Fetching
One moment.
Fetching
One moment.
Romanised transliteration as printed by the translator, not the original script. This is what we hold.
1b 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. In the field of philology, he showed, as Anquetil had already 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 writes, ‘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 due to misunderstandings, 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 growing 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 INTRODUCTION, I. Xxi books of their ancestors, in which nothing is found to indicate fraud or a modern hand 1.’ 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 thus—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.
2The 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, Ardeshir B&abag4n—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 4 un homme né dans ce siécle 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. Buta glance at the Zend glossary published by Anquetil suggested to him a remark 1 «Commentatio prior observationes historico-criticas de Zoroastre ejusque scriptis et placitis exhibens.’ Goettingen, in the Novi Comment. Soc. Reg. 1791. Xxil VEND{DAD. 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 Vydcaran!, as yushmacam, the genitive plural of yuashmad. 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 Prdcrit, or other popular idioms, which we know to have been spoken in India two thousand years ago#’ 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.
3In 1798 Father Paulo de St. Barthélemy further developed Jones’s remark in an essay on the antiquity of the Zend language *. He showed its affinity with the Sanskrit by a list of such Zend and Sanskrit words as were least likely to have been 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 1 The Sanskrit Grammar. ® Asiatic Researches, II, § 3. * ‘De antiquitate et affinitate linguae samscredamicae et germanicae,’ Rome, 1798. . INTRODUCTION, I. Xxiil 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 Sauraseni4. In the eyes of Erskine Zend was a Sanskrit dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never spoken in Persia?. 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 *, 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‘, and Rhode sketched the religious history of Persia after the translations of Anquetil °. Erskine’s essay provoked a decisive answer ® from Emmanuel Rask, one of the most gifted minds in the new school of philology, who had the honour of being a pre- 1 Asiatic Researches, X. 3 Ibid. X. 3 A large Persian dictionary compiled in India in the reign of Jehangir.
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.
1b 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. In the field of philology, he showed, as Anquetil had already 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 writes, ‘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 due to misunderstandings, 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 growing 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 INTRODUCTION, I. Xxi books of their ancestors, in which nothing is found to indicate fraud or a modern hand 1.’ 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 thus—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.
2The 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, Ardeshir B&abag4n—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 4 un homme né dans ce siécle 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. Buta glance at the Zend glossary published by Anquetil suggested to him a remark 1 «Commentatio prior observationes historico-criticas de Zoroastre ejusque scriptis et placitis exhibens.’ Goettingen, in the Novi Comment. Soc. Reg. 1791. Xxil VEND{DAD. 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 Vydcaran!, as yushmacam, the genitive plural of yuashmad. 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 Prdcrit, or other popular idioms, which we know to have been spoken in India two thousand years ago#’ 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.
3In 1798 Father Paulo de St. Barthélemy further developed Jones’s remark in an essay on the antiquity of the Zend language *. He showed its affinity with the Sanskrit by a list of such Zend and Sanskrit words as were least likely to have been 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 1 The Sanskrit Grammar. ® Asiatic Researches, II, § 3. * ‘De antiquitate et affinitate linguae samscredamicae et germanicae,’ Rome, 1798. . INTRODUCTION, I. Xxiil 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 Sauraseni4. In the eyes of Erskine Zend was a Sanskrit dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never spoken in Persia?. 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 *, 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‘, and Rhode sketched the religious history of Persia after the translations of Anquetil °. Erskine’s essay provoked a decisive answer ® from Emmanuel Rask, one of the most gifted minds in the new school of philology, who had the honour of being a pre- 1 Asiatic Researches, X. 3 Ibid. X. 3 A large Persian dictionary compiled in India in the reign of Jehangir.
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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