Sir William Jones then proceeds to make merry at the expense of Anquetil's translation—no difficult feat even with a better rendering of a work containing so much that is to us grotesque and puerile, as must, in some degree, be the case with what is produced by any people in its infancy—and thus sums up his reasonings:—
“Ou Zoroastre n'avait pas le sens commun, ou il n'écrivit pas le livre que vous lui attribuez; s'il n'avait pas le sens commun, il fallait le laisser dans la foule, et dans l'obscurité; s'il n'écrivit pas ce livre, il était impudent de le publier sous son nom. Ainsi, ou vous avez insulté le goût du public en lui présentant des sottises, ou vous l'avez trompé en lui débitant des faussetés: et de chaque côté vous méritez son mépris.”
Sir William Jones's letter, though it served to mar Anquetil du Perron's legitimate triumph, and (which was more serious) Anquetil avenged. to blind a certain number of scholars and men of letters to the real importance of his discoveries, has now only a historic interest. Time, which has so fully vindicated the latter that no competent judge now fails to recognise the merit of his work, also took its revenge on the former; and he who strained at the gnat of the Zend Avesta was destined to swallow the camel of the Desátír—one of the most impudent forgeries ever perpetrated. With the original of this egregious work he was, indeed, unacquainted, for the only known manuscript of it, though brought from Persia to India by Mullá Ká'ús about the year 1773, was only published by the son of the purchaser, Mullá Fírúz, in 1818;* his knowledge of its contents was derived from a curious but quite modern Persian book (to which, however, it was his incontestable merit first to direct attention in Europe) entitled the Dabistáni-Madháhib or “School of Sects,” a treatise composed in India about the middle of the seventeenth century of our era.* Of this work Sir William Jones spoke in 1789* in the following terms of exaggerated eulogy:—
“A fortunate discovery, for which I was first indebted to Mír
Sir W. Jones's
credulity equals
his scepticism,
and is as
misplaced.
Muhammed Husain, one of the most intelligent Musel-
“This rare and interesting tract on twelve different religions, entitled the Dabistán, and composed by a Mohammedan traveller, Sir W. Jones's exaggerated idea of the value of the Desátír and Dabistán. a native of Cashmír, named Mohsan, but distinguished by the assumed surname of Fání, or Perishable, begins with a wonderfully curious chapter on the religion of Húshang, which was long anterior to that of Zerátusht, but had continued to be secretly professed by many learned Persians even to the author's time; and several of the most eminent of them, dissenting in many points from the Gabrs, and persecuted by the ruling powers of their country, had retired to India; where they compiled a number of books, now extremely scarce, which Mohsan had perused, and with the writers of which, or with many of them, he had contracted an intimate friendship: from them he learned that a powerful monarchy had been established for ages in Írán before the accession of Cayúmers, that it was called the Mahábádian, for a reason which will soon be mentioned, and that many princes, of whom seven or eight only are named in the Dabistán, and among them Mahbul or Mahá Beli, had raised their empire to the zenith of human glory. If we can rely on this evidence, which to me appears unexceptionable, the Íránian monarchy must have been the oldest in the world; but it will remain dubious to which of the stocks, Hindu, Arabian, or Tartar, the first Kings of Írán belonged, or whether they sprang from a fourth race, distinct from any of the others; and these are questions which we shall be able, I imagine, to answer precisely when we have carefully inquired into the languages and letters, religion and philosophy, and incidentally into the arts and sciences, of the ancient Persians.
“In the new and important remarks, which I am going to offer, on the ancient languages and characters of Írán, I am sensible, that Sir W. Jones's notions about the history of Ancient Persia. you must give me credit for many assertions, which on this occasion it is impossible to prove; for I should ill deserve your indulgent attention, if I were to abuse it by repeating a dry list of detached words, and presenting you with a vocabulary instead of a dissertation; but, since I have no system to maintain, and have not suffered imagination to delude my judgment, since I have habituated myself to form opinions of men and things from evidence, which is the only solid basis of civil, as experiment is of natural, knowledge; and since I have maturely considered the questions which I mean to discuss; you will not, I am persuaded, suspect my testimony, or think I go too far, when I assure you, that I will assert nothing positively, which I am not able satisfactorily to demonstrate.”
