SANSKRIT AND INDO-EUROPEAN 5 1 Grandson of the waters 1 (a divinity), etc. In this field, how- ever, movements of religious reform with which the name of Zarathustra is associated have tended to alter the picture from the Iranian side. For instance Av. daeva-, O. Pers. daiva corresponding to Sanskrit devd- ' god ' has acquired the meaning of f devil In the same way some Vedic divinities appear in the Avestu as evil spirits : Skt. Indra Ndsatya- : Av. Indra, Ndyhaidya-. The material for Old Iranian is somewhat restricted both as to quantity and as regards the number of dialects represented. For the Middje Iranian period, thanks mainly to discoveries of the present century, the documentation is much wider. We now have, in addition to Middle Persian proper (Pahlavi) ex- tensive documents in two important East Iranian languages which are not represented in the early period, namely Sogdian and Saka (mainly in the dialect of Khotan, but with a few texts in a neighbouring dialect). The publication and interpreta- tion of the material in these languages has progressed rapidly and successfully, but the results are not yet in the main avail- able in a form easily accessible to students of general Indo-Aryan or Indo-European philology. Eventually a considerable contri- bution should be available from this source, because, although they cannot compete in antiquity with the Avestan and Old Persian texts, they constitute independent branches of Iranian which were not previously known and therefore have preserved things which were lost elsewhere from an early period . 1 In the mediaeval period the domain of Iranian became very much restricted, mainly on account of Turkish expansion. Over large tracts of Central Asia Iranian has long since died out. It has remained principally in Iran or Persia proper, where modern Persian can look back to a continuous literary tradition of over a thousand years. On the periphery of this area, par- ticularly on the Indo-Iranian frontier, there are still many minor languages surviving in small areas, and one which is still important, namely Pasto, the official language of Afghanistan, At the other side of the territory in the Northern Caucasus Ossetic still survives from one of the numerous Iranian invas- ions of South Russia. 1 For instance the IE word lor ‘ (young) pig Lat. porous, Lith. parkas, was not previously known in Indo-Iranian, but has now turned up in Khotanese : pa'sa
