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It would have required more than an ordinary amount of scepticism to look still upon the Zend as an artificial language, of foreign importation, without root in the land where it was written, and in the conscience of the people for whom it was written, at the moment when a twin language, bearing a striking likeness to it in nearly every feature, was suddenly making itself heard from the mouth of Darius, and speaking from the very tomb of the first Achaemenian king.
Zadig found by experience that the first month of marriage, as it is written in the book of Zend, is the moon of honey, and that the second is the moon of wormwood. He was some time after obliged to repudiate Azora, who became too difficult to be pleased; and he then sought for happiness in the study of nature.
Originated by Rhode, it has also in its favor the names of Burnouf, Lassen, Westergaard, and Haug. If then the Zend is to be regarded as really a local dialect, the idiom of a particular branch of the Iranic people, there is far more reason for considering it to be the ancient speech of Bactria than of any other Arian country.
I read in the Zend Avesta, "No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength speaks so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength speaks good. No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength does so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength does good." And now leave Persia and Zoroaster, and come down with me to our own New England and one of our old Puritan preachers.
Two competitors for the Crown appeared in the South, in the persons of Fateh Ali Shah's own father, and a son of Zaki Khan Zend; but both, as well as the Shekaki chief who advanced similar claims in the North, and Nadir Mirza, grandson of the great Nadir Shah, who had entered Khorasan from Afghanistan, and raised the standard of revolt, were soon defeated and driven into submission.
His translations have shown the scientific world that the originals of the Zend-Avesta, the sacred scriptures of the sun-worshippers, of Tripitaka, that of the Buddhists, and of Aytareya-Brahmanam, that of the Brahmans, were written in one and the same Sanskrit language; that all these three languages Zend, Nepalese, and the modern Brahman Sanskrit are more or less dialects of the first; that old Sanskrit is the origin of all the less ancient Indo-European languages, as well as of the modern European tongues and dialects; that the three chief religions of heathendom Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Brahmanism are mere heresies of the monotheistic teachings of the Vedas, which does not prevent them from being real ancient religions and not modern falsifications.
Turning to account his knowledge of Sanskrit and Zend, he found that the language of the inscriptions of Persepolis was but a Zend dialect used in Bactriana, which was still spoken in the sixth century B.C., and in which the books of Zoroaster were written. Burnouf's pamphlet bears date 1836. At the same period Lassen, a German scholar of Bonn, came to the same conclusion on the same grounds.
Nothing therefore is proved concerning the Zend dialect by establishing a connection between the Medes and Magism, which was a corrupting influence thrown in upon Zoroastrianism long after the composition of the great bulk of the sacred writings. These writings themselves sufficiently indicate the place of their composition.
The first twenty-five years of this century were void of results, but the old and sterile discussions as to the authenticity of the texts continued in England. In 1808 John Leyden regarded Zend as a Prácrit dialect, parallel to Pali; Pali being identical with the Magadhi dialect and Zend with the Sauraseni.
What a wholesome buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst's alienation doctrines! To go a little further. Of the two great Celtic divisions of language, the Gaelic and the Cymric, the Gaelic, say the philologists, is more related to the younger, more synthetic, group of languages, Sanscrit, Greek, Zend, Latin and Teutonic; the Cymric to the older, more analytic Turanian group.
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