Before speaking further of Pahlawí, however, something more must be said of the continued progress of Avestic studies. Further progress of Avesta studies. We have seen what help was derived from Sanskrit by Burnouf and Lassen in their study of the Achæmenian Inscriptions, and have already alluded incidentally to the monumental work on the Yasna published by the former in 1833-1835. Working with the copious materials collected by Anquetil, which had long lain neglected in the Bibliothèque Nationale, he first set himself, by careful collation of the MSS., to establish a correct text of this portion of the Avesta. For the elucidation of this he relied chiefly on Neriosengh's Sanskrit translation, as representing the oldest traditional interpretation available to him, which, however, he weighed, tested, and proved with the most careful and judicious criticism; while at the same time he sought to establish the grammar and lexicography of the Avestic language. But he was content to show the way to others, and to place the study of the Avesta on a really sound and scientific basis: the large volume which he published elucidates primarily only the first of the seventy-two chapters composing the Yasna, which is itself but one of the five divisions (the liturgical) of the Zoroastrian Scriptures; and though at a later date (1844-1846), he subjected the ninth chapter of the Yasna to a similar though briefer examination, he carried no further his investigations in this field.
The appearance of Bopp's great work on the Comparative Grammar of the Aryan, or Indo-Europæan, languages about “The War of the Methods.” this period brings us to the next great controversy which raged round the Avesta—that of the Traditional and Comparative Schools. By this time no sane and competent scholar had any doubt as to the genuineness of the book itself; the question now was as to the worth of the traditional interpretation of the Zoroastrians. Burnouf, in so far as he relied on the traditional explanation of Neriosengh (for the older Pahlawí translations were not at that time sufficiently understood to be of much use), belonged to the former school; Bopp, pre-eminently a Sanskritist and Comparative Philologist, to whom the study of the Avesta was a mere branch of Sanskrit Philology, to the latter. The publication (1852-1858) of Westergaard's and Spiegel's editions of the text greatly enlarged the circle of students who were able to attack on their own account the problems presented by the Avesta; and what Darmesteter calls “the war of the methods” (i.e., the Traditional and the Comparative) soon broke out on all sides. Of the Traditional School the most prominent representatives were, after Burnouf, Spiegel, and Justi, and, in a lesser degree, de Harlez and Geiger: of the Comparative School, Benfey and Roth. Windischmann held a middle position, while Haug, at first an ardent follower of Benfey, returned from India fully convinced of the value of the Pársí tradition, and thereafter became one of the pioneers of Pahlawí studies, a path in which he was followed with even more signal success by West, “whose unparalleled learning and acumen,” as Geldner says,* “have raised up Pahlawí studies from the lowest grade of science,” so that “indirectly he Geldner's encomium on Darmesteter and his “historical method.” became the reformer of Avesta studies.” But it was by that incomparable man, the late James Darmesteter, that the judicious and almost exhaustive use of the traditional materials (combined, of course, with a careful study of the texts themselves) was carried to its fullest extent, and it is pleasant to find Geldner, whose methods of textual criticism he had so severely criticised, describing his work and methods in the following generous words:—”
* “From the beginning an eager partisan of the Sásánian translation
and thoroughly grounded in Pahlawí, he in no wise based his interpretation
on this alone, but recognised that, amidst the strife as to
the best method, only a comprehensive enlargement of the field of
vision could lead from groping and guessing to clear and certain
knowledge. His immediate sources of help are the native translations,
carefully used in detail, and thoroughly studied as a whole,
and the entire learning accumulated therein. His indirect means
of help is the entire tradition from Sásánian times down to the
present day, the whole Pahlawí and Pázand literature, the Sháhnáma,
the Arabian chroniclers and historical notices of the Ancients,
personal information derived from living Pársís, their customs and
ideas, the ritual of the present time, which is likewise a piece of
unfalsified tradition, and, on the linguistic side, the entire material
of Íránian philology in all its degrees of development and dialectical
variations, and likewise Sanskrit, especially that of the Vedas. The
dispositions and beginnings had, for the most part, been already
made before him, although imperfectly, and with insufficient means,
but Darmesteter combined them and carried them on to a certain
conclusion. The ripest fruit of these endeavours is his most recent
monumental work: le Zend-Avesta, traduction nouvelle avec commen-
Let us now return to the history of the decipherment of the Pahlawí inscriptions and texts—that branch of Persian philology Continuation of the decipherment of Pahlawí. in which, despite the fruitful labours of de Sacy and his successors, of whom we shall speak immediately, and the copious illumination of this difficult study which we owe in recent times to West, Andreas, Nöldeke, Darmesteter, Salemann, and others, most yet remains to be achieved.
