VENDÎDÂD.

absurdities with which the so-called sacred books of Zoroaster teemed. It is true that Anquetil had given full scope to satire by the style he had adopted; he cared very little for literary elegance and did not mind writing Zend and Persian in French. Consequently, the new and strange ideas he had to express looked stranger still in the outlandish garb he gave them. Yet it was less the style than the ideas that shocked the contemporary of Voltaire¹ Cf. the article on Zoroaster in the Dictionnaire philosophique.. His main argument was that books full of such silly tales, of laws and rules so absurd, and of descriptions of gods and demons so grotesque, could not be the work of a sage like Zoroaster, nor the code of a religion so celebrated for its simplicity, wisdom, and purity. His conclusion was that the Avesta was a rhapsody of some modern Guebre (Zoroastrian). In fact, the only thing in which Jones succeeded was to prove in a decisive manner that the ancient Persians were not equal to the lumières (enlightened minds) of the eighteenth century, and that the authors of the Avesta had not read the Encyclopédie.

Jones's censure was echoed in England by Sir John Chardin and Richardson, and in Germany by Meiners. Richardson tried to give a scientific character to the attacks of Jones by grounding them on philological bases² 'A Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations,' Oxford, 1777.. He argued that the Avesta was a fabrication of modern times, as shown by the number of Arabic words he fancied he found in both the Zend and Pahlavi dialects—since no Arabic element was introduced into Persian idioms earlier than the seventh century—as well as by the harsh texture of the Zend, contrasted with the rare euphony of the Persian; and lastly, by the radical difference between the Zend and Persian, both in words and grammar. To these objections, drawn from the form, he added another derived from the uncommon stupidity of the content.

In Germany, Meiners added another charge of an unexpected kind to the accusations brought against the newly found books: namely, that they spoke of ideas unheard of before and made known new things. "Pray, who would dare..."