Bibliography.—1. General: Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Persia and the Persian Question (London, 1892), contains an account of European literature relating to Persia (A.D. 900–1901) and numerous bibliographical notes. See also Lady [M. L.] Shiel, Life and Manners in Persia (London, 1856); Sir A. H. Layard, Early Adventures in Persia (London, 1887); S. G. W. Benjamin, Persia and the Persians (3rd ed., London, 1891); C. E. Yate, Khurasan and Sistan (Edinburgh, 1900), H. S. Landor, Across Coveted Lands (London, 1902); J. de Morgan, Mission scientifique (vols. i.–v., 1897–1904); N. Malcolm, Five Years in a Persian Town (Yezd) (London, 1905); A. V. W. Jackson, Persia, Past and Present (London, 1906); E. C. Williams, Across Persia (London, 1907). The works of James Morier (q.v.), especially his Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, throw much light on Persian society in the early years of the 19th century.
2. History: Sir J. Malcolm, History of Persia (2nd ed., London, 1829); R. G. Watson, A History of Persia from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1873); Sir C. R. Markham, A General Sketch of the History of Persia (London, 1874), and Curzon, as quoted above, are the standard authorities on modern Persian history. The Travels of Pedro Teixeira (London, 1902) and other publications of the Hakluyt Society relating to Persia are also of great historical value. For more recent events see the reports of the Gleadowe-Newcomen and MacMahon missions: E. G. Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905–09 (London, 1910); A. Hamilton, Problems of the Middle East (London, 1909); V. Chirol, The Middle Eastern Question (London, 1904); E. C. Williams, Across Persia (London, 1907). The commercial convention of 1903 is given in Treaty series, No. 10 (London, 1903), the Russo-British convention in Treaty series, No. 34 (London, 1907). Other official publications of historical importance are the annual British F. O. reports, and the U.S. Consular Reports.
Language and Literature
I. Persian (Iranian) Languages.—Under the name of Persian is included the whole of that great family of languages occupying a field nearly coincident with the modern Iran, of which true Persian is simply the western division. It is therefore common and more correct to speak of the Iranian family. The original native name of the race which spoke these tongues was Aryan. King Darius is called on an inscription “a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan race”; and the followers of the Zoroastrian religion in their earliest records never give themselves any other title but Airyavō danghavō, that is to say, “Aryan races.” The province of the Iranian language is bounded on the west by the Semitic, on the north and north-east by the Ural-altaic or Turanian, and on the south-east by the kindred language of India.
The Iranian languages form one of the great branches of the Indo-European stem, first recognized as such by Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel. The Indo-European or Indo-Germanic languages are divided by Brugmann into (1) Aryan, with sub-branches (a) Indian, (b) Iranian; (2) Armenian; (3) Greek; (4) Albanian; (5) Italic; Iranian Languages. (6) Celtic; (7) Germanic, with sub-branches (a) Gothic, (b) Scandinavian, (c) West Germanic; and (8) Balto-Slavonic. (See Indo-European.) The Aryan family (called by Professor Sievers the “Asiatic base-language”) is subdivided into (1) Iranian (Eranian, or Erano-Aryan) languages, (2) Pisacha, or non-Sanskritic Indo-Aryan languages, (3) Indo-Aryan, or Sanskritic Indo-Aryan languages (for the last two see Indo-Aryan), Iranian being also grouped into Persian and non-Persian.
The common characteristics of all Iranian languages, which distinguish them especially from Sanskrit, are as follows:—
1. Changes of the original s into the spirant h. Thus—
| Sanskrit. | Zend. | Old Persian. | New Persian. |
| sindhu (Indus) | hindu | hindu | hind |
| sarva (all) | haurva | haruva | har |
| sama (whole) | hama | hama | ham |
| santi (sunt) | henti | hantiy | hend. |
2. Change of the original aspirates gh, dh, bh ( = χ, θ, φ) into the corresponding medials—
| Sanskrit. | Zend. | Old Persian. | New Persian. |
| bhūmi (earth) | bumi | bumi | bum |
| dhita (θετός) | dāta | dāta | dād |
| gharma (heat) | garema | garma | garm. |
3. k, t, p before a consonant are changed into the spirants kh, th, f—
| Sanskrit. | Zend. | Old Persian. | New Persian. |
| prathama (first) | fratema | fratama | fradum (Parsi) |
| kratu (insight) | khratu | . . . . | khirad. |
4. The development of soft sibilants—
| Sanskrit. | Zend. | Old Persian. | New Persian. |
| Asurō Medhās[1] | Ahuro Mazdao | Auramazda | Ormuzd |
| bāhu (arm) | bāzu | . . . . | bāzū |
| hima (hiems) | zima | . . . . | zim. |
Our knowledge of the Iranian languages in older periods is too fragmentary to allow of our giving a complete account of this family and of its special historical development. It will be sufficient here to distinguish the main types of the older and the more recent periods. From antiquity we have sufficient knowledge of two dialects, the first belonging to eastern Iran, the second to western.