It will be seen from the above citation that Sir William Jones was just as positive in his affirmations as in his negations, Sir W. Jones's blunders. and too often equally unfortunate in both. He confidently, and “without fear of contradiction,” identified Cyrus with the entirely legendary Kay-Khusraw of the Persian Epic (the Kawa Husrawa or Husrawaṅh of the Avesta), and the legendary Píshdádí kings with the Assyrians; derived the name of Cambyses (the Kambujiya of the Old Persian inscriptions) from the Modern Persian Kám-bakhsh, “granting desires,” which he regarded as “a title rather than a name,” and Xerxes (the Khshayárshá of the inscriptions) from Shíru'í (and this after his scornful rejection of Anquetil's correct derivation of Ahriman from Aṅra Mainyush!); continued to see “strong reasons to doubt the existence of genuine books in Zend or Pahlawí,” on the ground that “the well-informed author of the Dabistán affirms the work of Zerátusht to have been lost, and its place supplied by a recent compilation;” held “that the oldest discoverable languages of Persia were Chaldaick and Sanscrit, and that, when they had ceased to be vernacular, the Pahlawí and Zend were deduced from them respectively, and the Pársí either from the Zend, or immediately from the dialect of the Bráhmans;” believed (with the Persians) that Jamshíd (the Yima of the Avesta and Yama of the Hindú mythology, a shadowy personality belonging to the common Indo-Íránian legend) built Persepolis, and that the Achæmenian inscriptions there visible “if really alphabetical, were probably secret and sacerdotal, or a mere cypher, perhaps, of which the priests only had the key”; and finally accepted the absurd Desátír—“a sacred book in a heavenly language” (which proves, in fact, to be no language at all, but mere gibberish, slavishly modelled on the ordinary Persian in which the “Commentary” is written)— as an ancient historical document of capital importance, destined to throw an entirely new light on the earliest history of the Aryan people, and to prove “that the religion of the Bráhmans … prevailed in Persia before the accession of Cayúmers, whom the Pársís, from respect to his memory, consider as the first of men, although they believe in an universal deluge before his reign.” Truly Anquetil was abundantly avenged, and the proposition that misplaced scepticism often coexists with misplaced credulity received a striking illustration!
But Sir William Jones, however greatly he may have fallen into error in matters connected with the ancient history and languages of Persia, was so eminent in his public career, so catholic in his interests, so able a man of letters, and so elegant a scholar, that his opinion was bound to carry great weight, Influence of Sir W. Jones's views. especially in his own country; and consequently we find his scepticism as to the genuineness of the Avesta echoed in England by Sir John Chardin and Richardson (the celebrated Persian Lexicographer) and in Germany by Meiners and, at first, Tychsen, who, however, afterwards became one of Anquetil's strongest supporters, an attitude assumed from the first by another German scholar, Kleuker, who translated Anquetil's work into his own language, and added to it several appendices. In England, for the moment, Sir William Jones's opinion carried everything before it, and Anquetil's translation “was laid aside as spurious and not deserving any attention;”* while in France, on the other hand, it from the first commanded that general recognition and assent which are now universally accorded to it. To trace in detail the steps whereby this recognition was secured is not within the scope of this book, and we can only notice a few of the most important. Such as desire to follow them in detail will find all the information they require in the excellent accounts of Haug and Darmesteter referred to in the footnote on this page, as well as in Geldner's article, Awestalitteratur, in vol. ii (pp. 1-53, especially p. 40, Geschichte der Awestaforschung) of Geiger and Kuhn's Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie (Strassburg, 1896).