FOOTNOTES:
[45] 'Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsees.' By Martin Haug, Dr. Phil. Bombay, 1862.
[46] See page 84.
VI.
PROGRESS OF ZEND SCHOLARSHIP.[47]
here are certain branches of philological research which seem to be constantly changing, shifting, and, we hope, progressing. After the key to the interpretation of ancient inscriptions has been found, it by no means follows that every word can at once be definitely explained, or every sentence correctly construed. Thus it happens that the same hieroglyphic or cuneiform text is rendered differently by different scholars; nay, that the same scholar proposes a new rendering not many years after his first attempt at a translation has been published. And what applies to the decipherment of inscriptions applies with equal force to the translation of ancient texts. A translation of the hymns of the Veda, or of the Zend-Avesta, and, we may add, of the Old Testament too, requires exactly the same process as the deciphering of an inscription. The only safe way of finding the real meaning of words in the sacred texts of the Brahmans, the Zoroastrians, or the Jews, is to compare every passage in which the same word occurs, and to look for a meaning that is equally applicable to all, and can at the same time be defended on grammatical and etymological grounds. This is no doubt a tedious process, nor can it be free from uncertainty; but it is an uncertainty inherent in the subject itself, for which it would be unfair to blame those by whose genius and perseverance so much light has been shed on the darkest pages of ancient history. To those who are not acquainted with the efforts by which Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson unravelled the inscriptions of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, it may seem inexplicable, for instance, how an inscription which at one time was supposed to confirm the statement, known from Herodotus, that Darius obtained the sovereignty of Persia by the neighing of his horse, should now yield so very different a meaning. Herodotus relates that after the assassination of Smerdis the six conspirators agreed to confer the royal dignity on him whose horse should neigh first at sunrise. The horse of Darius neighed first, and he was accordingly elected king of Persia. After his election, Herodotus states that Darius erected a stone monument containing the figure of a horseman, with the following inscription: 'Darius, the son of Hystaspes, obtained the kingdom of the Persians by the virtue of his horse (giving its name), and of Oibareus, his groom.' Lassen translated one of the cuneiform inscriptions, copied originally by Niebuhr from a huge slab built in the southern wall of the great platform at Persepolis, in the following manner: 'Auramazdis magnus est. Is maximus est deorum. Ipse Darium regem constituit, benevolens imperium obtulit. Ex voluntate Auramazdis Darius rex sum. Generosus sum Darius rex hujus regionis Persicæ; hanc mihi Auramazdis obtulit "hoc pomœrio ope equi (Choaspis) claræ virtutis."' This translation was published in 1844, and the arguments by which Lassen supported it, in the sixth volume of the 'Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes,' may be read with interest and advantage even now when we know that this eminent scholar was mistaken in his analysis. The first step towards a more correct translation was made by Professor Holtzmann, who in 1845 pointed out that Smerdis was murdered at Susa, not at Persepolis; and that only six days later Darius was elected king of Persia, which happened again at Susa, and not at Persepolis. The monument, therefore, which Darius erected in the προἁστειον, or suburb, in the place where the fortunate event which led to his elevation occurred, and the inscription recording the event in loco, could not well be looked for at Persepolis. But far more important was the evidence derived from a more careful analysis of the words of the inscription itself. Niba, which Lassen translated as pomœrium, occurs in three other places, where it certainly cannot mean suburb. It seems to be an adjective meaning splendid, beautiful. Besides, nibâ is a nominative singular in the feminine, and so is the pronoun hyâ which precedes, and the two words which follow it—uvaspâ and umartiyâ. Professor Holtzmann translated therefore the same sentence which Professor Lassen had rendered by 'hoc pomœrio ope equi (Choaspis) claræ virtutis,' by 'quæ nitida, herbosa, celebris est,' a translation which is in the main correct, and has been adopted afterwards both by Sir H. Rawlinson and M. Oppert. Sir H. Rawlinson translates the whole passage as follows: 'This province of Persia which Ormazd has granted to me, which is illustrious, abounding in good horses, producing good men.' Thus vanished the horse of Darius, and the curious confirmation which the cuneiform inscription was at one time supposed to lend to the Persian legend recorded by Herodotus.
