ere was Edessa on the Euphrates, a city where Plato and
Aristotle were studied, where Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist tenets
were discussed, where Ephraem Syrus taught, and Syriac translations
were circulated which have preserved to us the lost originals of Greek
and Christian writers. The title of the Avesta under its Semitic form
Apestako, was known in Syria as well as in Persia, and the true name
of its author, Zarathustra, is not yet changed in Syriac into the
modern Zerdusht. While this intellectual stream, principally flowing
through Semitic channels, was irrigating and inundating the west of
Asia, the Persian language had been left without literary cultivation.
Need we wonder, then, that the men, who at the rising of a new
national dynasty (226) became the reformers, teachers, and prophets of
Persia, should have formed their language and the whole train of
their ideas on a Semitic model. Motley as their language may appear to
a Persian scholar fresh from the Avesta or from Firdusi, there is
hardly a language of modern Europe which, if closely sifted, would not
produce the same impression on a scholar accustomed only to the pure
idiom of Homer, Cicero, Ulfilas, or Caedmon. Moreover; the soul of the
Sassanian language--I mean its grammar--is Persian and nothing but
Persian; and though meagre when compared with the grammar of the
Avesta, it is richer in forms than the later Parsi, the Deri, or the
language of Firdusi. The supposition (once maintained) that Pehlevi
was the dialect of the western provinces of Persia is no longer
necessary. As well might we imagine, (it is Spiegel's apposite
remark,) that a Turkish work, because it is full of Arabic words,
could only have been written on the frontiers of Arabia. We may safely
consider the Huzvaresh of the translations of the Avesta as the
language of the Sassanian court and hierarchy. Works also like the
Bundehesh and Minokhired belong by language and thought to the same
period of mystic incubation, when India and Egypt, Babylonia and
Greece, were sitting together and gossiping like crazy old women,
chattering with toothless gums and silly brains about the dreams and
joys of their youth, yet unable to recall one single thought or
feeling with that vigour which once gave it life and truth. It was a
period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became
everything, when Maya and Sophia, Mitra and Christ, Viraf and Isaiah,
Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos were mixe