RELIGION, ARCHITECTURE, AND LANGUAGE

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freely, added much, and made the production so characteristically her own as often to bring forth a new creation; and if she has accepted gifts in artistic lines from China, it was only in part return for generous loans previously made to Chinese art by herself.

In the domain of linguistics there are a number of points which are interesting to consider in connection with Persia. For the older languages I need only refer to the contributions which were made to comparative philology, as well as religion and history, when the Zoroastrian scriptures were discovered and the cuneiform inscriptions deciphered. The study of the Pahlavi, or Middle Persian, texts, inscriptions, coins, and gems has yielded valuable results for general history as well as for linguistic science. The modern language of Persia has an interest even for the student of English who is not an Iranian specialist, because the loss of inflections and the admixture of Arabic words in Modern Persian, due to the Mohammedan conquest, may be paralleled with similar phenomena in our own tongue with its levelled case-endings, analytic structure, and its vast infusion of words brought in by the Norman invasion. In the matter of linguistic purity and the avoidance of foreign words in a national epic, Firdausi's Shah Namah, Book of Kings (A.D. 1000), affords an excellent parallel to Layamon's poetic chronicle, the Brut (A.D. 1200). The Iranian poet is as free from the contamination of Arabic words, which later became fashionable, as the British bard from elements of Norman-French origin.

Our ordinary vocabulary of to-day owes something to Persia.1 So common a word as van, a heavy vehicle, is an abbreviation of caravan (which has been etymologized in the folk-speech as 'carry-van'), and is as Persian as Shah, tiara,

1I am indebted for suggestions to the sketch by my friend, Professor Horn, Was verdanken wir Persien, in Nord und Süd, Heft 282, p. 379,

Breslau, 1900. See also Skeat, Etymological Dictionary, p. 759, Oxford, 1882; and my address in Congress of Arts and Science, St. Louis, 1904.

bakhshish, and magic (from Magi). The Persian term bazaar is current in English, and shawls, sashes, awnings, turquoises, and taffeta are standard articles in our linguistic stock in trade as the goods themselves in our markets. Products so common in America as the orange, lemon, melon, and peach (the last word being a disguised form of the Latin malum Persicum, which has come to us through the French) are Iranian in name as well as in origin. The vegetable spinach is Persian, and the word asparagus also traces its lineage apparently through the Greek άoπápayos ultimately to Avestan sparegha, shoot, stalk.' I must add, however, that this vegetable has gained much in delicacy by being transplanted to the West, if I may judge by the asparagus which now grows in Persia. The list of our linguistic indebtedness might be increased by including a score of words like julep (familiar in 'mint julep'), which is really an arabicized form of the Persian gulab, rose-water'; hazard, applied to taking the one chance in a thousand' (Pers. hazar); and last but not least, Paradise, which has come to us from Persian through the Greek, while gul and bulbul, the Persian nightingale and rose,' are familiar to all readers of Eastern poetry.

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The title of Persian literature to a place among the great literatures of the world is a recognized one, and it is in this domain perhaps that Persia makes the greatest claim upon our interest. In age the Avesta and the Old Persian Inscriptions carry us back at least to the sixth century before Christ and possibly earlier; the Pahlavi literature belongs to the Sasanian period from the third to the sixth century after Christ; and the Modern Persian began within the last thousand years. sprang up a century or two after the Arab conquest as a renaissance movement with the revival of the old national feeling; and this period is certainly the most interesting of all. Some knowledge of Firdausi, Saadi, and Hafiz belongs to true culture, and Omar Khayyam has become an English classic through FitzGerald's version. The less-known names of the

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