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Parsi scholarship at this period. Up to that time the Avestan texts had been almost wholly interpreted by the Zoroastrian authorities through the help of their Pahlavi translations. The original Avestan texts had remained largely unintelligible without the Pahlavi version. It was not then known that the Gathas were composed in metre, much less the fact that some other minor texts were also metrical. The rudiments of Avestan grammar that various inflections modified the meaning of a word had been a long forgotten fact. This was due to the circumstance that, owing to the inflectional poverty of the Pahlavi language, the translators had resorted to the use of particles and very often had even dropped this only means of indicating the syntactical relation of words in a sentence, and had contented themselves with rendering an inflected Avestan word by its uninflected crude Pahlavi equivalent. Firdausi and other Moslem writers were the sole informants of the Parsi scholars regarding the ancient and legendary history of Iran. As these did not record the doings of the Achaemenian kings, the Parsi community remained without any inkling of the greatness and glory of the illustrious Parsi kings of the great Persian empire. European history had now for the first time startled the English-educated Parsi youth with the information that there once flourished a mighty dynasty of rulers whom the modern Parsi can claim as his kith and kin. The truth had been denied for centuries to their legitimate descendants in India and Persia that a Cyrus or a Darius, a Xerxes or an Artaxerxes, who had carried the Persian banner in war to the farthest ends of the world, were historically their own coreligionists.

In vain did the august Farohar of Darius hover round the rock of Behistan for over two thousand years in pious expectation of some Parsi traveller who would one day trace his steps