by Will Durant
* If the Vishtaspa who promulgated him was the father of Darius I, the last of these dates seems the most probable.
† Anquetil-Duperron (ca. 1771 A.D.) introduced the prefix Zend, which the Persians had used to denote merely a translation and interpretation of the Avesta. The last is a word of uncertain origin, probably derived, like Veda, from the Aryan root vid, to know.62
‡ Native tradition tells of a larger Avesta in twenty-one books called Nasks; these in turn, we are told, were but part of the original Scriptures. One of the Nasks remains intact—the Vendidad; the rest survive only in scattered fragments in such later compositions as the Dinkard and the Bundahish. Arab historians speak of the complete text as having covered 12,000 cowhides. According to a sacred tradition, two copies of this were made by Prince Vishtaspa; one of them was destroyed when Alexander burned the royal palace at Persepolis; the other was taken by the victorious Greeks to their own country, and being translated, provided the Greeks (according to the Persian authorities) with all their scientific knowledge. During the third century of the Christian Era Vologesus V, a Parthian king of the Arsacid Dynasty, ordered the collection of all fragments surviving either in writing or in the memory of the faithful; this collection was fixed in its present form as the Zoroastrian canon in the fourth century, and became the official religion of the Persian state. The compilation so formed suffered further ravages during the Moslem conquest of Persia in the seventh century.63
The extant fragments may be divided into five parts:
(1) The Yasna—forty-five chapters of the liturgy recited by the Zoroastrian priests, and twenty-seven chapters (chs. 28-54) called Gathas, containing, apparently in metric form, the discourses and revelations of the Prophet;
(2) The Vispered—twenty-four additional chapters of liturgy;
(3) The Vendidad—twenty-two chapters or fargards expounding the theology and moral legislation of the Zoroastrians, and now forming the priestly code of the Parsees;
(4) The Yashts i.e., songs of praise—twenty-one psalms to angels, interspersed with legendary history and a prophecy of the end of the world; and
(5) The Khordah Avesta or Small Avesta—prayers for various occasions of life.64
* Darmesteter believes the “Good Mind” to be a semi-Gnostic adaptation of Philo’s logos tbeios, or Divine Word, and therefore dates the Yasna about the first century B.C.70
* But Yasna xlvi, 6 reads: “Wicked is he who is good to the wicked.” Inspired works are seldom consistent.
* Christmas was originally a solar festival, celebrating, at the winter solstice (about December 22nd), the lengthening of the day and the triumph of the sun over his enemies. It became a Mithraic, and finally a Christian, holy day.
* When the Persians fought Alexander at the Granicus practically all the “Persian” infantry were Greek mercenaries. At the battle of Issus 30,000 Greek mercenaries formed the center of the Persian line.98
* Statira was a model queen to Artaxerxes II; but his mother, Parysatis, poisoned her out of jealousy, encouraged the king to marry his own daughter Atossa, played dice with him for the life of a eunuch, and, winning, had him flayed alive. When Artaxerxes ordered the execution of a Carian soldier, Parysatis bettered his instructions by having the man stretched upon the rack for ten days, his eyes torn out, and molten lead poured into his ears until he died.119a
* One of these vases, shown at the International Exhibition of Persian Art in London, 1931, bears an inscription testifying that it belonged to Artaxerxes II.132
† An expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is now engaged in excavating Persepolis under the direction of Dr. James H. Breasted. In January, 1931, this expedition unearthed a mass of statuary equal in amount to all Persian sculptures previously known.134
* Fergusson pronounced them “the noblest example of a flight of stairs to be found in any part of the world.”136
† Underneath the platform ran a complicated system of drainage tunnels, six feet in diameter, often drilled through the solid rock.137
* “All those that were in Asia,” says Josephus, “were persuaded that the Macedonians would not so much as come to battle with the Persians, on account of their multitude.”143
* Probably equivalent to $60,000,000 in contemporary currencies.
† Plutarch, Quintus Curtius and Diodorus agree on this tale, and it does not do violence to Alexander’s impetuous character? but one may meet the story with a certain scepticism none the less.
* A town sixty miles from the Arbela which gave the battle its name.
