Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/121

 an interpreter), to the effect that ' the priest, according to his own statement, was ignorant of Zend and also of Sanscrit' (p. 311), would militate against the celebrant's having been a Zoroastrian dastur, who would surely have known the Avesta. As regards the statement that 'he understood Hindoostani, Hindi, and presumably also Parsee,' we may readily believe the first part, though the assumption as to the Parsi dialect is far less probable ; and we may well agree with Stewart (p. 314, cited below) that Thielmann was mistaken.^

Still more strong in favor of the Hindu, not Zoroastrian, character of the present sanctuary is the internal evidence of the inscriptions which have been mentioned already. The first to draw my attention to this fact was the Parsi priest Shams Ul-Ulama Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, of Bombay. In a letter writ- ten to me in 1904, after my first visit, and from which I quoted later in print (JAOS. 25. 304), he expressed his doubts, from the Zoroastrian standpoint. These doubts (which had been anticipated long before by Eichwald — see above, p. 50) were further strengthened by Dr. Abbott's reading of three of the inscriptions, as already mentioned ; and they are now wholly substantiated by the other inscriptions, here made accessible. They are all Indian, with the single exception of one written in Persian (see my reproduction), which is dated in the same year as the Hindu tablet over it, as explained above. The Iranian tablet is a quatrain in not very good Persian, the mistakes of which might have been made by a Hindu imper- fectly acquainted with the language, although Persian is current in northern India. ^

1 O'Donovan (iJferv Oasis, 1.37-39), throughout that the sanctuary was

who visited the fire-temple in 1879, 'Parsi' and says that 'thirty years

speaks of it as 'of ante-Mussulman ago ... the last Zoroastrian attend-

days ' and mentions ' Guebre worship. ' ant disappeared. ' A photograph of the

Furthermore, an article 'by a visitor,' shrine is given.

entitled ' An Ancient Zoroastrian Fire- ^ -phe four lines of the Persian tab- Temple at Baku,' in the magazine Men let (XIII), whose last line is metrically and Women of India, vol. 1, no. 12, imperfect, are in praise of fire, and p. 695 (Bombay, Dec. 1898), presumes read: ' A tire has been drawn up like

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