ARSACIDiEAN COINS. 
133 
which, in the course of ages, necessarily underwent many 
changes. The Zend, he thinks, approximates nearest to the 
Shanscrit, and is the most ancient of the whole ; being, indeed, 
deemed mysterious, and unknown to the vulgar long before the 
time of Zoroaster. The Dabistan, which may be called an 
ancient book, from the antiquity of its authorities, was compiled 
about a hundred and fifty years ago, by a native of Cashmere, 
from some very old Pehlivi manuscripts, which gave an account of 
the earliest dynasties of Persia, with their corresponding systems 
of religion. The Desatir is regarded as an original work of great 
age, being in a very old dialect, connected with the Pehlivi. It 
has been ably translated by Moullah Firoze, a learned Parsee at 
Bombay. Ferdousi, too, composed his poem of the Shah Na- 
mah, or Book of Kings, from the remains of Pehlivi fragments, 
collected after the attempt at their entire destruction by the 
Ottoman Arabs. But to return to my coins, whence this di¬ 
gression on the language of their legends has led me so far. I 
shall give only one other specimen, and that of the Arsacidasan 
dynasty, which commenced nearly four hundred years before the 
birth of the founder of the Sassanian line. In the whole of my 
route, I did not meet with any gold money of the former race, 
in my power to purchase; but I saw one, No. 10.* at Tiflis, in 
the possession of Colonel Rottiers, a .Dutch gentleman in the 
service of Russia; and its style was so different from the coin of 
the latter kings already described, that I could not refrain from 
making a sketch of it on the spot. The head of the prince, 
instead of being in profile, is a full face, crowned with a diadem 
fronted with a crescent, and surmounted by another containing 
* See the plate of coins. 