* From the time of Megasthenes, who described India to Greece ca. 302 B.C., down to the eighteenth century, India was all a marvel and a mystery to Europe. Marco Polo (1254-1323 A.D.) pictured its western fringe vaguely, Columbus blundered upon America in trying to reach it, Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to rediscover it, and merchants spoke rapaciously of “the wealth of the Indies.” But scholars left the mine almost untapped. A Dutch missionary to India, Abraham Roger, made a beginning with his Open Door to the Hidden Heathendom (1651); Dry den showed his alertness by writing the play Aurangzeb (1675); and an Austrian monk, Fra Paolino de S. Bartolomeo, advanced the matter with two Sanskrit grammars and a treatise on the Systema Brahmanicum (1792).1a In 1789 Sir William Jones opened his career as one of the greatest of Indologists by translating Kalidasa’s Shakuntala; this translation, re-rendered into German in 1791, profoundly affected Herder and Goethe, and—through the Schlegels—the entire Romantic movement, which hoped to find in the East all the mysticism and mystery that seemed to have died on the approach of science and Enlightenment in the West. Jones startled the world of scholarship by declaring that Sanskrit was cousin to all the languages of Europe, and an indication of our racial kinship with the Vedic Hindus; these announcements almost created modern philology and ethnology. In 1805 Colebrooke’s essay On the Vedas revealed to Europe the oldest product of Indian literature; and about the same time Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of a Persian translation of the Upanishads acquainted Schelling and Schopenhauer with what the latter called the profoundest philosophy that he had ever read.2 Buddhism was practically unknown as a system of thought until Burnouf’s Essai sur le Pali (1826)—i.e., on the language of the Buddhist documents. Burnouf in France, and his pupil Max Müller in England, roused scholars and philanthropists to make possible a translation of all the “Sacred Books of the East”; and Rhys Davids furthered this task by a lifetime devoted to the exposition of the literature of Buddhism. Despite and because of these labors it has become clear that we have merely begun to know India; our acquaintance with its literature is as limited as Europe’s knowledge of Greek and Roman literature in the days of Charlemagne. Today, in the enthusiasm of our discovery, we exaggerate generously the value of the new revelation; a European philosopher believes that “Indian wisdom is the profoundest that exists” and a great novelist writes: “I have not found, in Europe or America, poets, thinkers or popular leaders equal, or even comparable, to those of India today.”3
* The word Indian will be used in this Book as applying to India in general; the word Hindu, for variety’s sake, will occasionally be used in the same sense, following the custom of the Persians and the Greeks; but where any confusion might result, Hindu will be used in its later and stricter sense, as referring only to those inhabitants of India who (as distinct from Moslem Indians) accept one of the native faiths.
* From dakshina, “right hand” (Latin dexter); secondarily meaning “south,” since southern India is on the right hand of a worshiper facing the rising sun.
* These connections are suggested by similar seals found at Mohenjo-daro and in Sumeria (especially at Kish), and by the appearance of the Naga, or hooded serpent, among the early Mesopotamian seals.11 In 1932 Dr. Henri Frankfort unearthed, in the ruins of a Babylonian-Elamite village at the modern Tell-Asmar (near Baghdad), pottery seals and beads which in his judgment (Sir John Marshall concurring) were imported from Mohenjo-daro ca
. 2000 B.C.12
† Macdonell believes that this amazing civilization was derived from Sumeria;14 Hall believes that the Sumerians derived their culture from India;15 Woolley derives both the Sumerians and the early Hindus from some common parent stock and culture in or near Baluchistan.16 Investigators have been struck by the fact that similar seals found both in Babylonia and in India belong to the earliest (“pre-Sumerian”) phase of the Mesopotamian culture, but to the latest phase of the Indus civilization17—which suggests the priority of India. Childe inclines to this conclusion: “By the end of the fourth millennium B.C. the material culture of Abydos, Ur, or Mohenjo-daro would stand comparison with that of Periclean Athens or of any medieval town. . . . Judging by the domestic architecture, the seal-cutting, and the grace of the pottery, the Indus civilization was ahead of the Babylonian at the beginning of the third millennium (ca. 3000 B.C.). But that was a late phase of the Indian culture; it may have enjoyed no less lead in earlier times. Were then the innovations and discoveries that characterize proto-Sumerian civilization not native developments on Babylonian soil, but the results of Indian inspiration? If so, had the Sumerians themselves come from the Indus, or at least from regions in its immediate sphere of influence?”18 These fascinating questions cannot yet be answered; but they serve to remind us that a history of civilization, because of our human ignorance, begins at what was probably a late point in the actual development of culture.
* Recent excavations near Chitaldrug, in Mysore, revealed six levels of buried cultures, rising from Stone Age implements and geometrically adorned pottery apparently as old as 4000 B.C., to remains as late as 1200 A.D.19
* Monier-Williams derives Aryan from the Sanskrit root ri-ar, to plough;23 cf. the Latin aratrum, a plough, and area, an open space. On this theory the word Aryan originally meant not nobleman but peasant.
† We find such typically Vedic deities as Indra, Mitra and Varuna mentioned in a treaty concluded by the Aryan Hittites and Mitannians at the beginning of the fourteenth century B.C.;24 and so characteristic a Vedic ritual as the drinking of the sacred soma juice is repeated in the Persian ceremony of drinking the sap of the haoma plant. (Sanskrit s corresponds regularly to Zend or Persian h: soma becomes haoma, as sindhu becomes Hindu.25) We conclude that the Mitannians, the Hittites, the Kassites, the Sogdians, the Bactrians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Aryan invaders of India were branches of an already heterogeneous “Indo-European” stock which spread out from the shores of the Caspian Sea.
‡ A word applied by the ancient Persians to India north of the Narbada River.
