A literary history of Persia

68 HISTORY OF PERSIAN PHILOLOGYcidates primarily only the first of the seventy-two chapterscomposing the Yasna, which is itself but one of thefive divisions (the liturgical) of the Zoroastrian Scriptures ;and though at a later date (1844-1846), he subjected theninth chapter of the Yasna to a similar though brieferexamination, he carried no further his investigationsfield.in thisThe appearance of Bopp's great work on the ComparativeGrammar of the Aryan, or Indo-Europaean, languages aboutthis period brings us to the next great"controversyT theKods.'' which raged round the Avesta that of the Traditionaland Comparative Schools. Bythis timeno sane and competent scholar had any doubt as to thegenuineness of the book itself; the question now was as tothe worth of the traditional interpretation of the Zoroastrians.Burnouf, in so far as he relied on the traditional explanation ofNeriosengh (for the older Pahlawi translations were not at thattime sufficiently understood to be of much use), belonged tothe former school ; Bopp, pre-eminentlya Sanskritist andComparative Philologist, to whom the study of the Avesta wasa mere branch of Sanskrit Philology, to the latter. Thepublication (1852-1858) of Westergaard's and Spiegel's editionsof the text greatly enlarged the circle of students who wereable to attack on their own account the problems presented bythe Avesta ;and what Darmesteter calls " the war of themethods" (/.