Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/520
to this hallowed place, climb the rock to read the great king's record, make it known to the world, and thus earn the royal monarch's blessings whispered in the solemn silence by as many tongues as there were wedges and angles in the letters of the carved inscriptions.
Such, in short, was the deplorable state of Parsi scholarship when comparative philology came to its aid from the West and opened a new era of critical study in the field of Iranian researches.
Introduction of the science of comparative philology among the Parsis. Since the year 1771, when that worthy pioneer of romantic renown in Iranian studies, Anquetil du Perron, published his volumes containing the first European translation of the Avesta, or Sacred Book of Zoroaster, great strides forward have been made in Europe and America in the realm of Iranian research. The field is now replete with the lasting monuments of Western scholarship whether in the department of standard editions of the sacred texts or the compilation of grammars and dictionaries or again in the preparation of scientific translations as well as in making exegetical, philological and archeological researches. The service that these scholars have rendered to the Parsis is greater than can ever be expressed.
To K. R. Kama, Parsi pioneer of the Iranian studies on Western lines in India, who had studied the Avestan texts in Europe under the German savant Spiegel, is due the credit of introducing among Parsi scholars the science of comparative philology and the scientific method of interpreting their sacred books. The inauguration of this new era belongs to the early part of the second half of the last century.
Textual criticism brings startling revelation for the Parsis. The first outcome of the critical study of the Avestan literature, as may be judged from intimations given above, was the discovery made by the Western scholars that the grammar, style, and internal evidence of the extant Avestan texts show that they were not composed at a single period and by one person, but that they were the products of many persons who worked at various times. Scholars such as these undertook to determine the approximate dates of the component parts of the Avesta. The Gathas were shown to be the oldest in time of composition and the authorship of a considerable portion, if not all, of these