In 1 798 Father Paulo de St. Barthelemy further developed Jones’s remark in an essay on the antiquity of the Zend language1 *. 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 rela- tionship, 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. Ill’s conclu- sions 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: 4 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 clas- sical 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?5 This amounted, in fact, to say- ing 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 re- sults, 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 1 4 De ontiquitate et affmitate linguae samscredamicae ct germanicae/ Rome, xxii vend! DAD.
Saurascni \ In the eyes of Erskinc Zend was a Sanskrit dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never spoken in Persia1 2. His main argument was that Zend is not mentioned among the seven dialects which were current in ancient Persia according to the Farhang-i Jehangiri3, 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 polemics4 * 6, and Rhode sketched the religious history of Persia after the translations of Anquctil r>.
Erskine’s essay provoked a decisive answer0 from Em- manuel Rask, one of the most gifted minds in the new school of philology, who had the honour of being a pre- cursor 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; lie showed further that modern Persian is not derived from Zend, but from a dialect closely connected with it; and, lastly, lie 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 Anquctil. This was the first essay on Zend grammar, and it was a masterly one.
3 A large Persian dictionary compiled in India in the reign of Jehangir.
4 ‘ Erlauterungcn zum Neucn Testament aus einer neuerbffneten Morgenlandischen Quelle, ’I5oi> p&yoi diro dvaroXwv? Riga, 1 775- 6 ‘ Ueber das Alter und die Echtheit dcr Zend-Sprache und des Zend Avesta ’ (iibersetzt von F. H. von der Hagen), Berlin, 1826. Remarks on the Zend Language and the Zend-Avesta (Transactions of the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, III, 524).
INTRODUCTION, I.
xxiii 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 Erskinc. 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 Menage. Thus Ahriman became a Sanskrit word ariman, which would have meant ‘the fiend;’ yet Bohlen might have seen in Anquetil’s work itself that Ahri- man is nothing but the modern form of Angra Mainyu, words which hardly remind one of the Sanskrit ariman. Again, the angel Vohu-mano, or ‘good thought,’ was reduced, by means of the Parsi form Bah man, to the San- skrit bahuman, ‘a long-armed god.’
At last came Burnouf. From the time when Anquctil 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 authen- ticity of the texts grew fainter, the authority of the transla- tion 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 under- stand 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 Eugene Burnouf was engaged in a course of researches on the geographical extent of the Aryan lan- guages 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 XXIV vendJdAd.
if it is outside of India that the origin of the Indian lan- guages 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. lie saw that two causes had misled Anquctil: 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 tradi- tion as found in Anquctil’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 Ncrio- sengh in accordance with the old Pahlavi version. The information given by Neriosengh he tested, and either con- firmed 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 A vesta. 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 Traitana with Thraetaona and Feridun. Thus he made his ‘Commcntaire 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 com- parison, which, by comparing everything, confounds every- thing. Never sacrificing either tradition to comparison or comparison to tradition, he knew how to pass from the one INTRODUCTION, II.
XXV to the other, and was so enabled both to discover facts and to 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 Achremenian kings, of a language closely con- nected 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 lan- guage, 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 Ach.xmenian king. That unexpected voice silenced all controversies, and the.last echoes of the loud discussion which had been opened in 1771 died away unheeded \ CHAPTER II.
The Interpretation of tiie Zend-Avesta.
The peace did not last long, and a year after the death of Burnouf a new controversy broke out, which still con- tinues, the battle of the methods, that is, the dispute between those who, to interpret the Avesta, rely chiefly or exclusively on tradition, and those who rely only on com- parison with the Vedas. The cause of the rupture was the rapid progress made in the knowledge of theVedic language and literature: the deeper one penetrated into that oldest form of Indian words and thoughts, the more striking appeared its close affinity with the Avesta words and thoughts. Many a mysterious line in the 1 The attacks of John Romer (‘ Zend: Is it an Original Language?’ London, 1855) called for^h a refutation only in Bombay (Dhanjibai Framji, ‘On the Origin and the Authenticity of the Aryan Family of Languages, the Zend- Avesta and the Huzvarash,’ 1861).
