Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/17

Rh Proceeding now to trace the original wandering farther on, we find some help from Iranian traditions. The Zendavesta distinctly tells of a so-called Aîrjanem Vaêgo as a sacred country, the seat of creation, and place it in the farthest east of the highest Iranian table-land, the district of the source of the Oxus and Jaxartes; by the death-bringing Ahriman it was stricken with cold and barrenness, and only saw the sun thenceforth for two months of the year. The particularity with which it is described would point to the fact that the locality treated of was a distant one, with which the race had a traditional acquaintance; while at the same time it cannot be adopted too precisely in every detail, because details may be altered by a poetical imagination—merits may be exaggerated by regret for absence, and defects magnified by vexation, or invented in proof of the effects of a predicated curse.

If we may conclude that we have rightly traced up the Indians and Persians to a common home between the easternmost Iranian highlands and the Caspian Sea, it follows from the linguistic analogies of the so-called Indo-European peoples that this same home was also theirs at a time when they were not yet broken up into distinct families. This common local origin gives at once the reason for the analogies in the grammatical structure of their languages, and no less of their mythical traditions, which are far too widely spread, and have entered too radically into the universal