6. Two further philological considerations bear on the age of the Book.
i. One of these is the existence of no less than fifteen _Persian_ words (according to Nöldeke and others), especially in the Aramaic part. These words, which would not be surprising after the complete establishment of the Persian Empire, are surprising in passages which describe Babylonian institutions before the conquest of Cyrus.[56] Various attempts have been made to account for this phenomenon. Professor Fuller attempts to show, but with little success, that some of them may be Semitic.[57] Others argue that they are amply accounted for by the Persian trade which, as may be seen from the _Records of the Past_,[58] existed between Persia and Babylonia as early as the days of Belshazzar. To this it is replied that some of the words are not of a kind which one nation would at once borrow from another,[59] and that "no Persian words have hitherto been found in Assyrian or Babylonian inscriptions prior to the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, except the name of the god Mithra."
ii. But the linguistic evidence unfavourable to the genuineness of the Book of Daniel is far stronger than this, in the startling fact that it contains at least three Greek words. After giving the fullest consideration to all that has been urged in refutation of the conclusion, this circumstance has always been to me a strong confirmation of the view that the Book of Daniel in its present form is not older than the days of Antiochus Epiphanes.
Those three Greek words occur in the list of musical instruments mentioned in iii. 5, 7, 10, 15. They are: קיתרם, _kitharos_, κίθαρις, "harp"; פסנתרין, _psanterîn_, ψαλτήριον, "psaltery";[60] סומפניא, _sūmpōnyāh_, συμφωνία, A.V. "dulcimer," but perhaps "bagpipes."[61]
Be it remembered that these musical instruments are described as having (B.C. 550). Now, this is the date at which Pisistratus was tyrant at Athens, in the days of Pythagoras and Polycrates, before Athens became a fixed democracy. It is just conceivable that in those days the Babylonians might have borrowed from Greece the word _kitharis_.[62] It is, indeed, supremely _unlikely_, because the harp had been known in the East from the earliest days; and it is at least as probable that Greece, which at this time was only beginning to sit as a learner at the feet of the immemorial East, borrowed the idea of the instrument from Asia. Let it, however, be admitted that such words as _yayîn_, "wine" (οἶνος), _lappid_, "a torch" (λαμπάς), and a few others, _may_ indicate some early intercourse between Greece and the East, and that some commercial relations of a rudimentary kind were existent even in prehistoric days.[63]
But what are we to say of the two other words? Both are derivatives. _Psalterion_ does not occur in Greek before Aristotle (d. 322); nor _sumphonia_ before Plato (d. 347). In relation to music, and probably as the name of a musical instrument, _sumphonia_ is first used by Polybius (xxvi. 10, § 5, xxxi. 4, § 8), and _in express connexion_ with the festivities of the very king with whom the apocalyptic section of Daniel is mainly occupied--Antiochus Epiphanes.[64] The attempts of Professor Fuller and others to derive these words from Semitic roots are a desperate resource, and cannot win the assent of a single trained philologist. "These words," says Professor Driver, "could not have been used in the Book of Daniel, unless it had been written after the dissemination of Greek influence in Asia through the conquest of Alexander the Great."[65]