Pahlavi Texts (Sacred Books of the East) (v. 5)

Excerpt from book: extracts from the original work; this has been long suspected from the fragmentary character of the text they contain, but it could hardly be proved until a more complete text had been discovered. Whether TD may be considered as a copy of the text as it stood originally, or merely of an after recension of the work, can hardly be determined with certainty until the whole contents of the manuscript have been carefully examined ; it is, therefore, to be hoped that its owner will be induced to publish a lithographed facsimile of the whole, after the manner of Westergaard's edition. So far as appears in the lengthy and valuable extracts, with which he has kindly favoured me, no decided difference of style can be detected between the additional matter and the text hitherto known, nor any inconsistencies more striking than such as sometimes occur in the Indian MSS. On the other hand, it will be noticed that heading No. 25 in the list of contents seems to be misplaced, which is an argument against the text being in its original state; and the style of the Bundahij is so much less involved and obscure than that of the Selections of Za/-sparam (see Appendix to the Bundahij), which treat of some of the same subjects, that it may be fairly suspected of having been written originally in a different age. But the writer of the text, as it appears in TD, calls Zarf-sparaml one of his contemporaries (see Chap. XXXIII, 10, n of the translation); it may, therefore, be suspected that he merely re-edited an old text with some additions of his own, which, however, are rather difficult to distinguish from the rest. No stress can be laid upon peculiarities of orthography in TD, as they are, in all likelihood, attributable to copyists long subsequent to Za-sparam's contemporaries. Any future transla... Read more