LOSS OF PERSIA TO THE CALIPHS. 
45 
regarded as the palladium of Persian independence ; and the mo¬ 
ment so important a piece of superstitious reverence fell into his 
hand, he ordered it to be held aloft, and proclaimed himself 
master of the empire. But the country was not entirely con¬ 
quered till the following year, when one last effort was made by 
Yezdijird, on the plain of Nahavund. He gathered together the 
relics of his former army ; and, with better hearts than fortune, 
they maintained their ground against the enemy, till their bodies 
covered, it. That day, the sceptre of Darius passed into the 
grasp of an Arabian caliph, and the temples of Zoroaster sunk 
before the mosques of Mahomet. Yezdijird did not perish in the 
field; an assassin’s hand drew the last blood of Cyrus ; but the 
laudable respect was paid to his remains, of sending them to Per- 
sepolis to be entombed with his ancestors. In him, as I before 
observed, terminated a race that derived its stock from Darius 
Hystaspes, and the great founder of the empire; but the memory 
of which, in its latter branch, is still revered in the names of Ar- 
dashir, Shapoor, Baharam Gour; and Noushirvan the great Chos- 
roes, in whose reign the arch-impostor of Arabia was born. After 
the final defeat of the Mithratic king, the victorious army of the 
caliph over-ran the whole empire; destroying with bigot fury every 
memorial of past greatness, every symbol of what had hitherto 
been deemed sacred in that unhappy land. A large proportion of 
the inhabitants, preferring a new creed and their old possessions, 
to their old faith with poverty and oppression, swore allegiance 
to the laws, civil and religious, of the prophet of Mecca. Others, 
disdaining to barter the faith of their fathers, for any favour in 
the eyes of their enemies, retired, self-exiled, into distant coun¬ 
tries. Some few indeed, poor, and stedfast to their creed, not 
having it in their power to seek a distant asylum, remained 
