Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 24

INTRODUCTION, I.
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books of their ancestors, in which nothing is found to indicate fraud or a modern hand!'
Two years afterwards, in 1793, was published in Paris a book which, without directly dealing with the Avesta, was the first step taken to make its authenticity incontrovertible. It was the masterly memoir by Sylvestre de Sacy, in which the Pahlavi inscriptions of the first Sassanides were deciphered for the first time and in a decisive manner. De Sacy, in his researches, had chiefly relied on the Pahlavi lexicon published by Anquetil, whose work vindicated itself thus-better than by heaping up arguments—by promoting discoveries. The Pahlavi inscriptions gave the key, as is well known, to the Persian cuneiform inscriptions, which were in return to put beyond all doubt the genuineness of the Zend language.
Tychsen, in an appendix to his Commentaries, pointed to the importance of the new discovery: This,' he writes,
is a proof that the Pahlavi was used during the reign of the Sassanides, for it was from them that these inscriptions emanated, as it was by them-nay, by the first of them, Ardeshir Babagån—that the doctrine of Zoroaster was revived. One can now understand why the Zend books were translated into Pahlavi. Here, too, everything agrees, and speaks loudly for their antiquity and genuineness.'
About the same time Sir William Jones, then president of the Royal Asiatic Society, which he had just founded, resumed in a discourse delivered before that Society the same question he had solved in such an off-hand manner twenty years before. He was no longer the man to say, 'Sied-il à un homme né dans ce siècle de s'infatuer de fables indiennes ?' and although he had still a spite against Anquetil, he spoke of him with more reserve than in 1771. However, his judgment on the Avesta itself was not altered on the whole, although, as he himself declared, he had not thought it necessary to study the text. But a glance at the Zend glossary published by Anquetil suggested to him a remark
1 Commentatio prior observationes historico-criticas de Zoroastre ejusque scriptis et placitis exhibens.' Goettingen, in the Novi Comment. Soc. Reg. 1791.
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