II.
IRANIAN INDO-GERMANS.
The whole of this class is hypothetical. Such as it is, however, it comprises the populations of Kurdistan, Persia, Beloochistan, Affghanistan, and Kafferistan.
In order to understand the complications which leave so large a section of the human species in an unsatisfactory ethnological position, a notice of the Sanskrit language, and of the history of opinion concerning it, is necessary.
The language called Sanskrit has a grammar of the same copiousness and complexity as the Greek, and a vocabulary which places it in the Indo-European class of tongues.
It is the language of the religious and literary writings of the Brahminical Hindus; the Ramayana and Mahabharata (epic poems) being referred by Sanskrit scholars to the second century B.C.
A more archaic form of it is the language of the Vedas, referred by some Sanskrit scholars to 1400 B.C.
A form said to approach the archaic character of the Veda. Sanskrit is the language of the arrow-headed inscriptions—so far as they are Persian; the date of these being the reign of Darius.
A form (the Pali) less archaic than the Sanskrit of the Mahabharata has been found upon inscriptions of the æra of the Seleucidæ in Babylon, and as such in records older than that of the Non-Vedaic Sanskrit literature.
The same Pali is the language of the Buddhist religion and literature in India, in Ceylon, in the Trans-Gangetic Peninsula, in Tibet, and in the Sub-Himalayan range.
The Zend, a form closely allied to the proper Sanskrit is the language of the oldest Parsi religious books, the Zendavesta.