XXVI VENDiDAD.
Avcsta received an unlooked-for light from the poems of the Indian /i/shis, and. the long-forgotten past and the origin of many gods and heroes, whom the Parsi worships and extols without knowing who they were and whence they came, were suddenly revealed by the Vedas. Em- boldened by its bright discoveries, the comparative method took pity on its slower and less brilliant rival, which was then making its first attempts to unravel the Pahlavi tradi- tional books. Is it worth while, said the Vedic scholars1, to try slowly and painfully to extract the secret of the old book from that uncouth literature? Nay, is there any hope that its secret is there? Translating the Avesta in accord- ance with the Pahlavi is not translating the Avcsta, but only translating the Pahlavi version, which, wherever it has been deciphered, is found to wander strangely from the true meaning of the original text. Tradition, as a rule, is wont to enforce the ideas of its own ages into the books of past ages. From the time when the Avcsta was written to the time when it was translated, many ideas had undergone great changes: such ideas, tradition must needs either mis- understand or not understand at all, and tradition is always either new sense or nonsense. The key to the Avesta is not the Pahlavi, but the Veda. The Avesta and the Veda are two echoes of one and the same voice, the reflex of one and the same thought: the Vedas, therefore, are both the best lexicon and the best commentary to the Avcsta.
The traditional school 2 replied that translating Zend by means of Sanskrit and the Avesta by means of the Vedas, because Zend and the Avesta are closely related to San- skrit and the Vedas, is forgetting that relationship is not identity, and that what interests the Zend scholar is not to know how far Zend agrees with Sanskrit, but what it is in itself: what he seeks for in the Avesta, is the Avesta, not the Veda. Both the Vedic language and the Vedas are quite unable to teach us what became in Persia of those elements, which are common to the two systems, a thing which tradition alone can teach us. By the comparative 1 Roth, Bcnfey, Ilaug. Cf. Revue Critique, 1877, II, 81. 2 Spiegel, Justi.
INTRODUCTION, II.
XXV11 method, the Zend meregha, which means ‘a bird/ would assume the meaning of 4 gazelle ’ to accord with the San- skrit mrzga; ratu, 4 a part of the day/ would be extended to 4 a season’ out of regard for ritu; mainyu, 4 a spirit/ and dahyu, 4 a province/ would be degraded to ‘anger’ and to 4 a set of thieves/ and ‘the demons/ the Da6vas, would ascend from their dwelling in hell up to heaven, to meet their philological brothers, the Indian Dcvas. The tradi- tional method, as it starts from matters of facts, moves always in the field of reality; the comparative method starts from an hypothesis, moves in a vacuum, and builds up a fanciful religion and a fanciful language.
Such being the methods of the two schools, it often hap- pened that a passage, translated by two scholars, one of each school, took so different an aspect that a layman would have been quite unable to suspect that it was one and the same passage he had read twice. Yet the di- vergence between the two methods is more apparent than real, and proceeds from an imperfect notion of the field in which each of them ought to work. They ought not to oppose, but assist one another, as they are not intended to instruct us about the same kind of facts, but about two kinds of facts quite different and independent. No lan- guage, no religion, that has lived long and changed much, cah be understood at any moment of its development, unless we know what it became afterwards, and what it was before. The language and religion of the Avcsta record but a moment in the long life of the Iranian language and thought, so that wc arc unable to understand them, unless we know what they became and whence they came. What they became we learn directly from tradition, since the tradi- tion arose from the very ideas which the Avesta expresses; whence they came wc learn indirectly from the Vedas, be- cause the Vedas come from the same source as the Avesta.
