a and Zend-Avesta under the following simile: 'The
Veda,' he writes, 'and the Zend-Avesta are two rivers flowing from one
fountain-head: the stream of the Veda is the fuller and purer, and has
remained truer to its original character; that of the Zend-Avesta has
been in various ways polluted, has altered its course, and cannot,
with certainty, be traced back to its source.'

As to the language of the Achaemenians, presented to us in the Persian
text of the cuneiform inscriptions, there was no room for doubt, as
soon as it became legible at all, that it was the same tongue as that
of the Avesta, only in a second stage of its continuous growth. The
process of deciphering these bundles of arrows by means of Zend and
Sanskrit has been very much like deciphering an Italian inscription
without a knowledge of Italian, simply by means of classical and
mediaeval Latin. It would have been impossible, even with the quick
perception and patient combination of a Grotefend, to read more than
the proper names and a few titles on the walls of the Persian palaces,
without the aid of Zend and Sanskrit; and it seems almost
providential, as Lassen remarked, that these inscriptions, which at
any previous period would have been, in the eyes of either classical
or oriental scholars, nothing but a quaint conglomerate of nails,
wedges, or arrows, should have been rescued from the dust of centuries
at the very moment when the discovery and study of Sanskrit and Zend
had enabled the scholars of Europe to grapple successfully with their
difficulties.

Upon a closer inspection of the language and grammar of these mountain
records of the Achaemenian dynasty, a curious fact came to light which
seemed to disturb the historical relation between the language of
Zoroaster and the language of Darius. At first, historians were
satisfied with knowing that the edicts of Darius could be explained by
the language of the Avesta, and that the difference between the two,
which could be proved to imply a considerable interval of time, was
such as to exclude for ever the supposed historical identity of Darius
Hystaspes and Gushtasp, the mythical pupil of Zoroaster. The language
of the Avesta, though certainly not the language of Zarathustra,[37]
displayed a grammar so much more luxuriant, and forms so much more
primitive than the inscriptions, that centuries must have elapsed
between the two periods represented by these two strata of language.
When, however, the