It would be easy to point out many passages of this kind, and to use them in order to throw discredit on the whole method by which these and other inscriptions have lately been deciphered. It would not require any great display of forensic or parliamentary eloquence, to convince the public at large, by means of such evidence, that all the labours of Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson had been in vain, and to lay down once for all the general principle that the original meaning of inscriptions written in a dead language, of which the tradition is once lost, can never be recovered. Fortunately, questions of this kind are not settled by eloquent pleading or by the votes of majorities, but, on the contrary, by the independent judgment of the few who are competent to judge. The fact that different scholars should differ in their interpretations, or that the same scholars should reject his former translation, and adopt a new one that possibly may have to be surrendered again as soon as new light can be thrown on points hitherto doubtful and obscure—all this, which in the hands of those who argue for victory and not for truth, constitutes so formidable a weapon, and appeals so strongly to the prejudices of the many, produces very little effect on the minds of those who understand the reason of these changes, and to whom each new change represents but a new step in advance in the discovery of truth.
Nor should the fact be overlooked that, if there seems to be less change in the translation of the books of the Old Testament for instance, or of Homer, it is due in a great measure to the absence of that critical exactness at which the decipherers of ancient inscriptions and the translators of the Veda and Zend-Avesta aim in rendering each word that comes before them. If we compared the translation of the Septuagint with the authorised version of the Old Testament, we should occasionally find discrepancies nearly as startling as any that can be found in the different translations of the cuneiform inscriptions, or of the Veda and Zend-Avesta. In the Book of Job, the Vulgate translates the exhortation of Job's wife by 'Bless God and die;' the English version by 'Curse God and die;' the Septuagint by 'Say some word to the Lord and die.' Though, at the time when the Seventy translated the Old Testament, Hebrew could hardly be called a dead language, yet there were then many of its words the original meaning of which even the most learned rabbi would have had great difficulty in defining with real accuracy. The meaning of words changes imperceptibly and irresistibly. Even where there is a literature, and a printed literature like that of modern Europe, four or five centuries work such a change that few even of the most learned divines in England would find it easy to read and to understand accurately a theological treatise written in English four hundred years ago. The same happened, and happened to a far greater extent, in ancient languages. Nor was the sacred character attributed to certain writings any safeguard. On the contrary, greater violence is done by successive interpreters to sacred writings than to any other relics of ancient literature. Ideas grow and change, yet each generation tries to find its own ideas reflected in the sacred pages of their early prophets, and, in addition to the ordinary influences which blur and obscure the sharp features of old words, artificial influences are here at work distorting the natural expression of words which have been invested with a sacred authority. Passages in the Veda or Zend-Avesta which do not bear on religious or philosophical doctrines are generally explained simply and naturally, even by the latest of native commentators. But as soon as any word or sentence can be so turned as to support a doctrine, however modern, or a precept, however irrational, the simplest phrases are tortured and mangled till at last they are made to yield their assent to ideas the most foreign to the minds of the authors of the Veda and Zend-Avesta.
To those who take an interest in these matters we may recommend a small Essay lately published by the Rev. R. G. S. Browne—the 'Mosaic Cosmogony'—in which the author endeavours to establish a literal translation of the first chapter of Genesis. Touching the first verb that occurs in the Bible, he writes: 'What is the meaning or scope of the Hebrew verb, in our authorised version, rendered by "created?" To English ears and understandings the sound comes naturally, and by long use irresistibly, as the representation of an ex nihilo creation. But, in the teeth of all the Rabbinical and Cabbalistic fancies of Jewish commentators, and with reverential deference to modern criticism on the Hebrew Bible, it is not so. R. D. Kimchi, in his endeavour to ascertain the shades of difference existing between the terms used in the Mosaic cosmogony, has assumed that our Hebrew verb barâ has the full signification of ex nihilo creavit. Our own Castell, a profound and self-denying scholar has entertained the same groundless notion. And even our illustrious Bryan Walton was not inaccessible to this oblique ray of Rabbinical or ignis fatuus.'
