Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 4.djvu/29

xxiii asserts, how is it that the oldest rites of the Parsis, that the old inscriptions of the Persians, the accounts of the Zoroastrian religion in the classical writers, the liturgic prayers of the Parsis, and, lastly, even their books do not reveal the pure Sanskrit, as written in the land wherein the Parsis live, but a mixed language, which is as different from the other dialects of India as French is from Italian?' This amounted, in fact, to saying that the Zend is not derived from the Sanskrit, but that both are derived from another and older language. The Carmelite had a dim notion of that truth, but, as he failed to express it distinctly, it was lost for years, and had to be re-discovered.

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 Prakrit dialect, parallel to Pali; Pali being identical with the Magadhi dialect and Zend with the Sauraseni In the eyes of Erskine Zend was a Sanskrit dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never spoken in Persia. His main argument was that Zend is not mentioned among the seven dialects which were current in ancient Persia according to the Farhang-i Jehangiri, and that Pahlavi and Persian exhibit no close relationship with Zend.

In Germany, Meiners had found no followers. 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 honour of being a