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A.

BACTRIAN TRADITION AND THE BOOKS OF THE ZEND.

MANY years elapsed after the talented Anquetil made the discovery of the Zendavesta before the researches on that head were established upon a firm foundation. The labours of Benfey, Spiegel, Westergaard, and Haug have been added to those of Burnouf, and we now possess still more extensive investigations by the last three writers into the records of the Zarathustrian religion. The unfortunate notion that Zoroaster's King Gustasp was Darius the son of Hystaspes has been abandoned by men of learning, and it would now be as unscientific to controvert such an idea, as it formerly was to advance it. We have intimated in the First Book that the central point of the old Arian dominion was Bactria. Haug has very recently also maintained that the language of the Zend books is Bactrian. A. W. Schlegel's treatise on the origin of the Hindoos, which appeared first in 1835 in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, and then in his own celebrated "Essais," forms the turning-point for the correct view of the relation between the Indians and the northern parts of Eastern Asia. Prior to this (in 1832), Ritter, in the Introduction to his "Asia," had made a beginning towards connecting the predominant Indian legend about the Sacred Mountain of Meru with the geography of the highlands of Eastern North-Asia, with which we are acquainted.

We take up the subject with the advantage of having two fresh resting-places. In the first place we have additional proof of the correctness of the fact already assumed by Niebuhr :

That in the year 1903 before Alexander, or 2234 B. C., a Zoroastrian king of Media conquered Babylon, and that the dynasty which he founded there reigned more than 200 years.

Bactria however, and not Media, was the original seat of Zoroastrian lore. This, in itself, compels us to inquire whether the date of the great founder of that religion must not be placed much earlier; and, in endeavouring to fix that date, we have obtained important vantage ground.

In the second place, we can now institute our historical inquiry upon a more certain philological basis. Dr. Haug has kindly complied with our suggestion to give us the benefit of his valuable researches, in a new critical translation of the celebrated record which forms the opening to the Vêndidâd, or Code of the Fire-worshippers of Iran. The text and explanation are given in

an appendix to this Section.

His labours have confirmed the conviction which we had long entertained:

That the nucleus of this Record dates from the most ancient times, and that its contents are nothing less than the reminiscences of the passage of the old Arians to India-in other words, the succession of the foundation of fourteen kingdoms, the last and most southern of which was the land of the Five Rivers (the Punjab).

During this inquiry we shall answer in turn all the questions not yet settled in respect to the epochs of ArioIranian, as well as Ario-Indian, civilisation.

In order to lay before our readers a synoptical view of the results of our investigation of the above document, and to show its importance as regards general history, we have subjoined a sketch prepared by Dr. Petermann in illustration of Haug's Commentary.

[graphic]

B.

THE ZOROASTRIAN TRADITION ABOUT THE PRIMEVAL LAND, AND THE EMIGRATION OF THE ARIANS IN CONSEQUENCE OF A CONVULSION OF NATURE.

Two successful efforts of the critical school have at last established the value, and facilitated the understanding, of the celebrated first Fargard or section of the Vêndidâd. One of these was the study of the Bactrian language (commonly called Zend) and the Zend books, which was commenced by Burnouf and continued by Benfey, Spiegel, and Haug. The other circumstance which facilitated the explanation of the above record was the eminently successful decipherment of the first or Bactro-Medo-Persian cuneiform writing of the Achæmenidæ by Burnouf and Lassen, and latterly by Rawlinson's publication and elucidation of the inscription of Bisutun. Among these inscriptions the most important in its bearing upon that record is the list of the Iranian nations who were subject to Darius in Nakshi-Rustam. Ritter, in 1838199, materially assisted in explaining the geographical portion of it. Here, howevever, insurmountable difficulties already presented themselves, as to the explanation of the names of individual countries. According to Burnouf we were completely in the dark as to at least three out of the fourteen provinces mentioned between Sogdiana and the Punjab. In the only volume of Spiegel's translation of the Avesta hitherto published, which Brockhaus's edition had made so much more generally accessible, we have the Vêndidâd, which of course begins with the very record in ques

199 Erdkunde, viii. 29. seq., 84. seq.

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