forms of these languages were subjected to a more
searching analysis, it became evident that the phonetic system of the
cuneiform inscriptions was more primitive and regular than even that
of the earlier portions of the Avesta. This difficulty, however,
admits of a solution; and, like many difficulties of the kind, it
tends to confirm, if rightly explained, the very facts and views which
at first it seemed to overthrow. The confusion in the phonetic system
of the Zend grammar is no doubt owing to the influence of oral
tradition. Oral tradition, particularly if confided to the safeguard
of a learned priesthood, is able to preserve, during centuries of
growth and change, the sacred accents of a dead language; but it is
liable at least to the slow and imperceptible influences of a corrupt
pronunciation. Nowhere can we see this more clearly than in the Veda,
where grammatical forms that had ceased to be intelligible, were
carefully preserved, while the original pronunciation of vowels was
lost, and the simple structure of the ancient metres destroyed by the
adoption of a more modern pronunciation. The loss of the Digamma in
Homer is another case in point. There are no facts to prove that the
text of the Avesta, in the shape in which the Parsis of Bombay and
Yezd now possess it, was committed to writing previous to the
Sassanian dynasty (226 A.D.). After that time it can indeed be traced,
and to a great extent be controlled and checked by the Huzvaresh
translations made under that dynasty. Additions to it were made, as it
seems, even after these Huzvaresh translations; but their number is
small, and we have no reason to doubt that the text of the Avesta, in
the days of Arda Viraf, was on the whole exactly the same as at
present. At the time when these translations were made, it is clear
from their own evidence that the language of Zarathustra had already
suffered, and that the ideas of the Avesta were no longer fully
understood even by the learned. Before that time we may infer, indeed,
that the doctrine of Zoroaster had been committed to writing, for
Alexander is said to have destroyed the books of the Zoroastrians,
Hermippus of Alexandria is said to have read them.[38] But whether on
the revival of the Persian religion and literature, that is to say 500
years after Alexander, the works of Zoroaster were collected and
restored from extant MSS., or from oral tradition, must remain
uncertain, and the disturbed state of the pho