History of Zoroastrianism/Chapter 52

Introduction of Iranian studies in the West. The inexorable decree of Providence had ruled that a new light from the West should dispel the darkness that had surrounded the pages of the sacred scriptures for ages, and add to their better understanding and elucidation. European travellers who had visited India and Persia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries acquainted the people of the West with the religious beliefs, manners, and customs of the followers of Zoroaster. Hyde's masterly work on Parsi religion, which drew its materials from the works of the classical authors and the Persian version of the Sad Dar as well as from kindred works, appeared in 1700. Some important Iranian manuscripts had been carried from India to England, and were now shelved as curios in the Bodleian library at Oxford.

Anquetil du Perron's pioneer work. To the energetic Frenchman, Anquetil du Perron, is due the credit of making the first systematic attempt to study the Avestan texts and place their contents before the Western world.^[1] Having come across a facsimile of four leaves of the Bodleian manuscript, his curiosity was aroused, and with characteristic zeal he enlisted as a soldier in 1754 on a ship bound for India with the aim of bringing back to the Western world a knowledge of the sacred scriptures of Zoroaster. Unbounded enthusiasm, combined with the vigour of youth, enabled Anquetil to overcome the almost insuperable difficulties that stood in the way of his literary enterprise. Having acquired from Dastur Darab, the High Priest of the Parsis of Surat, what inadequate knowledge he could get in those days, he returned home after six years of strenuous work and published the result of his studies in three quarto volumes in 1771. This ​publication created a stir in literary circles, and gave rise to a heated controversy. One school of thought of eminent scholars in Europe declined to attach any weight to the Frenchman's work, and denied that the grotesque stuff that he had placed before the world could ever be the work of so great a thinker and sage as Zoroaster, stoutly maintaining that Anquetil's Avesta was either a forgery or that he had been duped by the Indian Parsi Mobads. The falseness of this view, however, was ultimately shown.

Western scholarship revives Zoroastrian studies. The disinterested labours of various scholars during the subsequent years fully substantiated Anquetil's pioneer work; and when the closer affinity between the languages of the Avesta and Sanskrit became generally known, the sacred texts began to be studied in the light of comparative philology, and the authenticity of the Avesta was completely proved. The seeds sown by Anquetil have since blossomed into fruitful trees in the West, but some decades passed after the publication of his work before Western scholarship penetrated into India.