INTRODUCTION. 79 



from the quality of riding or charioteering; in a 

 secondary sense, an exalted people, and was con- 

 nected with a dialect, if not Sanscrit, at least Zend 

 or Pelhevi, not remote from Maesogothic and Teu- 

 tonic, where pherd, perd, paert are dialectical varia- 

 tions of the same origin, and even the Latin ferro * 

 is not an alien. We may therefore suspect that 

 pra, para, &c., in common with many other Indo- 

 Sacian, Germanic, or Scythic t words abounding in 

 the Arabic and other Semitic languages, were im- 

 ported by the first equestrian colonies that invaded 

 Syria and Egypt. We find it in a remoter sense in 

 the name of phre, a title of the sun, the charioteer 

 and the image of beauty, as it is again in the West, 

 where the Scandinavian freya and fray denote 

 beauty and pre-eminence : these inferences are fur- 

 ther supported by the Babylonian name ninus, 

 ninnus, Mnnus, through the Greek www, from an 



* Probably through the imperative fer, which is radically 

 the same as Phra, Phar, the " Car-born" Pharoah and, Per- 

 sian, Varanes seem both to be epithets derived from faren^ 

 varen. Even the Sanscrit mystical boar Vahrahan^ Teutonic 

 Vehr, and Latin Verus preserves the character, if not of being 

 borne, but of bearing up ; for he upholds the world on his tusks. 



f We use the term Scythic for want of one more explicit, 

 and understand by it the Caucasian nations of the northern 

 half of ancient Asia, who, being provided with horses, came 

 across the Jaxartes, down the Oxus and the Indus, across the 

 Tigris, the Euphrates, to the Bosphoms and the Nile, in the 

 character of conquerors more than colonists. Servius, in his 

 remarks on the language of Virgil, who in common with most 

 ancient writers gives the creation of the horse to Neptune, 

 states that some name this horse Scythius. 