De Sacy's brilliant attempt to read some of the Sásánian
inscriptions at Naqsh-i-Rustam (situated on the cliffs which
The Naqsh-iRustam Sásánian inscriptions.
lie to the right of the Pulwár river, at the point
where the valley through which its course has
hitherto lain debouches into the Marv-Dasht plain
between Síwand and Zargún, and consequently opposite Perse-
“<text in Greek script omitted>”
The Sásánian Pahlawí, when transliterated, runs something like this:—
“PATKARÍ ZANÁ MAZDAYASN BAGÍ ARTAKHSHATR, MALKÁN MALKÁ AÍRÁN, MINÚ CHITRÍ MIN YAZTÁN, BARÁ PÁPAKÍ MALKÁ.”
*The English translation is:—
“THE EFFIGY OF THAT MAZDA-WORSHIPPING DIVI-
Encouraged by the results of this investigation, de Sacy
proceeded in his third and fourth memoirs to examine the
Application of
de Sacy's results
to numismatology.
Pahlawí legends on certain Sásánian coins, as well
as other inscriptions from Behistun of the same
period. How his labours formed the starting-
The character in which the Pahlawí books are written differs considerably from that of the contemporary monuments Pahlawí of inscriptions and books. (inscriptions and coins) of the Sásánians, and is far more ambiguous. It must be remembered that, with the exception of the fragments of Pahlawí papyrus discovered some twenty-two years ago in the Fayyúm in Egypt, and hitherto unpublished and but partially deciphered, the oldest specimen of written Pahlawí goes back only to A.D. 1323—that is, is subsequent by more than a thousand years to the inscription cited above. During this period (for the last half of which the Pahlawí script had ceased to be used save by the Zoroastrian priests for the transcription of works already extant) the written character had undergone considerable degeneration, so that characters originally quite distinct had gradually assumed the same form, thus giving rise to polyphony, or the multiple values of single characters. This polyphony already existed to some extent in the inscriptions, but in the book-Pahlawí it has undergone so great an extension that, to take only one instance, a single character now stands for the four values z, d, g, y, each of which had in the inscriptions its separate graphic symbol. Hence the difficulty of the book-Pahlawí, and hence the value of the Sásánian inscriptions in its elucidation. This value Marc Müller's essay. Joseph Müller, professor at Munich, thoroughly recognised in his Essai sur la langue Pehlvie, published in the Journal Asiatique of April, 1839, which essay, as Haug says, marks a fresh epoch in Pahlawí studies. Amongst the Zoroastrians, especially amongst the Pársís of Bombay, a traditional but corrupt method of reading the Pahlawí books had been preserved, which resulted in a monstrous birth of utterly fictitious words, never used by any nation either in speech or writing, such as boman (really bará) “son,” modá (really malyá) “word,” Anhoma (really Awharmazd) “God,” jamnuntan (really yemaleluntan) “to speak,” and the like. In each instance the ambiguous Pahlawí character admitted of this reading, as it admitted of a dozen others, but a comparison with the less ambiguous inscriptional Pahlawí sufficed in many cases to establish the correct form, and this control it was Müller's merit to have introduced, though naturally it was not in every case vouchsafed to him to arrive at the correct reading.