* The early Hindu word for caste is varna, color. This was translated by the Portuguese invaders as casta, from the Latin castus, pure.
* Cf. Atharva-veda, vi, 138, and vii, 35, 90, where incantations “bristling with hatred,” and “language of unbridled wildness” are used by women seeking to oust their rivals, or to make them barren.60 In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (6-12) formulas are given for raping a woman by incantation, and for “sinning without conceiving.”61
* An almost monotheistic devotion was accorded to Prajapati, until he was swallowed up, in later theology, by the all-consuming figure of Brahma.
* Ponebatque in gremium regina genitale victimae membrum.76
* Cf. English one, two, three, four, five with Sanskrit ek, dwee, tree, chatoor, panch; Latin unus, duo, tres, quattuor, quinque; Greek heis, duo, tria, tettara, pente. (Quattuor becomes four, as Latin quercus becomes fir.) Or cf. English am, art, is with Sanskrit asmi, asi, asti; Latin sum, es, est; Greek eimi, ei, esti. For family terms cf. p. 357 above. Grimm’s Law, which formulated the changes effected in the consonants of a word through the different vocal habits of separated peoples, has revealed to us more fully the surprising kinship of Sanskrit with our own tongue. The law may be roughly summarized by saying that in most cases (there are numerous exceptions):
1. Sanskrit k (as in kratu, power) corresponds to Greek k (kartos, strength), Latin c or qu (cornu, horn), German h, g or k (hart), and English h, g or f (hard);
2. Skt. g or j (as in jan, to beget), corresponds to Gk. g (genos, race), L. g (genus), Ger. ch or k (kind, child), E. k (kin);
3. Skt. gh or h (as in hyas, yesterday), corresponds to Gk. ch (chthes), L. h, f, g, or? (heri), Ger. k or g (gestern), E. g or y (yesterday);
4. Skt. t (as in tar, to cross) corresponds to Gk. t (terma, end), L. t (ter-minus), Ger. d (durch, through), E. th or d (through);
5. Skt. d (as in das, ten) corresponds to Gk. d (deka), L. d (decem), Ger.? (zehn), E. t (ten);
6. Skt. dh or h (as in dha, to place or put) corresponds to Gk. th (ti-the-mi, I place), L. f, d or b (fa-cere, do), Ger. t (tun, do), E. d (do, deed);
7 Skt. P (as in patana, feather) corresponds to Gk. p (pteros, wing), L. p (penna, feather), Ger. f or v (feder), E. f or b (feather);
8. Skt. bh (as in bhri, to bear) corresponds to Gk. ph (pherein), L. f or b (fero), Ger. p, f or ph (fahren), E. b or p (bear, birth, brother, etc.).82
* Perhaps poetry will recover its ancient hold upon our people when it is again recited rather than silently read.
† Greek (f)oida, Latin video, German weise, English wit and wisdom.
‡ This is but one of many possible divisions of the material. In addition to the “inspired” commentaries contained in the Brahmanas and Upanishads, Hindu scholars usually include in the Vedas several collections of shorter commentaries in aphoristic form, called Sutras (lit., threads, from Skt. siv, to sew). These, while not directly inspired from heaven, have the high authority of an ancient tradition. Many of them are brief to the point of unintelligibility; they were convenient condensations of doctrine, mnemonic devices for students who still relied upon memory rather than upon writing.
As to the authorship or date of this mass of poetry, myth, magic, ritual and philosophy, no man can say. Pious Hindus believe every word of it to be divinely inspired, and tell us that the great god Brahma wrote it with his own hand upon leaves of gold;89 and this is a view which cannot easily be refuted. According to the fervor of their patriotism, divers native authorities assign to the oldest hymns dates ranging from 6000 to 1000 B.C.90 The material was probably collected and arranged between 1000 and 500 B.C.91
* They are composed in stanzas generally of four lines each. The lines are of 5, 8, 11 or 12 syllables, indifferent as to quantity, except that the last four syllables are usually two trochees, or a trochee and a spondee.
* The derivation of this word is uncertain. Apparently (as in Rig. x, 16), it originally meant breath, like the Latin spiritus; then vital essence, then soul.109
* Brahman as here used, meaning the impersonal Soul of the World, is to be distinguished from the more personal Brahma, member of the Hindu triad of gods (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva); and from Brahman as denoting a member of the priestly caste. The distinction, however, is not always carried out, and Brahma is sometimes used in the sense of Brahman. Brahman as God will be distinguished in these pages from Brahman as priest by being italicized.
† The Hindu thinkers are the least anthropomorphic of all religious philosophers. Even in the later hymns of the Rig-veda the Supreme Being is indifferently referred to as be or it, to show that it is above sex.113
* It occurs first in the Satapatha Upanishad, where repeated births and deaths are viewed as a punishment inflicted by the gods for evil living. Most primitive tribes believe that the soul can pass from a man to an animal and vice versa; probably this idea became, in the pre-Aryan inhabitants of India, the basis of the transmigration creed.117