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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
TITLES OF THE SASANIAN GOVERNMENT
rt IX sa-pao, *sa8 (sar) -pay. Title of the official in charge of the affairs of the Persian religion in Si-nan, an office dating back to the time when temples of the celestial god of fire were erected there, about A.D. 621. In an excellent article PELLIOT has assembled all texts relative to this function.' I do not believe, however, that we are justified in accepting Devéria's theory that the Chinese transcription should render Syriac saba ("old man"). This plainly conflicts with the laws of transcription so rigorously expounded and upheld by Pelliot himself : it is necessary to account for the final dental or liquid in the character sa, which regularly appears in the Tang transcriptions. It would be strange also if the Persians should have applied a Syriac word to a sacred institution of their own. It is evident that the Chinese transcription corresponds to a Middle-Persian form traceable to Old Persian x.aOra-pavan (x.çpava, x§açapava), which resulted in Assyrian ax.adarapan or ax.adrapan, Hebrew axa. darfnim,2 Greek varp&irns (Armenian . ahapand, Sanskrit kgitrapa). The Middle-Persian form from which the Chinese transcription was very exactly made must have been *saB-p,v or *xsaO-pay. The character sa renders also Middle and New Persian sar ("head, chief ") .3
J ID Ktu-sa-ho, *Ku-sa5(r)-7wa, was the title of the
kings of Pârsa (Persia).4 This transcription appears to be based on an Iranian x. aOva or x§area, corresponding to Old Iranian *xséyavan-, *xsaivan, Sogdian xévan ("king ").5 It is notable that the initial spirant x is plainly and aptly expressed in Chinese by the element k`u,6 while in the preceding transcription it is suppressed. The differentiation in time may possibly account for this phenomenon: the transcription sa-pao comes down from about A.D. 621; while K`u-sa-ho, being con-
Le Sa-pao, Bull. de l'Ecole française, Vol. III, pp. 665-671. 2 H. POGNON, Journal asiatique, 1917, I, p. 395.
'R. GAUTHIOT, Journal asiatique, 1911, II, p. 6o.
6 Sui hi, Ch. 83, p. 7 b.
5 R. GAUTHIOT, Essai sur le vocalisme du sogdien, p. 97. See also the note of ANDREAS in A. Christensen, L'Empire des Sassanides, p. 113. I am unable to see how the Chinese transcription could correspond to the name Khosrou, as proposed by several scholars (CHAVANNES, Documents sur les Tou-kiue occidentaux, p. 171; and HIRTH, Journal Am. Or. Soc., Vol. XXXIII, 1913, p. 197).
s In the Manichan transcriptions it is expressed by II+ *xu (hu); see CHAVANNES and PELLIOT, Traité manichéen, p. 25.
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