A literary history of Persia

BURNOUF'S WORK 67and the like, in the same way, as though they too were mereideograms rather than groups of letters The ? general use ofPahlawi, it is true, belongs, as we have already seen, to a timewhen Assyria had long passed away, viz., the Sasdnian periodMuhammadan times imme-(A.D. 226-640), and the earlydiately succeeding but it hasit,been traced back to the thirdand fourth centuries before Christ, and mayin all likelihoodhave existed at a yet earlier date. In the essentially conservativeEast there isnothing very wonderful in this ;and thesiyaq, universally used for keeping accounts even at the presentday in Persia, presents a somewhat analogous phenomenon, forthe symbols used therein instead of the ordinary Arabicnumerals are in reality mutilated and abbreviated forms of theArabic names of the different numbers, a fact which the Persianaccountant who uses them often forgets and occasionally doesnot know.Before speaking further of Pahlawi, however, somethingmore must be said of the continued progress of Avestic studies.We have seen what help was derived from SanskritFurther progress .n r i T i i r iof Avestaof theby ijurnouf and Lassen in their studyAchaemenian Inscriptions, and have alreadyalluded incidentally to the monumental work on the Yasnapublished by the former in 1833-1835. Working withthe copious materials collected by Anquetil, which had longlain neglected in the Bibliotheque Nationale, he first sethimself, by careful collation of the MSS., to establish a correcttext of this portion of the Avesta. For the elucidation of thishe reliedchiefly on Neriosengh's Sanskrit translation, as representingthe oldest traditional interpretation available to him,which, however, he weighed, tested, and proved with the mostcareful and judiciouscriticism ;while at the same time hesought to establish the grammar and lexicography of the Avesticlanguage. But he was content to show the way to others,and to place the study of the Avesta on a really sound andscientific basis : the large volume which he published elu-