1. Zend or Old Bactrian.—Neither of these two titles is well chosen. The name Old Bactrian suggests that the language was limited to the small district of Bactria, or at least that it was spoken there—which is, at the most, only an hypothesis. Zend, again (originally āzaintish), is not the name of a language, as Anquetil Duperron supposed, but means “interpretation” Zend. or “explanation,” and is specially applied to the medieval Pahlavī translation of the Avesta. Our “Zend-Avesta” does not mean the Avesta in the Zend language, but is an incorrect transcription of the original expression “Avistāk va zand,” i.e. “the holy text (Avesta) together with the translation.” But, since we still lack sure data to fix the home of this language with any certainty, the convenient name of Zend has become generally established in Europe, and may be provisionally retained. But the home of the Zend language was certainly in eastern Iran; all attempts to seek it farther west—e.g. in Media[2]—must be regarded as failures.
Zend is the language of the so-called Avesta,[3] the holy book of the Persians, containing the oldest documents of the religion of Zoroaster. Besides this important monument, which is about twice as large as the Iliad and Odyssey put together, we only possess very scanty relics of the Zend language in medieval glosses and scattered quotations in Pahlavī books. These remains, however, suffice to give a complete insight into the structure of the language. Not only amongst Iranian languages, but amongst all the languages of the Indo-European group, Zend takes one of the very highest places in importance for the comparative philologist. In age it almost rivals Sanskrit; in primitiveness it surpasses that language in many points; it is inferior only in respect of its less extensive literature, and because it has not been made the subject of systematic grammatical treatment. The age of Zend must be examined in connexion with the age of the Avesta. In its present form the Avesta is not the work of a single author or of any one age, but embraces collections produced during a long period. The view which became current through Anquetil Duperron, that the Avesta is throughout the work of Zoroaster (in Zend, Zarathushtra), the founder of the religion, has long been abandoned as untenable. But the opposite view, that not a single word in the book can lay claim to the authorship of Zoroaster, also appears on closer study too sweeping. In the Avesta two stages of the language are plainly distinguishable. The older is represented in but a small part of the whole work, the so-called Gāthās or songs. These songs form the true kernel of the book Yasna;[4] they must have been in existence long before all the other parts of the Avesta, throughout the whole of which allusions to them occur. These gāthās are what they claim to be, and what they are honoured in the whole Avesta as being—the actual productions of the prophet himself or of his time. They bear in themselves irrefutable proofs of their authenticity, bringing us face to face not with the Zoroaster of the legends but with a real person, announcing a new doctrine and way of salvation, no supernatural Being assured of victory, but a mere man, struggling with human conflicts of every sort, in the midst of a society of fellow-believers yet in its earliest infancy. It is almost impossible that a much later period could have produced such unpretentious and almost depreciatory representations of the deeds and personality of the prophet. If, then, the gāthās reach back to the time of Zoroaster, and he himself, according to the most probable estimate, lived as early as the 14th century B.C., the oldest component parts of the Avesta are hardly inferior in age to the oldest Vedic hymns. The gāthās are still extremely rough in style and expression; the language is richer in forms than the more recent Zend; and the vocabulary shows important differences. The predominance of the long vowels is a marked characteristic, the constant appearance of a long final vowel contrasting with the preference for a final short in the later speech.
- ↑ Name of the supreme god of the Persians.
- ↑ Cf. I. Darmesteter, Études iraniennes, i. 10 (Paris, 1883).
- ↑ This, and not Zend-Avesta, is the correct title for the original text of the Persian Bible. The origin of the word is doubtful, and we cannot point to it before the time of the Sassanians. Perhaps it means “announcement,” “revelation.”
- ↑ The Avesta is divided into three parts. (1) Yasna, with an appendix, Visparad, a collection of prayers and forms for divine service; (2) Vendidad, containing directions for urilication and the penal code of the ancient Persians; (3) Khordah-Avesta, or the Small Avesta, containing the Yasht, the contents of which are for the most part mythological, with shorter prayers for private devotion.
