THE DISCOVERY AND INTERPRETATION OF THE INSCRIPTIONS AND DOCUMENTS OF ANCIENT PERSIA, WITH OTHER PHILOLOGICAL MATTER.
THE language of Modern, that is to say of Post-Muhammadan, Persia, was naturally, for practical reasons, an object of Brief sketch of the development of Oriental studies in Europe interest and study in Europe long before any serious attempt was made to solve the enigmas presented by the three ancient languages of which this chapter will briefly trace the discovery and decipherment: to wit, the Old Persian of the Achæmenian inscriptions, the Avestic idiom, and the Pahlawí of Sásánian times. The study of Modern Persian, again, was preceded by that of Arabic; which, as the vehicle whereby the Philosophy of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle, first became clearly known to Western Europe, commanded in a far higher degree the attention and interest of men of learning. The first translations from the Arabic into Twelfth century. European languages were made about the beginning of the twelfth century of our era by Jews and Moors converted to Christianity,* who were soon followed by native Europeans, such as Gerard of Cremona (b. A.D. 1114); Albertus Magnus (b. A.D. 1193), who, dressed as an Arab, expounded at Paris the teachings of Aristotle from the works of al-Fárábí, Ibn Síná (Avicenna), and al-Ghazzálí; and Michael Scot, who appears to have studied Thirteenth century. Arabic at Toledo in A.D. 1217. Roger Bacon and Raymond Lull (thirteenth century) also called attention to the importance, for philosophic and scientific purposes, of a study of Oriental languages. In Fourteenth century. A.D. 1311-1312 it was ordained by Pope Clement the Fifth that Professorships of Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic should be established at Rome, Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca, whose teaching, however, was soon afterwards (A.D. 1325) placed by the Church under a rigorous supervision, lest it should tend to endanger Christian orthodoxy. At each of these five seats of learning there were to be two professors, paid by the State or the Church, who were to make faithful Latin translations of the principal works written in these languages, and to train their pupils to speak them sufficiently well for missionary purposes.
It does not appear, however, that these laudable proposals met at first with any great measure of success, or that much Sixteenth century. was actually done to further the study of Arabic until the establishment of the Collège de France in A.D. 1530 by Francis the Fifth. Armegand of Montpellier* had already, in A.D. 1274, translated portions of the works of Avicenna and Averroes into Latin, but that remarkable scholar and traveller, Guillaume Postel* may, according to M. Dugat, be called “the first French Orientalist”; and he, apparently, was the first who caused Arabic types to be cut. In A.D. 1587 Henry the Third founded an Arabic chair at the Collège de France, and a few years subsequently Savary de Brèves, who is said to have had a fine taste in Oriental literature, and who later brought to Paris excellent founts of type which he had caused to be engraved in the East, was appointed French Ambassador at Constantinople. On his death these founts of type (Arabic, Syriac, Persian, Armenian, and Æthiopic), together with his Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Syriac MSS., were bought by Louis the Thirteenth (assisted financially by the clergy), and passed into the possession of the Imprimerie Royale.
The full development of Oriental studies in Europe, however, may be said to date from the seventeenth century, since Seventeenth century. which epoch progress has been steady and continuous. This century saw, for example, in England the establishment, by Sir Thomas Adams and Archbishop Laud respectively, of Arabic chairs at both Cambridge (A.D. 1632) and Oxford (A.D. 1636), of which the latter was filled by the illustrious Pococke and the former by the equally illustrious Abraham Wheelock, who, with the teaching of Arabic and Anglo-Saxon, combined the function of Thomas Hyde. University Librarian. Amongst his pupils was that distinguished scholar, Thomas Hyde, afterwards Professor of both the Hebrew and the Arabic languages at Oxford, whose work on the History of the Religion of the Ancient Persians, Parthians, and Medes, published in 1700, little more than a year before his death,* may be taken as representing the high-water-mark of knowledge on this subject at the close of the seventeenth century, and, indeed, until the publication of Anquetil du Perron's epoch-making memoirs (1763-1771), of which we shall shortly have to speak. A brief statement, therefore, of Hyde's views may appropriately form the starting-point of this survey; for his industry, his scholarship, and his linguistic attainments, added to the facilities which he enjoyed as Librarian of the Bodleian, rendered his work as complete and comprehensive an account of the ancient Persian religion as was possible with the materials then available. Hyde not only used the works of his predecessors, such as Barnaby de Brisson's De Regio Persarum Principatu Libri Tres (Paris, 1606)—a book based entirely on the statements of Greek and Latin authors,—Henry Lord's Religion of the Parsees* (1630), Sanson's De hodierno statu Persiæ (1683), and the narratives of the travellers Pedro Texeira (1604), Père Gabriel de Chinon (1608-1650), Tavernier (1629-1675), Olearius (1637-1638), Thevenot (1664-1667), Chardin (1665-1677), Petits de la Croix (1674-1676), and Samuel Flower (1667), but also a number of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Syriac manuscripts, which he manipulated with a skill deserving of the highest praise; and the knowledge thus acquired was supplemented in some cases by information verbally obtained by his friends in India from the Parsees. His work, in short, is a monument of erudition, most remarkable when we consider the time at which it was written and the few facilities then existing for research of this kind; and in some cases his acumen anticipated discoveries not confirmed till a much later date. Thus he recognised the name of Media in the Arabic Máh prefixed to certain place-names (p. 424), was aware of the existence amongst the Zoroastrians of Persia of a peculiar “gabrí” dialect (pp. 364, 429), knew the Ḥurúfí sect as a revived form of Manichæanism (p. 283), made free use of the rare Arabic translation of the Sháh-náma of al-Bundárí, and was acquainted with the so-called Zend character,* and with such later Pársí writings as the Zarátusht-náma, the Sad-dar (of which he gives a complete Latin translation), and the Persian translation of the Book of Arda Viráf.
On the other hand he had no knowledge whatever of the
Avestic or Pahlawí languages, entirely misunderstood the
Hyde had no
knowledge of
any one of the
three ancient
languages of
Persia.
meaning of the term Zend Avesta or Avesta va
Zend, and endeavoured to prove that the Old
Persian inscriptions were not writing at all, but
mere architectural ornamentation. Anquetil du
Perron at the end of his Discours Préliminaire
(pp. cccclxxxix-ccccxcviii) is at some pains to prove the
first of these statements, and points out that throughout Hyde's
work the Zend character merely serves to cloak Persian
sentences cited from late Pársí writings. But in fact proof is
unnecessary, for Hyde had in his own possession a MS. of part
of the Avesta, and was also acquainted with the MS. of the
Yasna presented to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by an
English merchant named Moody about the middle of the
seventeenth century;*
and is quite certain that he would
have made use of documents so important for his purpose had
he been able to read them. Now since he was conversant
with the character in which they were written, and even, as we
have seen, employed it in his work, it is evident that he could
make nothing whatever of the language. As regards the title
of the sacred book of the Zoroastrians, he regarded it as
“exotic and hybrid,” supposing that it consisted of the Arabic
word Zend (an implement for kindling fire), and the Hebrew-