Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/30

The Religion of the Veda
ancient Persia with her face turned westward. It
is to them the Persia that conquers, or controls
through her satrapics, Assyria and Babylonia, Pales-
tine, Egypt, or parts of Asia Minor. It is to them
the Persia that falls down before Greece. In the
day of her greatest glory Darius I. Hystaspes carved
into the Behistan rock, 300 feet above the ground,
the hugh trilingual cuneiform inscription, in which
he claims suzerainty over twenty-three countries.
To all intents and purposes he claims the earth for
his own. Among the countries mentioned are parts
adjacent to the extreme north-west of India: Dran-
giana, Arachosia, Gandhära, etc. Between 500-330
B.C., the rule of the Achemenidan Persian dynasty
had without doubt sent out its loosely attached
satrapies to the land of the Indus River. But this
did not result in the permanent attachment of one
country to the other. Again, the so-called Graeco-
Parthian rulers, successors of Alexander the Great
in the Persian countries of Parthia and Baktria, from
about 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., established principalities
in the north-west of India, notably the Indo-Parthian
kingdoms of Taxila and Arachosia.' But this politi-
cal relation, again, proved unstable and transient.
A small number of Parsis, after the Mohammedan
14
¹See Vincent Smith, The Indo-Parthian Dynasties, in Journal
of the German Oriental Society, vol. lx., p. 49 ff.