ammaire Comparee de M. Bopp,' had identified a second
personage, the Zend Kere_s_a_s_pa with the Sanskrit K_r_i_s_a_s_va.
But the similarity between the Zend Kere_s_a_s_pa and the Garshasp of
the Shahnameh opened a new and wide prospect to Burnouf, and
afterwards led him on to the most striking and valuable results. Some
of these were published in his last work on Zend, 'Etudes sur la
Langue et les Textes Zends.' This is a collection of articles
published originally in the 'Journal Asiatique' between 1840 and 1846;
and it is particularly the fourth essay, 'Le Dieu Homa,' which has
opened an entirely new mine for researches into the ancient state of
religion and tradition common to the Aryans before their schism.
Burnouf showed that three of the most famous names in the Shahnameh,
Jemshid, Feridun, and Garshasp, can be traced back to three heroes
mentioned in the Zend-Avesta as the representatives of the three
earliest generations of mankind, Yima Kshaeta, Thraetaona, and
Kere_s_a_s_pa; and that the prototypes of these Zoroastrian heroes
could be found again in the Yama, Trita, and K_r_i_s_a_s_va of the
Veda. He went even beyond this. He showed that, as in Sanskrit, the
father of Yama is Vivasvat, the father of Yima in the Avesta is
Viva_n_hvat. He showed that as Thraetaona in Persia is the son of
Athwya, the patronymic of Trita in the Veda is Aptya. He explained the
transition of Thraetaona into Feridun by pointing to the Pehlevi form
of the name, as given by Neriosengh, Fredun. This change of an
aspirated dental into an aspirated labial, which by many is considered
a flaw in this argument, is of frequent occurrence. We have only to
think of [Greek: pher] and [Greek: ther], of dhuma and fumus, of
modern Greek [Greek: phelo] and [Greek: thelo]--nay, Menenius's 'first
complaint' would suffice to explain it. Burnouf again identified
Zohak, the king of Persia, slain by Feridun, whom even Firdusi still
knows by the name of Ash dahak, with the Azhi dahaka, the biting
serpent, as he translates it, destroyed by Thraetaona in the Avesta;
and with regard to the changes which these names, and the ideas
originally expressed by them, had to undergo on the intellectual stage
of the Aryan nation, he says: 'Il est sans contredit fort curieux de
voir une des Divinites indiennes les plus venerees, donner son nom au
premier souverain de la dynastie ariopersanne; c'est un des faits qui
attestent le plus evidemment l'intime union des deux br