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"The strict moral and military education," says Schlegel, "which this nobility received, and of which Xenophon has drawn such a beautiful ideal sketch, constituted the chief strength of the state. And certainly the neglect of this old Persian system of education was one of the primary causes of the decline of the empire-a decline which the progressive relaxation and corruption of public morals accelerated with fearful rapidity. After the first mighty impulse which Cyrus had imparted to Persia disappeared, the same fate befell this empire which has befallen all the great Oriental monarchies. The same evils which the domination of provincial satraps, and a government of the seraglio invariably induce-factions, conspiracies, changes of dynasty, and other disorders incident to despotism, appear in exactly similar colours in the Persian annals; and even in the modern kingdom of Persia we find many of those characteristic traits or usages of Asiatic government as they existed in the ancient empire."1 The repulse of three successive invasions from the shores of Greece; the naval war of thirty years that followed the victories of Platea and Mycale, (B. c. 479;) the facility with which Greek armies penetrated the heart of the empire,—all these circumstances gradually ripened in Greece the idea of a Pan-Hellenic confederacy for the conquest of Asia. This was at length accomplished by Alexander of Macedon; and the death of the third Darius (Codomannus), after the battle of Arbela, (B. C. 331,) placed the tiara of the eastern world on the brow of the Greek conqueror. On his death the empire was parted into various kingdoms, among his generals and their descendants: most of these territories were gradually absorbed in the dominion of Rome. But in the third century B. C. Arsaces a chief of Parthia,2 heading a revolt from the oppressions of the Syrian Seleucid kings, founded a new Persian empire, which long employed the Roman arms. The Arsacidæ reigned from "the Euphrates to India, and from the Caspian to the Arabian Sea," for nearly 500 years. Artaxerxes (Ardshir), a native Persian, founded a new dynasty, the Sassanides.3 (A.D. 226.) The new king re

1 The Persian government appears in Scripture as the protector and patron of the Jews. The edict of Cyrus (Khoresh), a name mentioned by Jehovah himself in their prophecies, sanctioned their restoration; and its authority procured them the countenance of Darius and his successors. Their gratitude led them to espouse the Persian cause at the Macedonian invasion; but an alleged dream and the sight of the references in the prophets to his conquests disarmed the resentment of Alexander, who treated them with great favour.

2 A district to the east of the southern Caspian.

3 So called from his father Sassan.

stored the ancient religion of Zoroaster. In the seventh century of the Christian era the Mahometan conquest extinguished the Sassanian monarchy, and almost extirpated the ancient faith, whose votaries the Parsees, thinly scattered in Persia, and more numerously in north-western India, still continue to worship the elemental fire.1

The extinction of the Persian Empire, after a duration of 208 years, by the Macedonian Alexander, brings us to the period when Europe came into more immediate contact with Asia, and when in the diffusion of Greek arts, learning, and speech, the way was prepared for the fulness of time which was to give birth to the greatest of the revolutions among mankind. Greek sovereigns in general were reigning in the divided monarchies of the old empires; Rome had emerged scarcely a century and a half from her mythic history, but the literature of Greece had shed a steady light, for several centuries previous, on the history of the Levantine countries. The object of the present sketch being purely chronological, room has not been afforded for noticing the origin and growth of the peculiar features and institutions of nations, and the reciprocal results of their intercontact. We have been forced to overlook the history of castes in Asiatic society, (especially that of the priesthood,) and the changes and mitigations of this element in the nations of western Asia. China and India, two of Schlegel's four primitive nations, and the alleged sources of much that characterized Egypt and the neighbouring western countries, are omitted as not coming in contact with the main streams of ancient historical chronology. The Etruscan and Pelasgic antiquities are far beyond chronological reach, and we call attention again to the fact that history, beyond even the sphere of her nearer mythic traditions, contemplates, like geology, the fragments of an earlier

1 The history of Iran, the native name of Persia, as represented in the Zend sacred books, in the poets, and in Mohammedan writers, will be found in Malcolm's great work. This early history, with its tales of Giam-shid, the founder of the nation, its Jins and Deevs, miracles and gods, is followed by singular distortions of the facts found in ancient history of more authentic times. The authorities for the history of ancient Assyria, Babylon, and Persia, besides the Scripture, are, chiefly, Herodotus and Xenophon, with fragments of the writings of Ctesias, the Greek physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon; of Berosus, a priest of Belus, and of Abydenus, both contemporary, or nearly so, with Alexander the Great. To these may be added the list of the Babylonian kings in the astronomical canon of Ptolemy. See Skene's Sacred Chronology, p. 104. This little work furnishes a good idea of the difficulties that attend the investigation of ancient chronology.

historic world.1 We are left to wonder at the remoteness of the times "when there were giants in the earth'-when high aspirations nerved the stalwarth arms, that with the aid of unrecorded mechanism created the marvels of Nineveh, Babylon, and Thebes-excavated Karli and Ellora2arched the Etruscan Cloace, and upreared the Memphian Pyramids." The stones of Egypt have yet to unfold their shrouded history; and Assyria may yet give up her buried lore to link preceding ages to the history of the later times of Persia, of which on scarped precipices and architectural remains" we may read "the very tales to which Herodotus has familiarized us, respecting the prowess of Darius and the glory of Xerxes, recorded by those monarchs themselves, and coupled with thanksgivings to Auramazda,3 or the modest epitaph of Cyrus (Qurus) the king, the Achaemenian, which claims the goodly antiquity of 530 years before the Christian era."

