Persians ; in which are invoked an incredible number of pure animals and other things, which, as appears from the silence of ancient writers, were never known, or at least never worshipped, in Persia? What Greek ever spoke of Hém, of Jemshid, and of such other personages as the fabricators of that rhapsody exalt with every kind of praise, as divine heroes ? ?’ Anquetil and the Avesta found an eager champion in the person of Kleuker, professor in the University of Riga. As soon as the French version of the Avesta appeared, he published a German translation of it, and also of Anquetil’s historical dissertations *. Then, in a series of dissertations of his own *, he vindicated the authenticity of the Zend ' *A Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations,’ Oxford, 1777. 3 * De Zoroastris vita, institutis, doctrina et libris,’ in the Novi Commentarii Societatis Regiae, Goettingen, 1778-1779. 3 *Zend-Avesta ...nach dem Franzoesischen des Herr Anquetil Du Perron,’ 3 vols, in 4°, 1776. * * Anhang zum Zend-Avesta,’ 2 vols. in 4°, 1781. b 2 xx VENDIDAD. 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.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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