Mr. Browne then proceeds to quote Gesenius, who gives as the primary meaning of barâ, he cut, cut out, carved, planed down, polished; and he refers to Lee, who characterizes it as a silly theory that barâ meant to create ex nihilo. In Joshua xvii. 15 and 18, the same verb is used in the sense of cutting down trees; in Psalm civ. 30 it is translated by 'Thou renewest the face of the earth.' In Arabic, too, according to Lane, barâ means properly, though not always, to create out of pre-existing matter. All this shows that in the verb barâ, as in the Sanskrit tvaksh or taksh, there is no trace of the meaning assigned to it by later scholars, of a creation out of nothing. That idea in its definiteness was a modern idea, most likely called forth by the contact between Jews and Greeks at Alexandria. It was probably in contradistinction to the Greek notion of matter as co-eternal with the Creator, that the Jews, to whom Jehovah was all in all, asserted, for the first time deliberately, that God had made all things out of nothing. This became afterwards the received and orthodox view of Jewish and Christian divines, though the verb barâ, so far from lending any support to this theory, would rather show that, in the minds of those whom Moses addressed and whose language he spoke, it could only have called forth the simple conception of fashioning or arranging—if, indeed, it called forth any more definite conception than the general and vague one conveyed by the ποιεῖν of the Septuagint. To find out how the words of the Old Testament were understood by those to whom they were originally addressed is a task attempted by very few interpreters of the Bible. The great majority of readers transfer without hesitation the ideas which they connect with words as used in the nineteenth century to the mind of Moses or his contemporaries, forgetting altogether the distance which divides their language and their thoughts from the thoughts and language of the wandering tribes of Israel.
How many words, again, there are in Homer which have indeed a traditional interpretation, as given by our dictionaries and commentaries, but the exact purport of which is completely lost, is best known to Greek scholars. It is easy enough to translate πολἑμοιο γἑφυραι by the bridges of war, but what Homer really meant by these γἑφυραι has never been explained. It is extremely doubtful whether bridges, in our sense of the word, were known at all at the time of Homer; and even if it could be proved that Homer used γἑφυραι in the sense of a dam, the etymology, i. e., the earliest history of the word, would still remain obscure and doubtful. It is easy, again, to see that ἱερὁς in Greek means something like the English sacred. But how, if it did so, the same adjective could likewise be applied to a fish or to a chariot, is a question which, if it is to be answered at all, can only be answered by an etymological analysis of the word.[48] To say that sacred may mean marvellous, and therefore big, is saying nothing, particularly as Homer does not speak of catching big fish, but of catching fish in general.
These considerations—which might be carried much further, but which, we are afraid, have carried us away too far from our original subject—were suggested to us while reading a lecture lately published by Dr. Haug, and originally delivered by him at Bombay, in 1864, before an almost exclusively Parsi audience. In that lecture Dr. Haug gives a new translation of ten short paragraphs of the Zend-Avesta, which he had explained and translated in his 'Essays on the Sacred Language of the Parsees,' published in 1862. To an ordinary reader the difference between the two translations, published within the space of two years, might certainly be perplexing, and calculated to shake his faith in the soundness of a method that can lead to such varying results. Nor can it be denied that, if scholars who are engaged in these researches are bent on representing their last translation as final and as admitting of no further improvement, the public has a right to remind them that 'finality' is as dangerous a thing in scholarship as in politics. Considering the difficulty of translating the pages of the Zend-Avesta, we can never hope to have every sentence of it rendered into clear and intelligible English. Those who for the first time reduced the sacred traditions of the Zoroastrians to writing were separated by more than a thousand years from the time of their original composition. After that came all the vicissitudes to which manuscripts are exposed during the process of being copied by more or less ignorant scribes. The most ancient MSS. of the Zend-Avesta date from the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is true there is an early translation of the Zend-Avesta, the Pehlevi translation, and a later one in Sanskrit by Neriosengh. But the Pehlevi translation, which was made under the auspices of the Sassanian kings of Persia, served only to show how completely the literal and grammatical meaning of the Zend-Avesta was lost even at that time, in the third century after Christ; while the Sanskrit translation was clearly made, not from the original, but from the Pehlevi. It is true, also, that even in more modern times the Parsis of Bombay were able to give to Anquetil Duperron and other Europeans what they considered as a translation of the Zend-Avesta in modern Persian. But a scholar like Burnouf, who endeavoured for the first time to give an account of every word in the Zend text, to explain each grammatical termination, to parse every sentence, and to establish the true meaning of each term by an etymological analysis and by a comparison of cognate words in Sanskrit, was able to derive but scant assistance from these traditional translations. Professor Spiegel, to whom we owe a complete edition and translation of the Zend-Avesta, and who has devoted the whole of his life to the elucidation of the Zoroastrian religion, attributes a higher value to the tradition of the Parsis than Dr. Haug. But he also is obliged to admit that he could ascribe no greater authority to these traditional translations and glosses than a Biblical scholar might allow to Rabbinical commentaries. All scholars are agreed in fact on this, that whether the tradition be right or wrong, it requires in either case to be confirmed by an independent grammatical and etymological analysis of the original text. Such an analysis is no doubt as liable to error as the traditional translation itself, but it possesses this advantage, that it gives reasons for every word that has to be translated, and for every sentence that has to be construed. It is an excellent discipline to the mind even where the results at which we arrive are doubtful or erroneous, and it has imparted to these studies a scientific value and general interest which they could not otherwise have acquired.
