538 Professor Rasx’s Remarks on the Zend Language. 
Mewnv in Sanscrit, Moses in Hebrew, Pyruacoras and Lycurcus used the 
Doric, Soton and Socrates the Attic, Jesus the Syriac, the doctrines of 
AraTHER (Op1n) are preserved in Icelandic, and those of Munammep in 
Arabic. It is only in latter ages, remote from the foundation of the 
religion, when the colloquial dialect changes, or when the religion is 
propagated to foreign countries, that the religious language becomes diffe- 
rent from the vulgar one, because the people cling with veneration to that 
particular tongue, in which the religion was at first promulgated. 
Finally, if the Zend was the real tongue of Zoroaster, in which his 
religion was originally made known, the Zend books cannot possibly have 
originated in the time of Anpasuir BasacAn. After the religion had been 
neglected, and the language of the land changed for ages past, how could any 
thing be forged or composed in such an obsolete and difficult tongue, with 
three genders, six cases at least in each of the two numbers, six classes of 
nouns, pronouns of a peculiar inflexion, six or more classes of verbs, with 
many distinct tenses, all of which are extremely different from the colloquial 
dialects? How could such a number of complicated rules, which, eveu 
with a good grammar at hand, would require a very serious study, be 
constantly observed in mind in a book as large as the Bible, if it were 
produced or restored from memory in an ignorant age? Farther, if the 
priests, countenanced by the government, restored one of the twenty-one 
books of Zoroaster, why did not they restore the rest also, or avail them- 
selves of the opportunity to supply the defect by something of their own, or 
something to the advantage of that government. Certainly, whether the 
Zendavesta is conjectured to have been wholly composed, or only restored 
by the ignorant priests in the age of Arpasnir BAsacAy, it is a miracle a 
thousand times more improbable than that some fragments, allowed fairly 
to be less than one-twentieth part of the whole work of Zoroaster, may 
have escaped the persecution of Axzexanper and the indifference of 
succeeding ages. Nay, it is difficult to conceive how the Zendavesta could 
ever be wholly destroyed: by Atexanper it could scarcely be effected 
throughout that immense empire, and after his time no violent persecution 
took place until the Muhammedan conquest ; besides, subsequently to 
ALEXANDER, the text must have existed, when it was translated into Pahlaw. 
When these translations were made is not yet ascertained; but it is well 
known that the Pahdavi flourished during the reign of the Ashkanian or 
Parthian dynasty, and the Pdrst during the Sassanian: as, however, the 
