have been: it was doubtless more than a thousand years, at least, before Christ—but the bulk of the work is considerably later. Accompanying the Avesta is a version of it, made for the use of the priests, in another and much more modern Iranian dialect, the Pehlevi or Huzvaresh, supposed to have been the literary language of the westernmost provinces of Iran at a period some centuries later than the Christian era, and much mixed with materials derived from the Semitic tongues lying next westward, across the border. A few inscriptions and legends of coins, of the early Sassanian monarchs (after A.D. 226), furnish further specimens of the same or a nearly kindred dialect.
The general body of religious literature belonging to the Parsis of India contains tolerably copious documents of a somewhat younger and much purer Iranian dialect, usually styled the Parsi (sometimes also the Pazend). It comes, without much question, from a more eastern locality than the Pehlevi, and from a time nearly approaching that of the Mohammedan conquest. Finally, after the conquest, and when Persia was thoroughly made over into a province of the Moslem empire, arises, in the tenth century, the modern Persian, and becomes during several centuries, and even to our own day, the vehicle of an abundant and admirable literature, rich in every department, in poetry, fiction, history, philosophy, science. Its first great work, and almost or quite the greatest it has to offer us, is the Shah-Nameh, 'Book of Kings,' of Firdusi (ob. 1020), a true national epic, grand in extent, noble in style, varied in contents, in which is summed up and related at length the history of the land, traditional, legendary, and mythological, as it lay in the minds of the generation by whom was revived the ancient independence and glory of the Persian nationality. For the impoverishment of its grammar by the loss of ancient forms, the modern Persian is almost comparable with the English. It is more nearly related to the language of the Achæmenidan inscriptions than to that of the Avesta, although not the lineal descendant and representative of either. In its later literary use, it is greatly disfigured by the unlimited introduction of words from the Arabic vocabulary.
