Thus far the history of the Persian language had been reconstructed by the genius and perseverance of Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, and last, not least, by the comprehensive labours of Rawlinson, from the ante-historical epoch of Zoroaster down to the age of Darius and Artaxerxes II. It might have been expected that, after that time, the contemporaneous historians of Greece would have supplied the sequel. Unfortunately the Greeks cared nothing for any language except their own; and little for any other history except as bearing on themselves. The history of the Persian language after the Macedonian conquest and during the Parthian occupation is indeed but a blank page. The next glimpse of an authentic contemporaneous document is the inscription of Ardeshir, the founder of the new national dynasty of the Sassanians. It is written, though, it may be, with dialectic difference, in what was once called 'Pehlevi,' and is now more commonly known as 'Huzvaresh,' this being the proper title of the language of the translations of the Avesta. The legends of Sassanian coins, the bilingual inscriptions of Sassanian emperors, and the translation of the Avesta by Sassanian reformers, represent the Persian language in its third phase. To judge from the specimens given by Anquetil Duperron, it was not to be wondered at that this dialect, then called Pehlevi, should have been pronounced an artificial jargon. Even when more genuine specimens of it became known, the language seemed so overgrown with Semitic and barbarous words, that it was expelled from the Iranian family. Sir W. Jones pronounced it to be a dialect of Chaldaic. Spiegel, however, who is now publishing the text of these translations, has established the fact that the language is truly Aryan, neither Semitic nor barbarous, but Persian in roots and grammar. He accounts for the large infusion of foreign terms by pointing to the mixed elements in the intellectual and religious life of Persia during and before that period. There was the Semitic influence of Babylonia, clearly discernible even in the characters of the Achæmenian inscriptions; there was the slow infiltration of Jewish ideas, customs, and expressions, working sometimes in the palaces of Persian kings, and always in the bazars of Persian cities, on high roads and in villages; there was the irresistible power of the Greek genius, which even under its rude Macedonian garb emboldened oriental thinkers to a flight into regions undreamed of in their philosophy; there were the academies, the libraries, the works of art of the Seleucidæ; there was Edessa on the Euphrates, a city where Plato and Aristotle were studied, where Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist tenets were discussed, where Ephraem Syrus taught, and Syriac translations were circulated which have preserved to us the lost originals of Greek and Christian writers. The title of the Avesta under its Semitic form Apestako, was known in Syria as well as in Persia, and the true name