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


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INTRODUCTION.
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tions already mentioned as having been engraved on rocks, and impressed on coins, by the earlier kings of the Sasanian dynasty in Persia. The earliest of these rock inscriptions records the name and titles of Artakhshatar son of Pâpak, the first Sasanian monarch (A. D. 226–240); it is engraved in Greek and two kinds of old Pahlavi characters, which have been called Chaldæo-Pahlavi and Sasanian-Pahlavi, because the one bears more resemblance to Chaldee, both in its letters and the language they express, and the other is more frequently used by the subsequent Sasanian monarchs. A similar tri-lingual inscription records the names and titles of his son and successor Shahpûhar I (A. D. 240-271), who has also left a long bi-lingual inscription, in Chaldæo and SasanianPahlavi, in a cave near Persepolis. Another long bi-lingual inscription, fragments of which have been found on stones among the ruins of Pâî Kûlî, is attributed to his early successors, who have also left us several uni-lingual inscriptions in Sasanian-Pahlavi, two of which are of great length, but none later than the end of the fourth century.
The language of the earlier of these inscriptions differs from that of the manuscripts preserved by the Parsis, chiefly in the use of several Semitic words unknown to the manuscript Huzvâris, the non-existence of Iranian Huzvâris (which is evidently a growth of later times), and the less frequent use of Persian terminations affixed to Semitic words. These differences, however, are hardly greater than those which distinguish the English of Chaucer from that of our own day. Moreover, they gradually disappear in process of time, as we find the later inscriptions of the fourth century approaching much closer, in language, to the manuscripts.
As the alphabets of these inscriptions are less imperfect and ambiguous than that of the Pahlavi manuscripts, they render the pronunciation of many words much more certain. They consist of eighteen letters, having the following sounds :
'So stated in the inscription, but Pahlavi MSS. call him the son of Pâpak's daughter and of Sâsân (see Bund. XXXI, 30).
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