be the first time that such a thing has been accomplished in all the history of language.
Of the Asiatic branches of our family, the one which lies nearest us, the Iranian, or Persian, may first engage our attention. Its oldest monuments of well-determined date are the inscriptions—cut on the surface of immense walls of living rock, in the so-called cuneiform characters—by which the Achæmenidan sovereigns of Persia, Darius, Xerxes, and their successors, made imperishable record for posterity of their names and deeds. Fifty years ago, these inscriptions were an unsolved and apparently insoluble enigma; now, by a miracle of human ingenuity and patience, not without the aid of a combination of favouring circumstances wholly impossible at any earlier period, almost every word and every character is fully laid open to our comprehension, and they have been made to yield results of great value both to linguistic and to national history. The oldest of them come from a time about five centuries before Christ, and their extent is sufficient to give us a very distinct idea of the language of those Persians against whom the Greeks so long fought, first for independence, then for empire.
Of about the same age, and even, probably, in part considerably older, are the sacred Scriptures of the religion established by Zoroaster (in his own tongue, Zarathustra)—the book called the Avesta, or Zend-Avesta. The dialect in which these writings are composed goes usually by the name of the Zend; it is also styled the Avestan, and sometimes the Old Bactrian, from the country Bactria, the north-eastern-most region of the great Iranian territory, which is supposed to have been its specific locality. They have been preserved to us by the Parsis of western India, who fled thither from their native country after its reduction under Mohammedan vassalage in the seventh century of our era, and who have ever since faithfully maintained, under Hindu and British protection, the rites of the Magian faith, the pure worship of Ormuzd (Ahura-Mazda, 'the mighty spirit') through the symbol of fire. The Avesta shows two dialects, a younger and an older; some of its hymns and prayers possibly go back to the time of Zoroaster himself—whatever that may
