نسخة مذيلة من "بلاد فارس والشأن الفارسي" بقلم جورج كرزون، مع أوراق مدرجة [ظ‎‎٦‎٩] (١٨١٤/١٤٥)

6
PERSIA
a frequent, if also the most futile, battlefield of science. They
were the first of the Indo-European family to embrace a purely
monotheistic faith. Amongst them appealed Zarathustra, or
Zoroaster, the second in date of the great religious teachers of the
East, if, indeed, he ever appeared at all. 2 Thence sprang the
ennobling creed of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Then the A\esta took
shape, and there was kindled the fire that, all but extinguished
on its parent altars, still lights a subdued but steadfast flame in
the rich and comfortable exile of Bombay.
As we descend the stately flight of Persian history we en
counter many a name familiar to us from childhood. Dismissing
Drama of l e R en d ai y as appertaining to a region of myth more
Persian nebulous in the case of Iran than of almost any
instory countl y ? we are confronted with the illustrious figures of
Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, whose handwriting still echoes their
fame from the halls where they ruled and feasted. A succession
of meteoric phenomena, the wonder or the scourge of humanity,
an Alexander, a Jenghiz Khan, a Timur, a Nadir Shah, pass, at
different epochs, in a trail of fire and blood across the scene.
The direst day of the later Roman Commonwealth was when the
legions of Crassus were strewn on the plain of Carrhae. Twice did
a Roman Caesar surrender to a Persian or semi-Persian conqueror;
when the Emperor Valerian bowed his neck beneath the heel of
Shapur I. ; and when the Emperor Romanus Diogenes fell a
prisoner to the Seljuk Alp Arslan, the Great Lion. The death
in battle of a third, the renowned Julian, was a triumph more
precious than a battlefield to the second Shapur. Twice also, in
the days of the famous Chosroes, or Nushirwan, and again under
his grandson, the second Chosroes or Parviz, the borders of Iran
were extended to the Mediterranean, and the terror of her
1 I am aware that it is now asserted that the Aryans never came from Asia at
all. Bat, for the present, I hesitate to adopt either the Sarmatian theory (Dr.
Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, translated by F. B. Jevons,
1890 ; and Canon I. Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, 1890) or the Scandinavian
theory (Herr Penka, Pie Herltunft der Arier, 1886), for fear of being presently
invited to surrender them for a third and, as yet, undiscovered alternative. In
the meantime, therefore, I prefer the old Asian hypothesis, to which Professor J.
Schmidt has gallamly rallied in an essay published in 1890 in the Transactions of
the Royal Academy of Berlin.
Again a necessary qualification, seeing’ that so learned an authority as Pro
fessor Darmesteter has found in the personality of Zoroaster nothing more sub
stantial than a product of the ubiquitous storm-myth.’