certain authors praise,[1] have not any kind of poetry as I have already remarked.[2] The other Tartars were hardly more advanced before being placed by their conquests within reach of the learning of the vanquished people. The Turks had no alphabetical characters. The Huns were ignorant even of its existence. The proud vanquisher of Asia, Genghis Khan did not find, according to the best historians, a single man among the Mongolians capable of writing his despatches. The alphabet of fourteen letters that the Uïgurian Tartars possess, appears to have been given them by the ancient Persians,[3] from whom they also received the little that they knew of poetry.
These Persians, today imitators of the Arabs, were in very remote times disciples of the Indians. Their sacred tongue then called Zend, in which are written the fragments that remain to us of Zoroaster, was a dialect of Sanskrit.[4] These fragments that we owe to the indefatigable zeal of Anquetil Duperron, appear to be written, as the Vedas, or as all the sacred books of India, in cadenced prose. After the Zend-Avesta, the most famous book among the Parsees is the Boun-Dehesh, written in Pehlevi, and containing the cosmogony of Zoroaster. Pehlevi, which is derived from Chaldaic Nabatæan, indicates a translation,[5] and testifies that Persia had already passed from under the dominion of India to that of Assyria. But when, thanks to the conquests of Cyrus, Persia had become free and mistress of Asia, Pehlevi, which recalled its ancient servitude, was banished from the court by Bahman-Espandiar, whom we
- ↑ Le P. Parennin says that the language of the Manchus has an enormous quantity of words which express, in the most concise and most picturesque manner, what ordinary languages can do only by aid of numerous epithets or periphrases. (Duhalde, in-fol., t. iv., p. 65.)
- ↑ Ci-dessus, p. 31.
- ↑ Voyez la traduction française des Rech. asiatiq., t. ii., p. 49, notes a et b.
- ↑ Voyez ce que dit de Zend, Anquetil Duperron, et l'exemple qu'il donne de cette ancienne langue. Zend-Avesta, t. i.
- ↑ D'Herbelot, Bibl. orient., p. 54. Asiat. Research., t. ii., p. 51.
