, Lassen, and last,
not least, by the comprehensive labours of Rawlinson, from the
ante-historical epoch of Zoroaster down to the age of Darius and
Artaxerxes II. It might have been expected that, after that time, the
contemporaneous historians of Greece would have supplied the sequel.
Unfortunately the Greeks cared nothing for any language except their
own; and little for any other history except as bearing on themselves.
The history of the Persian language after the Macedonian conquest and
during the Parthian occupation is indeed but a blank page. The next
glimpse of an authentic contemporaneous document is the inscription of
Ardeshir, the founder of the new national dynasty of the Sassanians.
It is written, though, it may be, with dialectic difference, in what
was once called 'Pehlevi,' and is now more commonly known as
'Huzvaresh,' this being the proper title of the language of the
translations of the Avesta. The legends of Sassanian coins, the
bilingual inscriptions of Sassanian emperors, and the translation of
the Avesta by Sassanian reformers, represent the Persian language in
its third phase. To judge from the specimens given by Anquetil
Duperron, it was not to be wondered at that this dialect, then called
Pehlevi, should have been pronounced an artificial jargon. Even when
more genuine specimens of it became known, the language seemed so
overgrown with Semitic and barbarous words, that it was expelled from
the Iranian family. Sir W. Jones pronounced it to be a dialect of
Chaldaic. Spiegel, however, who is now publishing the text of these
translations, has established the fact that the language is truly
Aryan, neither Semitic nor barbarous, but Persian in roots and
grammar. He accounts for the large infusion of foreign terms by
pointing to the mixed elements in the intellectual and religious life
of Persia during and before that period. There was the Semitic
influence of Babylonia, clearly discernible even in the characters of
the Achaemenian inscriptions; there was the slow infiltration of Jewish
ideas, customs, and expressions, working sometimes in the palaces of
Persian kings, and always in the bazars of Persian cities, on high
roads and in villages; there was the irresistible power of the Greek
genius, which even under its rude Macedonian garb emboldened oriental
thinkers to a flight into regions undreamed of in their philosophy;
there were the academies, the libraries, the works of art of the
Seleucidae; th