The Greater Bundahisn

The task which I set myself when I undertook to study the text of the Greater Bundahisn was at that time by no means clear either in its difficulty or its extent. Nor could I then know to what degree the increased knowledge of Iranian, in particular, of Middle Iranian, the period from about 300 B.C. to 900 A.D., had made understanding of this text possible. Iranian studies attained to a new birth when in 1904 the results of archaeological expeditions to central Asia were first made known. By these discoveries of MSS the difficulties of reading Pahlavi were at once lightened. It was certain that if the vocabulary of Western Persia of Sasanian times were fully known, the Zoroastrian Pahlavi texts could no longer hide their secrets under the cursive alphabet which had hindered the progress of earlier scholars. Not only the Western dialects but also the recently discovered Sogdian and Saka have naturally enriched our understanding of the Middle Iranian vocabulary. But the lack of complete indexes of the words of theses two dialects still renders their use difficult. For Saka, besides the published indexes (of which the most important has only just appeared in Sten Konow's Saka Studies) I made my own index of all the unindexed Saka so far published. For Sogdian there has been the grammar of Buddhist Sogdian by R. Gauthiot, besides which I have had some indexed material of my own. Reichelt's promised glossary of Buddhist Sogdian has not yet appeared. The few Manichean Sogdian texts so far published (by F.W.K. Miller and Waldschmidt-Lentz) have yielded interesting words. For the Christian Sogdian there is the index in F.W.K. Muller's Soghdische Texte. From Introduction; continued in thesis ... .