A literary history of Persia

152 THE SASANIAN PERIOD" That the decipherment of the Pehlevi character has reached noscientific stage of development is manifest from the different readingsthat have been given of the Hajiabad lines ; and sooner thanpin my faith either to the philo-Christian theory of Mr. Thomas, orto the bowshot theory of Dr. M. Haug, althoughI believe the latterhas secured the verdict of most scholars, I prefer the security ofunshamed ignorance."No one, however, who is at all capable of weighing theevidence can doubt the general correctness of the renderingsof Haug and West, who had the advantage over Thomas ofbeing familiar with the book Pahlawi. Out of the 115 wordswhich constitute the Sisanian- Pahlawi version, not more thanhalf a dozen are uncertain in meaning (though unfortunatelythey are of importance for the understanding of the sense), andthe meaning of the first six lines and a half isperfectly certain.The difficulty of fully comprehending the whole largelyarisesfrom our absence of information as to the nature of theceremony described, and the exact object of the shooting ofthe arrow by the King out of this lonely little cave. Parallels,however, are not wanting, and evidently the shooting of anarrow to determine a site was not unusual in Sasanian times.Thus Tabari (Noldeke's translation, pp. 263-264) and Dinawari(p. 66)tell us that when the Persian general Wahriz,the conqueror and governor of Yemen, felt his death approaching,he called for his bow and arrows, bade his retainers raisehim up, and shot an arrow into the air, commanding those whostood by him to mark where it fell,and to build a mausoleumfor his body there ;and it is very probable that the shot whichforms the subject of the Haji-abdd inscription was made forsome similar purpose, which, were itknown, would greatlyfacilitate the full explanation of the inscription. 11That the practice of determining a site by shooting an arrow continuedinto Muhammadan times, and was used by the Arabs as well asthe Persians, is shown by a passage in al-Baladhuri's Kitdbn futuhi'l-bulddn(ed. de Goeje, p. 276). Compare II Kings xiii, 14-19.