Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 19

xvi
VENDIDÂD.
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 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 Persia 1.' Unfortunately the so-called genuine monuments of ancient Persia were nothing more than recent Persian compilations or refacimenti? But notwithstanding this defect, which could hardly be avoided then, and a distortion of critical acumen, the book of Thomas Hyde was the first complete and true picture of modern Parsiism, and it made inquiry into its history the order of the day. A warm appeal made by him to the zeal of travellers, to seek for and procure at any price the sacred books of the Parsis, did not remain ineffectual, and from that time scholars bethought themselves of studying Parsiism in its own home.
1. Veterum Persarum et Parthorum et Medorum religionis historia,' Oxford, 1700.
· The Saddar, an excellent text-book of Parstism, of which he gave an incorrect edition (the only one still in existence) and an incorrect translation, superseded only lately by West's translation in the Sacred Books of the East.A Persian metrical translation of the Pahlavi Ardà Viråf's visit to hell. The Farhangi Jihangiri, & Persian dictionary compiled in 1609 and explaining many Pahlavi and Pazend terms.
* Being struck with the many analogies between the Zoroastrian and the biblical systems, he recognised in Abraham the first lawgiver of ancient Pernia, in Magism a Sabean corruption of the primeval faith, and in Zoroaster a reformer, who had leamt the forgotten truth from the exiled Jews in Babylon.
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