زند أفستا، الجزء الأول: الفنديداد

Mazdcism but the name of its founder, who from a Magus was converted into a magician and master of the hidden sciences. It was not until the Renaissance that real inquiry was resumed. The first step was to collect all the information that could be gathered from Greek and Roman writers. That task was undertaken and successfully completed by Barnab£ Brisson 3. A nearer approach to the original source was made in the following century by Italian, English, and French travellers in Asia. Pietro della Valle, Henry Lord, Mandelslo, Ovington, Chardin, Gabriel du Chinon, and Tavernier found Zoroaster’s last followers in Persia and India, and made known their existence, their manners, and the main features of their belief to Europe. Gabriel du Chinon saw their books and recognised that they were not all written in the same language, their original holy writ being no longer understood except 1 Fabricius, Graeca Bibliotheca, fourth cd. p. 309 seq. 2 Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata I. Cf. infra, III, ii, and Porphyrius, de vita Plotini, § 16. 8 ‘ De regio PtVsarum principatu libri tres,’ Paris, 1 590. The second book is devoted to the religion and manners of the ancient Persians. XIV by means of translations and commentaries in another tongue. In the year 1700, a professor at Oxford, Thomas Hyde, the greatest Orientalist of his time in Europe, made the first systematic attempt to restore the history of the old Persian religion by combining the accounts of the Mohammedan writers with ‘ the true and genuine monuments of ancient Persia1.’ Unfortunately the so-called genuine monuments of ancient Persia were nothing more than recent compilations referring to the last stage of Parsiism.…