46. India in the Avesta of the Parsis. 
By SHams-ut-utMAa Dr. Jivanst Jamsueps1 Mont, B.A., 
PH.D 
Anquetil Du Perron, the great French scholar, having 
seen a few stray pages of the Avesta writings in his country, 
had come to this country as a soldier-adventurer to study that 
language, and, after passing through this city, had gone and 
settled at Surat, the then head-quarters of the Parsis. 
Having studied the Zend Avesta there for some years, he 
returned to France and published in 1771 his Zend Avesta, 
containing the French translation of the Scriptures of the 
Parsis. Sir W. Jones was the first to run him down 
one duped by the Parsis of Surat. He said that the Avesta 
books he had brought to the notice of scholars in Europe were 
not genuine and were a fabrication of the priests. The late 
Prof. James Darmesteter, a talented country-man of Anquetil 
Du Perron, who has for the first time translated into 
Avesta, which it pronounced a forgery. It was the future 
founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, William Jones, a young 
Oxonian then, who opened the war. He had been wounded 
to the quick by the scornful tone adopted by Anquetil towards 
Hyde and a few other English scholars: the Zend Avesta suf- 
fered for the fault of its introducer, Zoroaster for Anquetil.... . 
It is true that Anquetil had given full scope to satire by the 
stvle he had adopted: he cared very little for literary elegance, 
and did not mind writing Zend and Persian in French; so the 
new and strange ideas he had to express looked stranger still 
in the outlandish garb he gave them.’’' Summing up t . 
that the Avesta books he had discovered were genuine. Some 
of them in showing this, took the help of the Sanskrit 
guage, of the scientific study of which Sir W. Jones h 
1 $.B.E., Vol. IV (1880), pp. xv-xvi. 2 Thid., p. xvii. 
