Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IX.djvu/359

IRANIC RACES AND LANGUAGES 347 a dark velvet-like skin. The Tajiks are also of Iranian blood and speech. Khanikoff has completely disproved the tradition hitherto ac- cepted by many scholars, that the Tajiks are a Semitic people from Babylonia. They are met with among the Afghans and Belooches, hut are found in largest number in Bokhara and Badakhshan, and many have settled in Khokan, Khiva, and Chinese Tartary. They are of good middle height and powerful frame, but have a broader head than the Afghans, and a thicker cheek and nose. In Bokhara and Khiva they form the literary class. They compose the largest part of the population of Cabool, Can- dahar, Ghuzni, Herat, and Balkh. Their su- perstitious practices clearly show that fire wor- ship was their ancient form of religion ; they are now Sunnis. The Barekis and the Per- mulis are considered branches of the Tajiks. Further west, mainly on the borderland of Af- ghanistan, Khiva, and Persia, live the Aimags, whose language is of a -very ancient type and but little mixed with Arabic. They consist of four peoples, the Timuri, Timeni, Ferozkohi, and Jamshidi. Among the Iranic populations of Persia, the Bakhtiaris and Feilis of Luristan deserve special mention. The Persians are considerably fairer than the Afghans, and their features are more regular, their physiognomy having been much improved by admixtures of Georgian and Circassian blood. (See PERSIA.) Modern research has established that the Kurds also belong to the Iranian race. They are found in Khorasan, and inhabit the north- ern slopes and valleys of the Elburz, but the bulk of the eastern Kurds live on the Zagros mountains. The western Kurds have inhab- ited for a long period a portion of the Arme- nian mountain ranges on the northern limit of the Mesopotamian desert. (See KURDISTAN.) Khanikoff praises the beautiful heads and pre- possessing features of the Kurds. The Yezids, who dwell in the Sinjar mountains, N. of Mo- sul, are also classed with the Kurds as Ira- nians. Among the Kurds live an agricultural people, called Gurans, whose dialect is more closely related to Persian than the Kurdish. N. of the Kurds the principal Iranic populations are the Armenians (see ARMENIA), the inhabi- tants of the southern shores of the Caspian sea, the Tats, who live in Baku, and the Ossetes, on both sides of the Caucasus, near the Dariel pass. These generally surpass the Persians in complexion. The large black eyes of the Ar- menians are admired. LANGUAGES. The re- covery of the ancient languages of Persia is mainly an accomplishment of this century, and is principally due to the knowledge of Sanskrit. The two oldest phases of Iranic speech lay buried in the sacred books of the Parsees and in the cuneiform characters. Subsequent to the destruction of the Persian empire by Alexan- der the Great, the documents of the religion of Ormuzd, founded by Zoroaster, were neg- lected under the reign of the foreign princes. The new Persian dynasty of the Sassanides (226-651) reestablished the ancient religion in its former dignity, and the extant fragments of the holy books were carefully gathered. The conquest by the Arabs dethroned the native religion again, and almost wiped it out of exis- tence. A few succeeded in retaining the an- cient worship in Persia, as in Yezd and Ker- man, and others introduced it into India. The remains of the holy books extant at the time of the Arab conquest are still preserved, partly in the original language, but mostly in an an- cient translation. The oldest Iranic form of speech known to us was probably an eastern language, and Spiegel has given it the name of Old Bactrian. Others designate it as Zend, which was originally intended to be applied to the translation, but was subsequently used by mistake for the language of the text. The lan- guage of the translation is Huzvaresh, which is the literary form of the Pehlevi. Anquetil-Du- perron published in 1771 a French translation of the text under the title Zend-Avesta. (See ZEND-AVESTA.) The hints which he gave of the language were sufficient to prove its San- skritic character, and Sir William Jones was the first to identify it as such (1789); but a. whole generation passed before any real progress in the recovery of the language was noticeable. When the labors of Bopp and Schlegel had given a solid foundation to Sanskrit philology, the Iranian languages soon gained a similar basis through the labors of Olshausen, Bur- nouf, Hermann Brockhaus, Spiegel, Wester- gaard, Haug, Justi, Lagarde, and Lassen. The first attempt at a grammar of the Old Bactrian or Zend language was made by Haug in his " Essays on the Sacred Language, Writing, and Religion of the Parsees " (Bombay, 1862). In 1867 appeared Spiegel's Qrammatik der Alt- baktrischen Sprache, containing also an appen- dix on the dialect of the Gathas. Justi pub- lished in 1864 a ffandbuch der Zend&prache, in which he furnished a lexicon of Old Bactrian, to which Paul de Lagarde has made valuable additions in his Beitrage zur baktrisehen Lexi- Tcographie (1868). (See ZEND LANGUAGE.) For the old Persian language of the time of the Achaamenides, as found on the monuments of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, see CUNEIFORM IN- SCRIPTIONS. Benfey, Mordtmann, and others are of opinion that the second column of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions contains the language of the ancient Medes. The language called Pehlevi, Pahlavi, or Huzvaresh, is Iranic, but it is not positively known where and when it was spoken. Spiegel assigns it to the west- ern portion of the empire of the Sassanides, and considers its Semitic elements of Naba- thsean origin. It was probably used as a literary language from about the 3d century to the downfall of the Sassanian empire, and contin- ued in use for religious documents. It is known through the translation of the Avesta, and through a few other religious works, as the Dundehesh, and through inscriptions, coins, and gems. It is not always the same, but dif-