in the triple Inscriptions of the Persians, &c. 261 
they both in common are here compared with. Our author is, therefore, I sub- 
mit, bound in consistency to extend his view of the artificial and comparatively 
modern origin of the Zend to the Sanscrit ; of which latter dialect he might, upon 
many other grounds also, have asserted that it did not come into existence till 
long after the Persian of the legends in the first kind of cuneiform writing had 
ceased to be a living tongue, and that it was then, to a considerable extent,—to 
use his own form of expression,—refined and systematized upon the debris of that 
ancient language. He has himself, in another part of the same essay, very can- 
didly acknowledged that the striking similarity of the Greek and Sanscrit letters, 
in their oldest extant shapes, ‘“‘requires to be explained ;”* and, indeed, this 
remarkable fact is quite inexplicable, except on the supposition of the Sanscrit 
alphabet having been in a great measure derived from the Greek one,—a suppo- 
* “ James Prinsep, who first deciphered this interesting character [namely, that called the Lat 
character, which exhibits the Sanscrit alphabet in its oldest extant state], was struck with its 
resemblance to the most archaic form of Greek; and he drew up accordingly a comparative 
table of the Pali [or rather the Lat] and Sigzean alphabets (see Journal of the Asiatic Society, 
vol. vi. p. 382). His theory, however, has found little favour with paleographers; the names, 
powers, and series of the Greek letters, together with unanimous tradition, establishing, it is 
thought, beyond the reach of controversy, their Phcenician derivation. The extraordinary simi- 
larity, at the same time, between the forms of the letters, as they were used at a very early epoch 
by two branches of the Arian family, widely severed as were the Greeks and Indians [that is, at 
the aforesaid imaginary epoch, before the time of the Macedonian Alexander], together with the 
common direction of the writing from left to right, in contradistinction to the Semitic usage, 
requires still, I think, to be explained.”—Journal of the Royal Asiatie Society, vol. x. part i. 
note to p. 41. If the reader will take the trouble of looking back to the comparative table opposite 
page 405, in the first volume of the second part of my Work, he will there find some of the letters 
in question plainly and obviously traced to Greek, some to Ethiopic, and some to Roman originals ; 
as also the very peculiar mode of indicating the vocal terminations of the syllables denoted by 
those letters, evidently brought home to that employed in the Ethiopie syllabary, of which sylla- 
bary again the system of vowels is shown in the same volume to be derived from the Greek 
alphabet. Even the bare appearance, then, of the elements of the oldest known, and, in all 
likelihood, the absolutely oldest Hindu alphabet, supplies three limits to its age : the Greek part 
of it could not have been formed till after the first intercourse of the Hindus with the Greeks, that 
is, till after Alexander’s invasion of India; its vowel marks could not have been formed till after 
the first intercourse of the Ethiopians with the Greeks, that is, till after Egypt had been reduced 
under the dominion of the Ptolemies ; and its Roman part could not have been formed till after 
the arrival of the Romans in India, that is, till after the commencement of the Christian era. 
