remain behind the Brahmans and the Jews, who have preserved their sacred writings so well, and facilitated modern researches to so great an extent? The era for a sound philological explanation of the time-hallowed fragments of the Zoroastrian writings has come, and the Dasturs, as the spiritual guides of the Parsi community, should take a chief part in it. The darkness in which much of their creed is enshrouded should be dispelled; but the only way of obtaining so desirable a result is by the diffusion of a sound and critical knowledge of the Avesta language.

II. THE PAHLAVI LANGUAGE AND PAZAND.

It has been already noticed (p. 67) that after the five centuries of obscurity, and probable anarchy,1 which followed the death of Alexander, when we next meet with the vernacular language of Western Iran, it has assumed the form of Pahlavi, the name generally applied to the language of the inscriptions of the Sasanian dynasty, whether on rocks or coins.

Various interpretations of the word Pahlavi have been proposed. Anquetil derives it from the Persian pahlû, "side," in which case Pahlavi would mean "the frontier language;" but although this opinion has been held by some scholars, it can hardly be correct, as it is difficult to imagine that a frontier language could have spread over a vast empire. It has also been connected with pahlav, “ a hero," but "the hero language" is a very improbable designation. Native lexicographers have traced Pahlavi to the name Pahlav of a town and province; that it was not the language of a town only, is evident from Firdausi's statements that the Pahlavi traditions were preserved by the dihgân," village chief;" it may have been the language

1 'In the Kârnâmah of Artakhshîr-i 'Papakân it was written that after 'the death of Alexander of Rum, 'there were 240 small rulers of the 'country of Airân. The warriors of

'Fârs and the borders adjacent to it 'were in the hands of a chieftain of

Ardavân. Pâpak was governor and 'sovereign of Fârs, and was appointed 'by Ardavân.'-Kârnâmak-i A. P.

of a province, but the province of Pahlav is said to have included Ispahân, Raî, Hamadân, Nihâvand, and Adarbaîjân, and must have comprised the ancient Media, but that country is never called Pahlav by Persian and Arab historians. Quatremère was of opinion that Pahlav was identical with the province Parthia, mentioned by the Greeks; he shows, by reference to Armenian authors, that pahlav was a royal title of the Arsacidans. As the Parthians regarded themselves as the most warlike people of the Orient, it is not surprising that pahlav and pahlavân in Persian, and paihav or pahlav, and pahlavig or palhavig in Armenian, became appellations for a warrior; the name thus lost its national meaning altogether, and became only a title for bold champions of old. It spread beyond the frontiers of Iran eastwards to India, for we find the Pahlavâs mentioned as a mighty foreign nation in the Râmâyana, Mahâbhârata, and the Laws of Manu, and we can only understand them to have been the Persians. Regarding the origin of the word, we may compare it with. páhlûm, "excellent," but cannot derive it therefrom.

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As the name of a nation, we can discover it only in the Parthva of the cuneiform inscriptions, which is the Parthia of the Greeks and Romans. The change of parthra into pahlav is not surprising, as is not discoverable in the ancient Iranian tongues, where r is used instead, and th in the middle of an ancient Iranian word generally becomes h in Persian, as in Av. mithra Pers. mihir. It may be objected that the Parthians were not Persians but probably a Scythic race, and that Pahlavi could not have been the language of the Parthians. This objection, however, will not hold good when we consider that the Parthians were the actual rulers of Persia for nearly five hundred years, and made themselves respected and famous everywhere by their fierce and successful contests with the mightiest nation of the ancient world, the Romans. It is not surprising, therefore, that the name which once struck such terror into the hearts of Roman generals and emperors

was remembered in Persia, and that everything connected with antiquity, whether in history, religion, letters, writing, or language, was called pahlaví, or belonging to the ancient rulers of the country, the Parthians. Pahlavi thus means, in fact, nothing but "ancient Persian" in general, without restriction to any particular period or dialect. This we may see from the use made of the word by Mohammedan writers; thus, Ibn Hauqal, an Arab geographer of the tenth century, when describing the province of Fârs, the ancient Persis, states that three languages were used there, viz. (a) the Fârsî (Persian), spoken by the natives when conversing with one another, which was spread all over Persia, and understood everywhere; (b) the Pahlavî, which was the language of the ancient Persians, in which the Magi wrote their historical records, but which in the writer's time could not be understood by the inhabitants of the province without a translation; (c) the Arabic, which was used for all official documents. Of other languages spoken in Persia he notices the Khûzî, the language of Khûzistân, which he states to be quite different from Hebrew, Syriac, or Fârsî. In the Mujmilu-t-tawârîkh there is an account of "Pahlavi" inscriptions at Persepolis, but the writer evidently means those in cuneiform characters.

