SOME LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE RECARDING ITS DATE. 223 



Pairidaeza, an enclosure walled round, from fairi (— Gk. irepl) 

 and the root daeza, to wall in, the whole denoting a park: becoming 

 in Greek TrapaBeocrofi. (Strassmeier, Inschriften von Cyrus, 213, 

 3 : Amal urns sha pardlsu, park-keeper.) Again the Persian 

 measure which in Greek became aprdfir], is mentioned as Artahw^ 

 (Strassmeier, op. cit., 316, 1 and 6). Another possible'^ trace 

 of Persian influence " is the word Piru (also written Biru), which 

 Tiglath Pileser III, Sennacherib, and Sargon use in their in- 

 scriptions (vide Muss-Arnolt, Ass. Diet. s. v.). The word means 

 elephant, and the terms shinni pin, ivory, mashak piri, elephants' 

 hide, occur in the accounts of these kings' expeditions. But 

 piru is perhaps from the Sanskrit word Pilu, elephant, so called 

 from the supposed resemblance between that animal's ear and the 

 leaf of a pllu-tiee (Careya Arborea or Salvador a Persica, Linn.). 

 The word in Assyrian is also written Pilu. In this form it was 

 derived from Sanskrit directly ; but the other form Ptru may have 

 come through the Persian, for Persian had not the letter I in 

 either the Achsemenian or the Avestic dialect, changing that 

 letter into r. It cannot be denied, even by the Higher Critics, 

 that Sennacherib, Sargon, and Tiglath Pileser lived before the 

 establishment of the Persian domination over Babylonia, yet 

 even into Assyrio-Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions some 

 Persian words seem in their time to have made their way. The 

 occurrence of a Persian word in an inscription of Cambyses proves 

 the same thing, for the word must have already acquired a firm 

 place in the Babylonian vocabulary or his scribe would not have 

 used it. We have quoted only three Persian words in this 

 connexion, but if Dr. Driver holds that the use of only two 

 admittedly Greek words in Daniel is sufficient to justify him in 

 affirming that these two " Greek words demand a date after the 

 conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great " for the composi- 

 tion of the Book of Daniel, what shall we say of the occurrence of 

 three Persian words in the Babylonian Inscriptions ? Do they 



* Having already assumed a Babylonian termination. 



t I say possible, and mention the word with some hesitation, because 

 the word, explained in an Assyrian bilingual text as pronounced piru, is 

 expressed by the compound ideograph AM-SI ; the reading of this 

 ideograph was unknown till discovered by Prof. Pinches of the British 

 Museum. He says : " This carries the date of its introduction back to 

 about 2000 B.C. The form pilu, if I remember rightly, is found later. 

 As elephants were hunted near Haran, it seems more likely that piru was 

 a native word, and not derived from the Sanskrit." 



