Book Title: Sacred Laws of Aryas
Author(s): Gorge Buhler
Publisher: Oxford


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INTRODUCTION.
XV
with the meaning to grow old, to become thread-bare. If such a verb really exists in Persian, although its meaning may imply decrepitude or decay' rather than 'antiquity or obsoleteness, yet its abstract noun would not be altogether inapplicable to the logograms used in Pahlavi, which are, in fact, last remnants of older writings.
The word Pâzand is probably derived from Av. paitizanti, with the meaning 're-explanation,' that is, a further interpretation of the Pahlavi Zand in the Persian vernacular. This term is applied not only to the purely Persian words in Pahlavi texts, but also (as already noticed) to transliterations of the said texts, either in Avesta or modern Persian characters, in which all the Huzvâris words are replaced by their Pâzand equivalents. These transliterations form what are called Pâzand texts; they retain the exact idiom and construction of the Pahlavi original, and represent the mode in which it was read. It may be remarked, however, that all such Pazand texts, as have been examined, seem to have been written in India, so that they may be suspected of representing some corrupt Gugarâti pronunciation of Persian, rather than the peculiar orthography of any period of the Persian language.
This theory of the origin and development of Pahlavi writing could hardly be upheld, unless we could trace the same artificial mixture of Huzvâris and Pâzand in all accessible Pahlavi records, from their earliest appearance to the present time. This we are able to do, even in the scanty materials afforded by the legends on the provincial Persian coins of the third century B.C. and second century A.D. already mentioned. But we can trace it with greater certainty not only in the coin legends, but also in the rock inscriptions of the earlier Sasanian kings (A.D. 226–388), in the latest of which we find the written language differing very slightly from that contained in the manuscripts preserved by the Parsis of the present day, although the characters differ very much in form. And, finally, in the legends on the coins of the later Sasanian kings (A.D. 388– 651) and on seals of their times, we find even this difference in the shapes of the letters disappearing by degrees. In
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