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Grose's Travels to the East Indies, 1772. 2 vols. 8vo. Zend Avesta. Par Anquetil du Perrin. Paris, 1771. 3 vols. 4to. M. Anquetil has prefixed to his translation of this supposed work of Zoroaster, an account of his travels in the East Indies, in which there is much valuable information, especially on antiquarian subjects.
He saw that two causes had misled Anquetil: on the one hand, his teachers, the Parsi dasturs, either knew little themselves or taught him imperfectly, not only the Zend, but even the Pahlavi intended to explain the meaning of the Zend; so that the tradition on which his work rested, being incorrect in itself, corrupted it from the very beginning; on the other hand, as Sanscrit was unknown to him and comparative grammar did not as yet exist, he could not supply the defects of tradition by their aid.
But this interpretation is as doubtful, as the many others which have been attempted. An appropriate one is given in the essay by Kern quoted below, from zara golden, and thwistra glittering; thus "the gold glittering one." It is uncertain whether he was born in Bactria, Media or Persia, Anquetil thinks in Urmi, a town in Aderbaijan.
Anquetil's translation was still the only guide, and as the doubts about the authenticity of the texts grew fainter, the authority of the translation became greater, the trust reposed in the "Avesta" being reflected on to the work of its interpreter. The Parsis had been the teachers of Anquetil; and who could ever understand the holy writ of the Parsis better than the Parsis themselves?
In the field of philology, he showed, as Anquetil had already done, that Zend has no Arabic elements in it, and that Pahlavi itself, which is more modern than Zend, does not contain any Arabic, but only Semitic words of the Aramean dialect, which are easily accounted for by the close relations of Persia with Aramean lands in the time of the Sassanian kings.
Emerson, in his lecture on heroism, has signalled especially the heroism of the scholar, and selected as an example the Frenchman Anquetil Duperron, who worked his passage on a vessel to India, and then worked his way, mostly on foot, through Afghanistan and Persia, learning languages as he went, in order to obtain copies of the sacred books of the Persians, which were then unknown in Europe.
Indeed, the cultivation of eastern learning eventually proved of singular service to him in his juridical capacity. In 1771 he published in French a pamphlet in answer to Anquetil du Perron's Attack on the University of Oxford, in the discourse prefixed to his "Zind-Avesta;" and entered on "A History of the Turks," the introduction to which was printed, but not made public till after his death.
The theologians appealed to the "Avesta," in their polemics, and Rhode sketched the religious history of Persia after the translations of Anquetil. Erskine's essay provoked a decisive answer from Emmanuel Rask, one of the most gifted minds in the new school of philology, who had the honor of being a precursor of both Grimm and Burnouf.
A cloth, the Paiti-dhana, was bound round the heads of the priests, the ends of which covered the mouth, and thus preserved the pure fire from pollution by human breath. It was from 2 to 7 fingers broad. Anquetil gives a drawing of it in his Zend-Avesia. Strabo speaks of the Paiti-dhana p. 733.
It becomes necessary, therefore, to examine this theory, in order to justify our abstention from an inquiry on which, if the theory were sound, we should be now called upon to enter. The notion that the Zend language was the idiom of ancient Media originated with Anquetil du Perron. He looked on Zoroaster as a native of Azerbijan, contemporary with Darius Hystaspis.
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