Therefore it cannot happen that the tradition and the Veda will really contradict one another, if we take care to ask from each only what it knows, from one the present, and the past from the other. Each method is equally right and equally efficacious, at its proper time and in its right xxvm VEND IdAd.
place. The first place belongs to tradition, as it comes straight from the A^festa. The second inquiry, to be suc- cessful, requires infinite prudence and care: the Veda is not the past of the Avesta, as the Avcsta is the past of tra- dition; the Avcsta and Veda are not derived from one another, but from one and the same original, diversely altered in each, and, therefore, there are two stages of variation between them, whereas from the Avcsta to tradi- tion there is only one. The Veda, if first interrogated, gives no valuable evidence, as the words and gods, common to the two systems, may not have retained in both the same meaning they had in the Indo-Iranian period: they may have preserved it in one and lost it in the other, or they may have both altered it, but each in a different way. The Veda, generally speaking, cannot help in discovering matters of fact in the Avcsta, but only in explaining them when discovered by tradition. If we review the discoveries made by the masters of the comparative school, it will be seen that they have in reality started, without noticing it, from facts formerly established by tradition. In fact tradi- tion gives the materials, and comparison puts them in order. It is not possible, cither to know the Avcsta without the former, or to understand it without the latter.
The traditional school, and especially its indefatigable and well-deserving leader, Spiegel, made us acquainted with the nature of the old Iranian religion by gathering together all its materials; the comparative school tried to explain its growth. The traditional school published the text and the traditional translations, and produced the first Parsi grammar, the first Pahlavi grammar, and the first transla- tion of the Avesta which had been made since Anquetil. The danger with it is that it shows itself too apt to stop at tradition, instead of going from it to comparison. When it undertakes to expound the history of the religion, it cannot but be misled by tradition. Any living people, although its existing state of mind is but the result of various and changing states through many successive ages, yet, at any particular moment of its life, keeps the remains of its former stages of thought in order, under the control of the INTRODUCTION. II.
XXIX principle that is then predominant. Thus it happens that their ideas are connected together in a way which seldom agrees with their historical sequence: chronological order is lost to sight and replaced by logical order, and the past is read into the present. Comparison alone can enable us to put things in their proper place, to trace their birth, their growth, their changes, their former relations, and lead us from the logical order, which is a shadow, to the historical order, which is the substance.
The comparative school developed Indo-Iranian mytho- logy. Roth showed after Burnouf how the epical history of Iran was derived from the same source as the myths of Vcdic India, and pointed out the primitive identity of Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of Iran, with Varuwa, the supreme god of the Vcdic age. In the same direction Windischmann, in his c Zoroastrian Essays 5 and in his studies on Mithra and Anahita, displayed singular sagacity. But the dangers of the method came to light in the works of Haug, who, giving a definite form to a system still fluctuating, converted Mazdeism into a religious revolu- tion against Vedic polytheism, found historical allusions to that schism both in the Avesta and in the Veda, pointed out curses against Zoroaster in the Vedas, and, in short, transformed, as it were, the two books into histqrical pamphlets l.
In the contest about the authenticity of the Avesta, one party must necessarily have been right and the other wrong; but in the present struggle the issue is not so clear, as both parties arc partly right and partly wrong. Both of them, by following their principles, have rendered such services to science as seem to give each a right to cling to its own method more firmly than ever. Yet it is to be hoped that they will sec at last that they must be allies, not enemies, and that their common work must be begun by the one and completed by the other.
1 It would be unjust, when speaking of Haug, not to recall the invaluable services he rendered in the second part of his career, as a Pahlavi scholar. He was the firs? who thought of illustrating the Pahlavi in the books by the Pahlavi in the inscriptions, and thus determined the reading of the principal elements in the manuscript Pahlavi.
XXX VENDlDAD.
CHAPTER III.
The Formation of the Zend-Avesta.
§ i. The collection of Zend fragments, known as the Zend-Avesta \ is divided, in its usual form, into two parts.
The first part, or the Avcsta properly so called, contains the Vendidad, the Visp£rad, and the Yasna. The Ven- did*id is a compilation of religious laws and of mythical tales; the Visperad is a collection of litanies for the sacri- fice; and the Yasna is composed of litanies of the same kind and of five hymns or Gathas written in a special dialect, older than the general language of the Avcsta.