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The following eloquent summary of the progress of Asiatic superstition will form a not inappropriate appendage to the history of a time when the old east was broken up by Greek invasion, and destined shortly to be recemented by the omnipotence of Rome. "It appears to have been before the dispersion from Shinar that mankind fell from the love and possession of revealed truth, and were successively betrayed into every form of religious delusion. So early did they begin to adore the ascending sun, the moon walking in her brightness, and the multitudinous stars-to acknowledge the diffusion of the Deity through heaven, ocean, earth, and all the elements-to revere each divine emanation that moves in the animal and breathes in the plant-to abase themselves in presence of the formless fetish which they had arbitrarily selected-to consecrate the symbol of the image of their own fashioning-to invoke with vows and offerings the soul of the departed hero-to weave the reminiscences of patriarchal history, as well as the promises of future grace, into the tissue of a wild mythology. The attributes of the Creator and the created were gradually interfused, when both were conceived as but the corresponding parts of boundless and

1 Muller, in the History of the Literature of Greece, uses this comparison, to illustrate the condition of the earliest forms of the Greek language. The same thought is found in a preceding article at page 89.

2 Karli, between Bombay and Poonah; Ellore, the capital of one of the Circars, on the Bay of Bengal.

3 Ormuzd.

eternal Nature; when, in the language of different systems, they were represented, in relation to each other, as the soul and the body,—the source and the efflux,—the river and the lake, the pencil of light and the mirror,-the lusty bridegroom and his coy spouse,-the unresting agent and the passive recipient of all imaginable forms;—the vivifying ardour of heaven and the blossoming productiveness of earth. Thus the two principles were looked upon as mutually dependent and as interchanging their attributes. The visible and tangible were deemed to be an extension of the unseen and impalpable,—the fleeting forms of external existence to be emanations of the sempiternal glory; the spiritual essence was identified with the ethereal nutriment of the starry host, while the material appeared to embody the life which glows in the flower-bed-that sublunary galaxy and both were symbolized by the flame which, descending from the thunder-cloud, or spiring upward in gaseous exhalations from the soil of Baku,1 is cherished upon the altar, unsullied by the magian's breath. Further-it was still Asiatic speculation, which, after it was once fascinated by the dark side of Providence-by that broad shadow of physical and moral deformity which bisects the chart of the universe, sublimed the impersonation of evil into a power that might rival the good Lord; and presently around either antagonist were. arrayed angel bands, either swathed in gloom or enrobed in light, who were believed to be engaged in an unintermitting struggle for ascendency, as well in the bosom of man as throughout the infinitude of space. The belief in a Duad, however, through the necessity for finding an umpire or a mediator, gradually merged into a Tritheism; and this again proved to be of so expansive a genius, as in some quarters to comprehend innumerable genies and æons of conflicting interests, and in some others to coalesce with Sabiism in forming a new front for the effete varieties of worship which Christianity was advancing to assail."

GREECE.

The progress of our knowledge of the analogies of languages has in modern times greatly facilitated the means of identifying the connexions, and tracing the migrations of

In the Persian province of Shirvan on the south-west shore of the Caspian. The vicinity abounds with sulphur and naphtha, and the soil emits gaseous inflammable steams.

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races of mankind. In a broad belt extending from Southern Asia to the north-west of Europe, stretch the nations which from their languages and other circumstances have been termed Indo-European. These seem to have followed each other in successive waves westward, till we find the Kelts in the west, the Slavonic, Teutonic, and Gothic nations in the centre and north-west of Europe; and the Greeks, with their kindred races, along the line of the south. The people of ancient Phrygia and Armenia, with the Medes, Persians, and others, are assigned to the same stock, chiefly from the evident connexion of their languages with the Sanscrit, the sacred tongue of ancient India. Of these, in early times, the most important are the Greeks, from the impress which they left on the subsequent histories of Europe and Asia. The Greek Peninsulas and the Islands, the supposed remnants of a continent2 submerged by the outburst of an ocean through the Bosphori on the north-east of the Ægean, by a mountainous configuration, and by numerous intersections of the sea, seemed adapted for the habitation of communities of varied character and institution. We can merely glance at the dim antiquity of Greece's thousand years of mythic fable, in whose earlier centuries Pelasgi, Leleges, Epeans, and other tribes, occupied its districts, the successors of some earlier people who had passed westward in the progress of the earth's population. Of these times the gigantic Cyclopian3 ruins to this day speak, so old that they were antiquities when Homer sung; and the Pelasgic shrines of Samothrace and Dodona formed the bases of the seats of future superstitions. To these tribes succeeded the Hellenes, and the inferior races were either absorbed or driven westward into Italy and its Islands. The history of the country is that of the Hellenic nation. Hellen,+ the son of Deucalion, the mythological Noah, is the father of three sons, who give birth to four tribes, Eolians, Dorians, Ionians, and Acheans. Of these the Eolians were the most widely diffused, especially in southern Thessaly, in Boeotia, and in the west of Peloponnesus and Hellas. The Dorians gave name to the small mountain district of Doris in the north-west of Hellas, but their descendants overspread the

The belt is interrupted in Syria and the Euphrates valley by the nations who spoke the Semitic tongues. 2 Lectonia.

3 So termed from being ascribed to the Cyclopes; they are found in Argolis; they consist of immense irregular stones fitted without mortar; the walls of the early cities of Italy exhibit the same structure; it was found also in the edifices of the Peruvians and Mexicans.

4 A national hero of the Leleges.-Muller,

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