﻿ON THE PERSIANS. 47 



of Sasan, except a few rustic traditions and fables, 

 which furnished materials for the Shahnamah, and 

 which are still supposed to exist in the Pahlavi lan- 

 guage. All the annals of the Pishdadi, or Assyrian 

 race, must be considered as dark and fabulous ; and 

 those of the Cayanl family, or the Medes and Persians, 

 as heroic and poetical ; though the lunar eclipses, 

 said to be mentioned by Ptolemy, fix the time of 

 Gushtasp, the prince by whom Zeratush was pro- 

 tected, of the Parthian kings descended from Ar- 

 shac or Arsaces, we know little more than the names; 

 but the Sasanis had so long an intercourse with the 

 emperors of Rome and Byzantium, that the period 

 of their dominion may be called an historical age. 

 ]n attempting to ascertain the beginning of the Assy- 

 rian empire, we are deluded, as in a thousand instances, 

 by names arbitrarily imposed. It had been settled 

 by chronologers, that the first monarchy established 

 in Persia was the Assyrian ; and Newton, finding 

 some of opinion, that it rose in the first century af- 

 ter the Flood, but unable by his own calculations to 

 extend it farther back than seven hundred and ninety 

 years before Christ, rejected part of the old system, 

 and adopted the rest of it ; concluding, that the As- 

 syrian monarchs began to reign about two hundred 

 years after Solomon, and that, in all preceding ages, 



the government of Iran had been divided into several 

 o .... _ . . . 



petty states and principalities. Of this opinion 1 con- 

 fess myself to have been ; when, disregarding the wild 

 chronology of the Mnsehnans and Gahrs, I had al- 

 lowed the utmost natural duration to the reigns of 

 eleven Pishdadi kings, without being able to add 

 more than a hundred years to Newton s computation. 

 It seemed indeed unaccountably strange, that, although 

 Ahraham had found a regular monarchy in Egypt ; 

 although the kingdom of Yemen had just pretensions 

 to very high antiquity; although the Chinese, in the 

 twelfth century before our sera, had made approaches 



