ght before it.
Unfortunately we possess but very scanty data for determining, and can
do little more than conjecture, the proper answers to be given to them.

The early composition of certain portions of the Zendavesta, which has
been asserted in this work, may seem at first sight to imply the use
of a written character in Bactria and the adjacent countries at a very
remote era. But such a conclusion is not necessary. Nations have often
had an oral literature, existing only in the memories of men, and have
handed down such a literature from generation to generation, through
a long succession of ages. The sacred lore of Zoroaster may have been
brought by the Modes from the East-Caspian country in an unwritten
shape, and may not have been reduced to writing till many centuries
later. On the whole it is perhaps most probable that the Medes were
unacquainted with letters when they made their great migration, and that
they acquired their first knowledge of them from the races with whom
they came into collision when they settled along the Zagros chain. In
these regions they were brought into contact with at least two forms of
written speech, one that of the old Armenians, a Turanian dialect, the
other that of the Assyrians, a language of the Semitic type. These two
nations used the same alphabetic system, though their languages were
utterly unlike; and it would apparently have been the easiest plan
for the new comers to have adopted the established forms, and to have
applied them, so far as was possible, to the representation of their own
speech. But the extreme complication of a system which employed between
three and four hundred written signs, and composed signs sometimes of
fourteen or fifteen wedges, seems to have shocked the simplicity of the
Medes, who recognized the fact that the varieties of their articulations
fell far short of this excessive luxuriance. The Arian races, so far
as appears, declined to follow the example set them by the Turanians of
Armenia, who had adopted the Assyrian alphabet, and preferred to invent
a new system for themselves, which they determined to make far more
simple. It is possible that they found an example already set them.
In Achaemenian times we observe two alphabets used through Media and
Persia, both of which are simpler than the Assyrian: one is employed to
express the Turanian dialect of the people whom the Arians conquered and
dispossessed; the other, to express the tongue of the c