TITLES OF THE SASANIAN GOVERNMENT 



92. H St sa-pao, *sa5(sar)-pav. Title of the official in charge of 

 the affairs of the Persian religion in Si-nan, an office dating back to the 

 time when temples of the celestial god of fire were erected there, about 

 a.d. 621. In an excellent article Pelliot has assembled all texts relative 

 to this function. 1 I do not believe, however, that we are justified in 

 accepting Deveria's theory that the Chinese transcription should render 

 Syriac saba ("old man"). This plainly conflicts with the laws of tran- 

 scription so rigorously expounded and upheld by Pelliot himself: it is 

 necessary to account for the final dental or liquid in the character sa, 

 which regularly appears in the T'ang transcriptions. It would be 

 strange also if the Persians should have applied a Syriac word to a 

 sacred institution of their own. It is evident that the Chinese tran- 

 scription corresponds to a Middle-Persian form traceable to Old Persian 

 xfadra-pdvan (xSgpava, xSagapdvd) , which resulted in Assyrian axSadar- 

 apdn or axladrapdn, Hebrew axaSdarfnim, 2 Greek aarpairris (Armenian 

 Sahapand, Sanskrit ksatrapa). The Middle-Persian form from which the 

 Chinese transcription was very exactly made must have been *sa0-pS,v 

 or *xsa0-pav. The character sa renders also Middle and New Persian 

 sar ("head, chief"). 3 



93. M H ^0 K'u-sa-ho, *Ku-sa5(r)-7wa, was the title rf 8 of the 

 kings of Parsa (Persia). 4 This transcription appears to be based on an 

 Iranian xSadva or xSarva, corresponding to Old Iranian *x§ayavan-, 

 *xsaivan, Sogdian xSevan (" king ") . 5 It is notable that the initial spirant 

 x is plainly and aptly expressed in Chinese by the element k'u, 6 while 

 in the preceding transcription it is suppressed. The differentiation in 

 time may possibly account for this phenomenon: the transcription 

 sa-pao comes down from about a.d. 621; while K'u-sa-ho, being con- 



1 Le Sa-pao, Bull, de I'Ecolefrangaise, Vol. Ill, pp. 665-671. 



a H. Pognon, Journal asiatique, 191 7, I, p. 395. 



3 R. Gauthiot, Journal asiatique, 191 1, II, p. 60. 



1 Sui Su, Ch. 83, p. 7 b. 



6 R. Gauthiot, Essai sur le vocalisme du sogdien, p. 97. See also the note of 

 Andreas in A. Christensen, L'Empire des Sassanides, p. 113. I am unable to see 

 how the Chinese transcription could correspond to the name Khosrou, as proposed 

 by several scholars (Chavannes, Documents sur les Tou-kiue occidentaux, p. 171; 

 and Hirth, Journal Am. Or. Soc, Vol. XXXIII, 1913, p. 197). 



6 In the Manichaean transcriptions it is expressed by P^ *xu ihu) ; see Cha- 

 vannes and Pelliot, Traits manicheen, p. 25. 



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