Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 144

i3«
LE NORD
scale, he gave the first comprehensive description of the ancient
history and geography of the Iranian border country, and he also
made contributions to the study of the Indo-Iranian border
language of Baluchistan.
Westergaard, on the other hand, became gradually more and
more absorbed by his interest in things Iranian, and may almost
be called the first real Iranologist of Europe. Lassen and others
had published parts of the Avesta, but the first collected and as
yet the most complete edition is that of Westergaard (1852—54),
to which students often have recourse to this very day in order
to consult Westergaard’s readings. When, more than forty years
later, the German scholar Geldner prepared a new edition on
the basis of MSS which had become available after Westergaard’s
time, he wrote:
“The much more difficult editio princeps was successfully
prepared by Westergaard in an admirable manner. Westergaard
used the MSS available to him so skilfully, and the resulting
text is such a model of its kind, that nothing would have remained
for me to do but for the emergence of fresh MS material--------
(which) has enabled me to improve on some of Westergaard’s de-
tails and to adduce better authority for things which he had read
correctly.” In Westergaard’s edition, students had at last been
provided with a satisfactory tool for the methodical philological
investigation of the Avesta, and from the middle of the century
continual progress was made in the study of the Avestan language
and religion.
In another field too, Westergaard did pioneer work, viz. by
his edition of the cosmological book of “Bundehesh,” the first
edition of a Pahlavi text to be published in Europe. Pahlavi is
the Middle Iranian language which later Zarathustran scholars
used in their translations of and commentaries to the Avesta,
and in their own theological and other writings. The reading of
Pahlavi was made very difficult by the complicated system of
notation, in which a number of signs and ligatures are exasperat-
ingly ambiguous, and the understanding of which is further
hampered by the use of so-called ideograms, i. e. words written
in Semitic, but meant to be read in Middle Persian. It was thus
no mean achievement at that time to overcome the difficulties
of editing a Pahlavi text.
Westergaard also published a catalogue of his own and Rask’s
manuscript collections, which is a model of its kind. On a leaf