NATURE 



189 



THURSDAY, JULY i, iSSo 



THE SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST 



The Sacred Books of the East. Edited by F. Max Mu)ler. 



Vols, iv., v., and vii. (Clarendon Press, 1880.) 



THE great work upon which Prof. Max Miiller is 

 engaged goes on apace. Volume after volume issues 

 from the University Press containing the principal portions 

 of the sacred literature of the East translated by com- 

 petent scholars. The materials for a science of religion 

 are being rapidly accumulated. The grand conception of 

 a science which shall trace the development and relations 

 of the religions of the world and determine the laws that 

 have presided over their birth, their growth, and their 

 decay is no longer a dream of the distant future. Before 

 many years are over the materials will be in our hands 

 for realising that conception, if indeed it is ever to be 

 realised at all. 



The fourth and fifth volumes of the series introduce us 

 to Zoroastrianism, the great Puritan religion of the 

 Aryans, and thus the counterpart of Mohammedanism in 

 the Semitic world. The fourth volume contains M. 

 Darmesteter's translation of the Vendidad, a compilation 

 of religious laws and mythological tales which forms the 

 first part of the Avesta or Zoroastrian bible. The two 

 other parts consist of the Visperad or litanies for the 

 sacrifice, and the Yasna, which includes five hymns or 

 Gathas written in a peculiar dialect and constituting the 

 oldest portion of the Avesta. Besides these the Parsis 

 also reverence the Khorda Avesta or Small Avesta, com- 

 prising short prayers, the Yashts or hymns of praise, and 

 several other fragments. 



These are all that is left of a much larger body of 

 sacred literature which once existed among the disciples 

 of Zoroaster. According to Parsi tradition, out of the 

 twenty-one Nosks or books revealed to the Mazdean 

 prophet one only, the Vendidad, remains complete, and 

 though this tradition cannot be accepted in its literal 

 form, there is abundant evidence that the Parsis have 

 saved only scattered fragments out of the ^vreck of their 

 sacred books caused by Greeks, by Christians, and by 

 IMohammedans. In their present shape, moreover, these 

 fragments do not go back beyond the age of the Sas- 

 sanians, indeed they bear traces of even later modsrnisa. 

 tion ; but the basis upon which they rest, the leading 

 ideas they embody, and numerous passages that are 

 imbedded in them are of much earlier date. If we may 

 trust Dr. Oppert's translation of the Protomedic transcript 

 of the inscription of Darius Hystaspis at Behistun, it was 

 that Persian monarch who ordered the Avesta or "law " 

 and the Zend or " Commentary" to be restored after the 

 religious disturbances of the Magian usurpation. At any 

 rate there can be little doubt that both existed before the 

 foundation of the Persian Empire. 



But like all other religions, Mazdeism developed and 

 became changed in the process of time, and this develop- 

 ment and gradual change may be read in the records of 

 its sacred books. M. Darmesteter points out the untena- 

 bility of the view which made it at the outset a revolt 

 against the old Vedic religion of the Eastern Aryans ; 

 on the contrary, it grew naturally out of the elements 

 religious and mythological, which we see reflected in the 

 Vol, XXII. — No. 557 



Rig- Veda of India, and even after taking shape and con- 

 sistency, after the days of Darius and the Sassanians, it 

 still continued to grow. In the hands of its priests it 

 became more and more rigorous and ceremonial ; ancient 

 texts were misinterpreted, and the misinterpretation carried 

 out to its logical consequences. 



In the fifth volume Dr. West introduces us to a later 

 phase of Zoroastrian belief. He translates for us the 

 Pahlavi texts, the Bundehesh, the Zad-sparam, the 

 Bahman Yasht, and the Shayast la-shayast, which are 

 translations and explanations of the older Avesta. The 

 Zend language had become obsolete, and the books 

 written in it accordingly recjuired to be translated and in- 

 terpreted. The Pahlavi texts have, therefore, preserved 

 portions of the ancient Zoroastrian scriptures which would 

 otherwise have been lost. The Pahlavi is the language of 

 medieval Persia, the daughter of the Persian of Darius and 

 his successors, and the niece of the Zend dialect of the 

 Avesta. Our acquaintance with it practically begins with 

 the inscriptions of Artakhshir-i Papakan (a.d. 226-240) 

 the founder of the Sassanian dynasty, and ends with 

 Parsi writings, one of the latest of which is dated A.D. 88r. 

 The Pahlavi alphabet is an exceedingly difficult one ; its 

 letters have been corrupted to a prodigious extent, so that 

 a large number of them are written exactly alike. The 

 difficulties in the way of reading it may therefore be 

 imagined. Pahlavi texts, however, are not always written 

 in the Pahlavi alphabet ; sometimes the Zend alphabet 

 of the Avesta, sometimes the modem Persian alphabet, 

 is used instead. 



But the reading of these texts is further complicated 

 by the introduction of Semitic words, which have, how- 

 ever, to be replaced in pronunciation by their Persian 

 equivalents. Thus what is written malkAn iiialkd, " king 

 of kings," would have to be pronounced shdhdn shah. 

 The same phenomenon meets us in the cuneiform inscrip- 

 tions, where an Accadian word often occurs in an Assyrian 

 text, for which its Assyrian equivalent has to be substi- 

 tuted in reading, and so too in modern Japanese Chinese 

 words are written but translated into Japanese by the 

 reader. The usage of Pahlavi seems to be ancient, since 

 the cuneiform alphabet of the AchKmenian inscriptions 

 was obtained by Darius by translating a certain number 

 of Assyrian ideographs into Persian and then setting 

 apart the initial sound of the Persian word as the alpha- 

 betic value of the ideographic character. In addition to 

 these Semitic logograms the Parsis also gave a conven- 

 tional pronunciation to certain obsolete Persian words, 

 the true pronunciation of which they had forgotten and 

 were unable to recover owing to the obscurities of Pahlavi 

 writing, and the employment of these t\vo kinds of 

 logograms is termed Huzvaresh. 



The seventh volume contains a translation by Prof. 

 Jolly of the Vishnu-siitra, a semi-inspired Hindu law-book 

 belonging to one of the schools who studied the Black 

 Yajur Veda, and closely related to the famous Code of 

 Manu. It has been revised by a Vishnuitic editor of 

 comparatively recent date, but the substance of it goes 

 back to an early time, before the introduction of saii or 

 widow-burning, or even, it may be, the rise of Buddhism. 

 It will be interesting to the lawyer as well as to the 

 student of religion, who will bo tempted to compare 

 it with the book of Leviticus. Its minute and absurd 



