128 



tiou to the Mazdean creed of Darius and liis Zoroastrian 

 followers.* 



A proof of the nou-Zoroastrian creed of Cyrus and Cam- 

 byses is shown in the fact that Gomates, the Magian, who 

 declared himself to Bardes, the Barziya of the inscriptions^ the 

 son of Cyrus, was a distinct opponent of the Zoroastrian 

 rites. For Darius, in the Behistun inscription, states that 

 he restored the sacrifices, rites, and sacred chants which 

 Gomates, the Magian, had taken away. Had Cyrus been a 

 rigid Zoroastrian Monotheist, the claimant who personified 

 his son would hardly have acted in this heretical manner. 

 The inscriptions at Mai Amir of the King Sutur-Kit, son of 

 Khanni-Kit, and which represent the dialect of the population 

 and the edicts of a dynasty reigning in the interval between 

 the fall of Susa, B.C. 645, and the rise of the Akhsemenian 

 sub-kingdom of Ansan, are cognate in dialect with the 

 Proto Median or Amardian of the second column of the 

 Behistun inscription. It was among this people that the 

 ancestors of Cyrus ruled, and so little was the great Zoroas- 

 trian god known to them, that Ormuzd is called annap 

 Arriynam (Behistun Col. iii., 77-79), — '"'the god of the 

 Aryans,^' — in their version of the royal proclamation. 

 These facts show that all the surroundings of Cyrus and his 

 ancestors were non- Aryan and anti-Mazdean; and these, taken 

 in conjunction with the facts that the name of Cambyses and 

 Cyrus, which are the typical ones of the dynasty, do not 

 admit of a satisfactory explanation by Aryan philology, would 

 seem to dispel for ever the idea of the Zoroastrian creed of 

 Cyrus, or of the apparent references to it in Isaiah. The 

 same conclusion, on somewhat different grounds, seems to 

 have been arrived at by Canon George Rawlinson {ContentjK 

 Rev., Jan., '80, p. 93), for he says, ''A wholly new light is 

 thrown on the character of the great Persian monarch, who, 

 instead of being inspired, as was supposed, by Monotheism, 

 and an almost fanatical hatred of idolatry, appears to have 

 been a politic prince, cool, cautious, somewhat of an in- 

 differentist in religion, and, if not a renegade from the faith of 

 his fathers, at any rate so broad in his views as to be willing 

 to identify his own Ahuramazda, the maker of hea,ven and 

 earth, the all-bounteous Spirit, alike with the one god of the 

 Jews,'' or with Merodach, the great Lord of the Babylonians. 



The conduct of Cyi-us, with regard to the chief gods of the 

 Babylonians and the God of the Jews, is exactly in accordance 



* On the diflerence of the creeds see Lenonnant's Chaldean Magic. 



