Neither shall the Arabian pitch his tent there; And wolves shall howl to one another in their palaces, From the few particulars recorded of the Assyrian empire, it appears to have been lower in the scale of civilization than the Babylonian. Nineveh, according to the description of the prophet Nahum, was an encampment rather than a commercial mart; its destruction therefore produced very little effect on surrounding nations, and its very name soon sunk into oblivion. * Isaiah xiii. 19-22. CHAPTER III. PERSIAN CIVILIZATION. "THE Persian Empire," says Professor Heeren, “ owed its origin to one of those great political revolutions which are of such frequent occurrence in Asia. A rude mountain tribe of nomade habits rushed with impetuous rapidity from its fastnesses, and overwhelmed all the nations of Southern Asia (the Arabians excepted), from the Mediterranean to the Indus and Jaxartes. Even the nearest parts of Europe and Asia were shaken by their onset, and to a certain extent subdued; and in spite of frequent insurrections which broke out in these and other portions of their empire, and were not always completely repressed, the Persians continued to maintain their general supremacy for a period of full two centuries." * Few nations of antiquity seem to have taken more pains to transmit an account of their early history, policy, and government, to posterity. We find in the Book of Esther that a record was kept in the royal chronicles of every important event connected with the administration. When the conspiracy of the eunuchs against Ahasuerus was discovered by Mordecai, "inquisition was made of the matter, and when it was found out, they were both hanged on a tree, and it was written in the Book of the Chronicles before the king."+ But notwithstanding all their care, our knowledge of the political and social condition of the ancient Persians is principally derived from the writings of * Heeren's Asiatic Nations, i. 92. + Esther ii. 23. the Hebrews and the Greeks; the native records were destroyed in the many successive revolutions which have desolated Central Asia; and the few facts imperfectly preserved by tradition have been so perverted by national pride and poetic fiction, that they can scarcely be received as illustrations, much less as authorities. From the time of the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great (B. c. 330) to the restoration of a native dynasty by Ardeshir Babegan (A. D. 226), a period of more than five centuries, Persia was subject to the iron rule of foreigners, who hated and persecuted her ancient literature, institutions, and religion. The Seleucida, who inherited the dominions of Alexander in Asia, made it the great object of their policy to Hellenize the nations subject to their sway; they persecuted equally the religion of the Jews and of the Persians, and they speedily lost their empire over both. Headed by the gallant Maccabees, the Jews recovered their independence, but the Persians only exchanged the Syrian yoke for that of the Parthians—a race indeed cognate to their own, but for that very reason eager to destroy the memory of their former degradation. If any effort was made after the restoration of the Sassanid to collect the scattered materials of Persian history, and to gather the memorials of the early greatness of the nation, it is obvious that after the lapse of five centuries such labours could not have been very successful. Some religious books were probably preserved by the priests who found shelter in the mountains of Iran: the ballads in which Xenophon informs us that the memory of popular heroes and monarchs was celebrated,* might have survived in tradition, and from these an imperfect record might have been compiled. But even these scanty records had. to undergo new and more fiery ordeals: the Arabs, in the first burst of their enthusiasm after their embracing Mohammedanism, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, overran and subdued Persia, destroying in the fury of their fanaticism every memorial of its ancient religion and history. Doubts have been thrown on the burning of the library at Alexandria by the followers of the Prophet of Mecca, but no one has ever questioned the destruction of the great library collected at Ctesiphon or Al Modain; it was one of the first objects against which the bigotry of the Arab conquerors was directed. "We learn," says Sir John Malcolm, "from every cotemporary historian, that the followers of the Prophet of Arabia were so irritated by the obstinacy with which the Persians defended their independence and their religion, that they destroyed with bigoted fury all that could keep alive a spirit they found it so difficult to subdue: cities were razed; temples were burnt; the holy priests that officiated in them were slaughtered; and the books in which were written whatever the learned of the nation knew, either of general science or of their own history and religion, were, with their possessors, devoted to destruction. The priests of the Persians, who were termed mujous,* or magi, were all considered sorcerers, and their profane works were viewed as the implements of their wicked art. For a proof of this feeling, we have only to refer to the popular tales of Arabia, where we find that every act of wickedness or of witchcraft, is the deed of a Gueber, or * This comes from the Persian word mugh, which signifies an infidel priest; generally applied to the priests of the Guebers, but sometimes to Christians. This word is sometimes used in Persian poetry to signify a tavern-keeper. This is, however, only a metaphorical application of the term.—M. a Gaur;* and that term, which means no more than a follower of Zoroaster, has, from the impressions it excited at the dawn of their religion, become synonymous with the reproachful eepithet of infidel over the whole Mohammedan world."+ It was not until after nearly four centuries that any effort was made to collect the relics of the Persian archives which survived the second catastrophe, and the few fragments recovered were given to the poet Firdausi by the celebrated Mahmood of Ghizni, to form the basis of an epic poem. The Shah-Nameh, or Book of Kings, as Firdausi's poem is called, has thus become the great source of all the subsequent accounts of Persia written by natives. of that country; from what we have said, it is evident that the poet's materials must have been miserably scanty; and it may be added, that his attention was more particularly directed to whatever concerned Eastern Persia, to which his patron belonged, and that he neglected Western Persia, which was precisely the part that most occupied the attention of the Greeks and the Hebrews. Some oriental antiquarians have shown a disposition to prefer the native Persian accounts to those of the Greeks, but the preceding statement is quite sufficient to prove that the authority of Firdausi cannot be placed in competition with that of Herodotus. On the other hand, the Rev. Dr. Wall has argued from the present inconsistency and absurdity of Persian history, as given by native writers, that the Persians never had historical records. All the authorities, sacred and profane, however, concur in establishing the fact that chronicles were regularly kept under * Gaur is a corrupt abbreviation of Gueber, as Moal is of Mogul, etc.-M. + Sir J. Malcolm's Persia, i. 200. |