These three books arc found in manuscripts in two dif- ferent forms: either each by itself, in which case they are generally accompanied by a Fahlavi translation; or the three mingled together according to the requirements of the liturgy, as they are not each recited separately in their entirety, but the chapters of the different books are inter- mingled; and in this case the collection is called the Vendidad Sadah or ‘ Vendidad pure/ as it exhibits the original text alone, without a translation.
The second part, generally known as the Khorda Avesta or ‘ Small Avcsta/ is composed of short prayers which are recited not only by the priests, but by all the faithful, at certain moments of the day, month, or year, and in presence of the different elements; these prayers are the five Gah, the thirty formulas of the Sirozah, the three Afrigan, and the six Nyayii*. But it is also usual to include in the Khorda Avesta, although forming no real part of it, the Ya$ts or hymns of praise and glorification to the several 1 A very improper designation, as Zend means ‘ a commentary or explana- tion,’ and was applied only to explanatory texts, to the translations of the Avesta. Avesta (from the old Persian abasta, ' the law;* see Oppert, Journal Asiatiquc, 1872, Mars) is the proper name of the original texts. What it is customary to call ‘ the Zend language ’ ought to be named • the Avesta lan- guage; * the Zend being no language at all; and, if the word be used as the designation of one, it can be rightly applied only to the lahlavi. The ex- pression ‘Avesta and Zend* is often used in the Pahlavi commentary to designate ‘ the law with its traditional and revealed explanation.* INTRODUCTION, III.
XXXI Izads, and a number of fragments, the most important of which is the Hadh6kht Nosk.
§ 2. That the extent of the sacred literature of Mazdeism was formerly much greater than it is now, appears not only from internal evidence, that is, from the fragmentary cha- racter of the book, but is also proved by historical evidence. In the first place, the Arab conquest proved fatal to the religious literature of the Sassanian ages, a great part of which was cither destroyed by the fanaticism of the con- querors and the new converts, or lost during the long exodus of the Parsis. Thus the Pahlavi translation of the Vendidad, which was not finished before the latter end of the Sassanian dynasty, contains not a few Zend quotations from books which arc no longer in existence; other quotations, as remarkable in their importance as in their contents, are to be found in Pahlavi and Parsi tracts, like the Niran- gistan and the Aogcmaide. The Bundahu* contains much matter which is not spoken of in the existing Avcsta, but which is very likely to have been taken from Zend books which were still in the hands of its compiler. It is a tradi- tion with the Parsis, that the Ya^ts were originally thirty in number, there having been one for each of the thirty Izads who preside over the thirty days of the month; yet there are only eighteen still extant.
The cause that preserved the A vesta is obvious; taken as a whole, it does not profess to be a religious encyclo- pedia, but only a liturgical collection, and it bears more likeness to a Prayer Book than to the Bible. It can be readily conceived that the Vendidad Sadali, which had to be recited every day, would be more carefully preserved than the Ya$ts, which are generally recited once a month; and these again more carefully than other books, which, however sacred they might be, were not used in the per- formance of worship. Many texts, no doubt, were lost in consequence of the Arab conquest, but mostly such as would have more importance in the eyes of the theologian than in those of the priest. We have a fair specimen of what these lost texts rflay have been in the few non-liturgical frag- ments which we still possess, such as the VLrt&sp Ya^t and XXX11 VENdIdAd.
the blessing of Zoroaster upon King Vijtasp, which belong to the old epic cycle of Iran, and the Hadhdkht Nosk, which treats of the fate of the soul after death.
§ 3. But if we have lost much of the Sassanian sacred literature, Sassanian Persia herself, if we may trust Parsi tradition, had lost still more of the original books. The primitive Avesta, as revealed by Ormazd to Zoroaster and by Zoroaster to Virtasp, king of Bactria, was supposed to have been composed of twenty-one Nosks or Books, the greater part of which was burnt by Iskander the Rtimi (Alexander the Great). After his death the priests of the Zoroastrian religion met together, and by collecting the various fragments that had escaped the ravages of the war and others that they knew by heart, they formed the present collection, which is a very small part of the original book, as out of the twenty-one Nosks there was only one that was preserved in its entirety, the Vendidad 1.