1917.] Numismatic Supplement No. XXVIII. 59 



final letter was a vowel, either u or o, equivalent to the final i 

 added to many words in Sassanian Pahlavi, and that it probab- 

 ly represented some indistinct short vowel sound, resembling 

 that which is inherent in all the consonants of Indian langu- 

 ages. Dr. Haug suggested that a short 6, distinguished by the 

 prosodial symbol of brevity, might be suitable, to which Dr. 

 West assented, adding that a simple short o is sufficient, since 

 its position, at the end of a word, explains the nature of the 

 sound. Where, however, it may represent an 6 or ao in an 

 original language, it should be written 6 (see Arda-Viraf, Intro- 

 duction, pp. xxxviii — xli, by Dr. Martin Haug, 1871). 



Dr. West (Cama Memorial Volume, p. 108) says : " If Haug 

 had lived till 1887, he would have been delighted to read a con- 

 firmation of his suggestion in Dr. M. A. Stein's Zoroastrian 

 Deities on Indo-Scythian coins. These coins supply a dozen 

 names of Zoroastrian Yazats in Greek uncials, each name end- 

 ing with the shorter Greek 0, which letter is also used to ex- 

 press the A vesta v, h and th. But the forms of the names are 

 Pahlavi, such as one would hardly expect to be as- old as the 

 first century a.d., the period usually assigned to the Indo-Scy- 

 thic kings whose names these coins also bear." l 



I must note that A0PO with the variant A90P0 is found 

 on the gold coins of Huvishka, and not AGbO or A0Ot>O as 

 given by Mr. Thanawalla. The reading athsho has no meanim 

 known to me, but A0PO is directly derived from the Zend athr 

 and is identical with the Pahlavi atro and the Persian adhar, 

 " fire." The latter form has survived side by side with the more 

 common atash (a descendant of the ancient nominative atars), 

 chiefly as the name of the 9th Zoroastrian month and also the 

 9th day of every month. (See Sir M. A. Stein's paper, p. 12.) 



Similarly the first letter of the legend PAOPHOPO has 

 been recorded by Mr. Thanawalla as t>, but this too is inaccu- 

 rate. The Scythian P bears here the phonetic character of sh 

 exactly as it does in the case of the well-known KOPANO = 



Kushan. 



FlJRDOONJEE D. J. PARUCK. 



2Stk May, 1916. 



174. On a Gold Coin of the Sassanian King Shapur 



the Great. 



On the death of Hormazd II (310 a. a), his natural heir 

 Hormazd was set aside by the nobles, who disliked his inclination 



1 A more interesting and to my mind more convincing example of 

 this is to be found in the mute vowel T> which forms the termination in 



Cyrillic characters of practically every Russian word ending, as far as its 

 pronunciation is concerned . in a consonant. — H. N. 



