PARTHIA. 
457 
Kara-Choran, or Sulimania; all thickly inhabited by bold and 
independent men. The authority of their native chiefs is not 
always hereditary from father to son, but often given according 
to the real or supposed merit of any other member of the family ; 
the respect of the whole tribe for its pre-eminent race, being un¬ 
alienable ; and like all aboriginal nations, the people have a 
general reverence for ancestry. They claim their descent direct 
from Noah; and few can date an ancient lineage from better 
grounds, Ararat being one of their own great mountain-chain, 
and what is habitable of its stupendous sides being even now 
covered with Courdish tribes. The whole of what was properly 
Carduchia, took in a part of Armenia, also a sweep of Media? 
and certainly a part of Assyria. It has been imagined by some 
writers, that these people are the remains of the Parthians who 
displaced the Seleucidse ; but had we no other arguments against 
the idea, Herodotus presents one in speaking of the Parthians 
and the Gourds in a manner that shews them different na¬ 
tions. Strabo and Pliny, with some other authors, place the 
Parthian country more to the east; and modern investigation 
deems it to be found in the fine provinces to the east of Mazan- 
deraun, (the ancient Hyrcania,) and immediately south of the 
Caspian Sea. That some classic writers should notice the 
Courds as Parthians, while a Parthian dynasty were masters of 
the old Persian empire and all its dependencies, does not im¬ 
peach our argument; the whole people of the land, from the 
banks of the Persian Gulf to those of the Tigris and the Caspian, 
being then indiscriminately called Parthians, as members of the 
empire which bore that general name. 
I have already remarked, that the manners of the people of 
this mountain-region, seem as unchangeable as their rocks ; but 
3 N 
VOL. II. 
