HISTORY OF CASHMIR. 91 



was first acquired, and may have formed an Episode in the i>. .ous and for 

 a time triumphant invasion of Persia, by the Tartar king Arjasp ; when 

 Khorasan was plundered, Balkh was taken, and the old king of Persia 

 Lohrasp was included in the general massacre of the priests and follow- 

 ers of Zoroaster.* If the king of Persia, Gushtasp, the object of these 

 hostilities, be the same with Darius Hystaspes, as seems probable, these 

 events should have occurred between the years B.C. 521 and 485 — By the 

 computation of the Sanscrit text, the Turushka princes must have reigned 

 some time subsequent to Sdcya Sinha, who as Gautama dates B.C. 542, but 

 it is not at all clear that the three princes were cotemporary, and we have 

 no guide to the duration of their authority, beyond the inferences already 

 alluded to, derived from its ceasing within a century and a half after the death 

 of the legislator : supposing them then to have been half a century later, they 

 vwill be cotemporary with the war between the Persian and Tartar monarchs, 

 and may have been individual adventurers who took advantage of the tem- 

 porary confusion to establish themselves in Cashmir : it is also worthy of 

 observation, that as they brought with them a new impulse to the Bauddha 

 religion, so the war between Arjasp and Gushtasp was entirely religious, 

 arising out of the attempt of the former to compej the latter to revert to the 

 common faith of their ancestors, very probably the Bauddha or Sd/cyan, that 

 of the Sacce or Scythians, which Gushtasp had abandoned for the religion 

 of the Medes, the worship of Fire.| 



If the Tartar princes then governed Cashmir through the greater part of 



* Malcolm's Persia, i. 62. 



f In the days of Cyrus, as well observed by Volney, tbe Persians did not worship the elements : 

 this opinion is founded on the account given by Nicolas Damascenus of the pile prepared to burn Croe- 

 sus, which Volney infers he derived from Xanthus who wrote a history of the kings of Lydia 40 years 

 before Herodotus: it was on that occasion the historian states, that the Persians established the law, 

 conformably to tbe oracles of Zoroaster, that Fire should be no more contaminated with the carcases 

 of the dead. Chronologie D'Herodote, 251. . In the code of the Parsis however the other elements 

 receive equal veneration. Elementa enim omnia tenentur servari pura. Hyde Hist. Relig. vet. 

 Per. 414. Persoe nolentes Terram pollucre defunctorum corpora non humant, &c. Ibid. Yet the 

 Tomb of Cyrus was very celebrated, and even Darius Hystaspes himself is said by Ktesias to havo 

 had his tomb prepared whilst living— how are these contradictions to be reconciled. 



