he texts
had resulted from it. 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? There was no
one who even tried to read the texts by the light of Anquetil's
translation, to obtain a direct understanding of them.

About 1825 Eugene Burnouf was engaged in a course of researches on the
geographical extent of the Aryan languages in India. After he had
defined the limits which divide the races speaking Aryan languages from
the native non-brahmanical tribes in the south, he wanted to know if a
similar boundary had ever existed in the northwest; and if it is outside
of India that the origin of the Indian languages and civilization is to
be sought for. He was thus led to study the languages of Persia, and,
first of all, the oldest of them, the Zend. But as he tried to read the
texts by help of Anquetil's translation, he was surprised to find that
this was not the clue he had expected. 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. Burnouf, laying aside tradition
as found in Anquetil's translation, consulted it as found in a much
older and purer form, in a Sanscrit translation of the Yasna made in the
fifteenth century by the Parsi Neriosengh in accordance with the old
Pahlavi version. The information given by Neriosengh he tested, and
either confirmed or corrected, by a comparison of parallel passages and
by the help of comparative grammar, which had just been founded by Bopp,
and applied by him successfully to the explanation of Zend forms. Thus
he succeeded in tracing the general outlines of the Zend lexicon and in
fixing its grammatical forms, and founded the only correct method of
interpreting the "Avesta." He also gave the first notions of a