them again from his hands, would retain their title of Shâh[1] At the time when Tansar wrote, fourteen years had elapsed since Ardashir had begun his work: a part of it was done, the unity of the empire was restored: the only political task that remained to be performed was to avenge Dara's murder on Alexander's successors, and to exact from them the old tribute they had formerly paid to Persia for Egypt and Syria[2].
§ 13. Then remained the work of moral restoration. The Shâhinshâh s second task is to re-establish 'the law of the Ancients' (سنّة اوّلينان[3]). How shall that ideal of the past be brought again to light? There lay the difficulty, as the Avesta was all but lost, and the tradition of the law had been obliterated by revolutions and anarchy. 'You know that Alexander burnt in Istakhar[4] our sacred books written on twelve thousand ox-hides. There remained something of it in memory, but it was only legends and traditions[5]: nothing more was known of the religious laws and ordinances[6]; and at last, by the corruption of the men of those times, by the disappearance of the law, the love of novelties and apocrypha[7] and the wish for notoriety, even those legends and traditions passed away from the memory of the people, so that there was not a particle authentic
- ↑ Journal Asiatique, 1. 1. 513-514.
- ↑ 'Now the Shâhinshâh intends to go to war against Rûm and he will not rest till he has avenged Dara's blood on the Alexandrides, enriched his own treasury and the treasury of the state, and restored the towns which Alexander spitefully destroyed in Fârs. He must exact from them the tribute which they always paid to our kings for the Coptic country and Syria, which our kings had formerly conquered in the land of the Hebrews, at the time of the invasion of Bokht-Nasr' (1.1. pp. 548-549).—Ardashîr's pretensions are expressed by Herodian in tenns remarkably concordant with those in Tansar's letter: 'He pretended to have unquestionable rights to the possession of all the provinces in Asia lying between the Euphrates, the Aegean sea, and the Propontis: as all those countries, as far as Ionia and Caria, had always been governed by satraps of their nation from the days of Cyrus, who transferred the empire from the Medes to the Persians, to the time of Darius, who was conquered by Alexander: therefore by entering into possession of the old heritage of his ancestors he would not wrong the Romans.' (Journal Asiatique, 1894, p. 549.)
- ↑ The Paoiryô dkaêsô in the Avesta.
- ↑ Persepolis.
- ↑ قصص و احاديث.
- ↑ شراقع و احكام.
- ↑ حرص بدصت و تموبها.
