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APPENDIX
were as wives of Virâf; revelation, also, was easy to them, and the ritual had been performed .... they stood up and bowed, and spoke thus : “Do not this thing, ye Mazda-worshippers ! for we are seven sisters, and he is an only brother, and we are, all seven sisters, as wives? of that brother." This passage, supposing that it really refers to marriage, seems to attribute an exaggerated form of the Khvêtak-das of brother and sister to Virâf, as a proof of his extraordinary sanctity; but it can hardly be considered as a literal statement of facts, any more than the supposed case of a woman having married seven brothers successively, mentioned in Mark xii. 20-22, Luke xx. 29–32.
In another Pahlavi book of about the same age, which is best known by its Pâzand name, Mainyô-i Khard?, we find Khvêtûk-das placed second among
to Pers. har, but a Parsi critic has suggested that it ought to be read kanîk, 'virgin,' so as to get rid of the idea that the sisters were married to Viraf. This suggestion is ingenious, because the difference between kolâ and kanîk is very slight, when written in Pahlavi characters; but it is not very ingenuous, because the substitution of kan ik for kola, both here and in the similar phrase at the end of the passage quoted in our text, would render the sentences quite ungrammatical, as would be easily seen by any well-educated Parsi who would translate the phrases literally into modern Persian words, which would give him the following text: ân har haft 'hva harân Viraf kan zan bad and for the first phrase, and har haft 'hva har ân birâdar zanî êm for the second. To substitute any Persian word for 'virgin'in place of the pronoun har, in these two phrases, would evidently produce nonsense. The really doubtful point in these phrases is whether zan and zanî are to be understood as 'wife' and wifehood,' or merely as woman' and 'womankind;' but it would be unusual to use such terms for the unmarried female members of a family.
Or the womankind.' ? From a facsimile of the only known MS. of the original Pahlavi
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