Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 20

INTRODUCTION, I.
. xvii
Eighteen years later, a countryman of Hyde, George Boucher, received from the Parsis in Surat a copy of the Vendidad Sâda, which was brought to England in 1723 by Richard Cobbel. But the old manuscript was a sealed book, and the most that could then be made of it was to hang it by an iron chain to the wall of the Bodleian Library,
as a curiosity to be shown to foreigners. A few years later, sa Scotchman, named Fraser, went to Surat, with the view of
obtaining from the Parsis, not only their books, but also a knowledge of their contents. He was not very successful in the first undertaking, and utterly failed in the second.
In 1754 a young man, twenty years old, Anquetil Duperron, a scholar of the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris, happened to see a facsimile of four leaves of the Oxford Vendidåd, which had been sent from England, a few years before, to Etienne Fourmont, the Orientalist. He determined at once to give to France both the books of Zoroaster and the first European translation of them. Too impatient to set off, to wait for a mission from the government which had been promised to him, he enlisted as a private soldier in the service of the French East India Company; he embarked at Lorient on the 24th of February, 1755, and aster three years of endless adventures and dangers through the whole breadth of Hindustan, at the very time when war was waging between France and England, he arrived at last in Surat, where he stayed among the Parsis for three years more. Here began another struggle, not less hard, but more decisive, against the same mistrust and ill-will which had disheartened Fraser ; but he came out of it victorious, and prevailed at last on the Parsis to part both with their books and their knowledge. He came back to Paris on the 14th of March, 1764, and deposited on the following day at the Bibliothèque Royale the whole of the Zend-Avesta and copies of several tradi
" It was entitled : 'Leges sacrae ritus ex liturgia Zoroastri, ... scripsit hunc librum Tched Divdadi filias,' Vendidad (Göt Dev Dåt) being mistaken for & man's name. The manuscript was written in the year 1050 of Yazdgard (1680-1681 A.D.)
• It is numbered nowadays, Orientalia, 322.
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