We shall give a few specimens of the translations proposed by different scholars of one or two verses of the Zend-Avesta. We cannot here enter into the grammatical arguments by which each of these translations is supported. We only wish to show what is the present state of Zend scholarship, and though we would by no means disguise the fact of its somewhat chaotic character, yet we do not hesitate to affirm that, in spite of the conflict of the opinions of different scholars, and in spite of the fluctuation of systems apparently opposed to each other, progress may be reported, and a firm hope expressed that the essential doctrines of one of the earliest forms of religion may in time be recovered and placed before us in their original purity and simplicity. We begin with the Pehlevi translation of a passage in Yasna, 45:
'Thus the religion is to be proclaimed; now give an attentive hearing, and now listen, that is, keep your ear in readiness, make your works and speeches gentle. Those who have wished from nigh and far to study the religion, may now do so. For now all is manifest, that Anhuma (Ormazd) created, that Anhuma created all these beings; that at the second time, at the (time of the) future body, Aharman does not destroy (the life of) the worlds. Aharman made evil desire and wickedness to spread through his tongue.'
Professor Spiegel, in 1859, translated the same passage, of which the Pehlevi is a running commentary rather than a literal rendering, as follows:
'Now I will tell you, lend me your ear, now hear what you desired, you that came from near and from afar! It is clear, the wise (spirits) have created all things; evil doctrine shall not for a second time destroy the world. The Evil One has made a bad choice with his tongue.'
Next follows the translation of the passage as published by Dr. Haug in 1862:
'All ye, who have come from nigh and far, listen now and hearken to my speech. Now I will tell you all about that pair of spirits how it is known to the wise. Neither the ill-speaker (the devil) shall destroy the second (spiritual) life, nor that man who, being a liar with his tongue, professes the false (idolatrous) belief.'
The same scholar, in 1865, translates the same passage somewhat differently:
'All you that have come from near and far should now listen and hearken to what I shall proclaim. Now the wise have manifested this universe as a duality. Let not the mischief-maker destroy the second life, since he, the wicked, chose with his tongue the pernicious doctrine.'
The principal difficulty in this paragraph consists in the word which Dr. Haug translated by duality, viz. dûm, and which he identifies with Sanskrit dvam, i. e. dvandvam, pair. Such a word, as far as we are aware, does not occur again in the Zend-Avesta, and hence it is not likely that the uncertainty attaching to its meaning will ever be removed. Other interpreters take it as a verb in the second person plural, and hence the decided difference of interpretation.
The sixth paragraph of the same passage is explained by the Pehlevi translator as follows:
'Thus I proclaimed that among all things the greatest is to worship God. The praise of purity is (due) to him who has a good knowledge, (to those) who depend on Ormazd. I hear Spentô-mainyu (who is) Ormazd; listen to me, to what I shall speak (unto you). Whose worship is intercourse with the Good Mind; one can know (experience) the divine command to do good through inquiry after what is good. That which is in the intellect they teach me as the best, viz. the inborn (heavenly) wisdom, (that is, that the divine wisdom is superior to the human).'
Professor Spiegel translates:
'Now I will tell you of all things the greatest. It is praise with purity of Him who is wise from those who exist. The holiest heavenly being, Ahuramazda, may hear it, He for whose praise inquiry is made from the holy spirit, may He teach me the best by his intelligence.'
Dr. Haug in 1862:
'Thus I will tell you of the greatest of all (Sraosha), who is praising the truth, and doing good, and of all who are gathered round him (to assist him), by order of the holy spirit (Ahuramazda). The living Wise may hear me; by means of His goodness the good mind increases (in the world). He may lead me with the best of his wisdom.'
Dr. Haug in 1865:
'I will proclaim as the greatest of all things that one should be good, praising only truth. Ahuramazda will hear those who are bent on furthering (all that is good). May he whose goodness is communicated by the Good Mind instruct me in his best wisdom.'
To those who are interested in the study of Zend, and wish to judge for themselves of the trustworthiness of these various translations, we can recommend a most useful work lately published in Germany by Dr. F. Justi, 'Handbuch der Zendsprache,' containing a complete dictionary, a grammar, and selections from the Zend-Avesta.
September, 1865.