From all this we may clearly see that the name Pahlavi was not limited to any particular period or district. In the time of Firdausi (A.D. 1000), the cuneiform writing as well as the Sasanian inscriptions passed for Pahlavi characters; and the ancient Persian and Avesta were regarded as Pahlavi, equally with the official language of the Sasanian period, to which the term has been now restricted, since the others have become better known. The term Pahlavi was thus, in fact, never used by the Persians themselves in any other sense than that of "ancient Persian," whether they referred to the Sasanian, Arsacidan, Achæmenian, Kayanian, or Peshdadian times. Any reader of the Shâhnâmah will arrive at this conclusion.

This

misapplication of a more recent name to earlier historical facts is analogous to the misuse of the appellation Arûmák, Roman," which the Parsi writers apply to Alexander, the Macedonian conqueror, because he entered the Persian empire from the quarter where the Roman armies appeared in later times.

However loosely the term Pahlavi may have been formerly applied, it has long been practically restricted to the written language of Persia during the Sasanian dynasty, and to the literature of that period and a short time after, of which some fragments have been preserved by the Parsis, in a character resembling that of the Avesta, but very deficient in distinct letters. These Pahlavi writings are of a very peculiar character: instead of presenting us with a pure Iranian dialect (as might be expected in the language of a period commencing with the purely Iranian ancient Persian, and ending with the nearly equally pure Iranian language of Firdausi), it exhibits a large admixture of Semitic words, which increases as we trace it further back, so that the earliest inscriptions of the Sasanian dynasty may be described as being written in a Semitic. language, with some admixture of Iranian words, and a prevailing Iranian construction. Traces of the Semitic portion of the Pahlavi can be found on coins of the third and fourth century B.C., and possibly on some tablets found at Nineveh, which must be as old as the seventh century B.C.; so there is some reason to suppose that it may be derived from one of the dialects of the Assyrian language, although it differs considerably from the language of the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions. Practically, however, our acquaintance with Pahlavi commences with the inscriptions of the first Sasanian kings on rocks and coins.

Since the Mohammedan conquest of Persia, the language has become greatly mixed with Semitic words from the Arabic, but this Semitic admixture is of a totally different. character to that we find in Pahlavi. The Arabic element in modern Persian consists chiefly of substantives and

F

adjectives, referring to religion, literature, or science; few particles or verbs have been adopted, except when whole phrases have been borrowed; in fact, the Arabic words, although very numerous, are evidently borrowed from a foreign language. The Semitic element in Pahlavi writings, on the contrary, comprises nearly all kinds of words which are not Arabic in modern Persian; almost all pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and common verbs, many adverbs and substantives in frequent use, the first ten numerals, but very few adjectives, are Semitic; while nearly every Arabic word in modern Persian would be represented by an Iranian one in Pahlavi writings. It is optional, however, to use Iranian equivalents for any of these Semitic words when writing Pahlavi, but these equivalents are rarely used for some of the pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions; so rarely, indeed, that the orthography of a few of them is uncertain. Notwithstanding the Semitic appearance of the written Pahlavi, we find that all traces of Semitic inflexions have disappeared, except in a few of the earliest Sasanian inscriptions, written in a peculiar character and dialect, called Chaldæco-Pahlavi, in which the Chaldee plural suffix în is still often used, as in malkin malka, "king of kings," instead of malkan malka in the ordinary Sasanian Pahlavi inscriptions of the same age, where the Iranian plural suffix an is used. Besides. this Iranian suffix to nouns, we find the verbs appearing in one unchangeable Semitic form, to which is added certain Iranian suffixes, except in the earliest inscriptions in Sasanian Pahlavi, where these suffixes are wanting. In addition to these indications of Iranian grammar, we also find a prevailing Iranian construction in the sentences, as much in the older inscriptions as in the later writings.

The explanation of this extraordinary compound writing, fundamentally Semitic in its words and Iranian in its construction, is that it never literally represented the spoken language of any nation. The Iranians must have inherited their writing from a Semitic people, and although