Owning an ancient manuscript did not mean being able to read it. In 1754, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) saw lines copied from an Avestan text, part of the Zoroastrian religious tradition. European scholars had written extensively about Zoroaster, but this writing remained beyond their secure understanding. Anquetil believed that the people who preserved such books could also teach him what they said.
He enlisted as a soldier to obtain a passage to India, setting out before John Zephaniah Holwell (1711–1798) published his claims about an ancient Indian scripture. The two searches arose independently from the hope that Asian texts might illuminate the earliest religious past. Anquetil’s route led eventually to the Parsi custodians of Zoroastrian learning at Surat, where study required teachers, payment, copies, and the use of intermediary languages. His access depended on people whose religious books were also part of their continuing community life.
The manuscripts themselves provided a measure of what the journey had achieved. On his return through England, Anquetil visited Oxford and compared his copies with the Avestan material whose unread script had helped send him abroad. A library’s isolated text now belonged to a much larger collection, accompanied by what he had learned from its custodians. The work reached European readers in his Zend-Avesta of 1771.
The encounter complicated the familiar European image of an ancient sage. Texts learned through living interpreters did not necessarily contain the philosophy that readers expected Zoroaster to have taught. The work Anquetil brought home invited argument about its authenticity, his competence, and the standing of the teachers who had instructed him. A journey to the source had enlarged the evidence without ending the dispute.
His later Oupnek’hat opened another important body of Asian learning to European readers. It rendered the Upanishads, Indian texts about reality and the self, into Latin through a Persian translation. The route mattered to the result, even where readers welcomed the book as direct access to primordial wisdom. Behind the printed Latin stood generations of interpretation and particular acts of translation, each contributing to the ancient teaching a European reader believed he had discovered.