Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/104

88 fallen into the same errors. The Parsees, likewise, in order to elude the pursuit of Mussulman fanaticism, have more or less Shemiticised their entire mythology. The treatise of Hyde on the religion of the ancient Persians, so imperfect as a picture of the true Zoroastrian institutions, unknown at the time when Hyde wrote in 1700, but so curious as a picture of old Persian traditions disfigured by Islamism, presents at every step, names of Hebrew patriarchs, substituted for those of the heroes of Persia. Finally, the Ardaï Viraf Nameh, of the period of the Sassanides, presents the extraordinary phenomenon of a Jewish book, “The Ascension of Isaiah,” changed bodily into full-blown Mazdeism, and applied to a pretended sage, contemporary with Ardíshir Bábíkán, Ardaï Viraf. The habit of fraud and untruth which infested the East towards the close of the