Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/77

65 SYRIAC CHARACTERS. — NESTORIAN DOCTRINE. 65 opinion, and the solicitations of the Magi, instituted a violent persecution of Christianity, proscribed the Syriac, and ordered that the Parsee alone should be spoken at Court, and taught in the schools. This re-action, however, was not final *, the Magi not being at that time strong enough to resist the combined influence of Syria and the Greek Empire, acting in the interests of Christianity. Under Firouz, the Nestorians of Syria made great progress, and under Chosroes, we see the Sassanide Empire becoming the centre of a vast intellectual movement, directed by Greeks and Syrians. Great numbers of the men of Iran came to be instructed at Edessa, and it was this which procured for it the appellation of the School of the Persians. The instruction of the academies of Nisibius and Gandisapor was Greek as to its plan, but the lessons were given in Syriac, and Syriac became in Persia the language of learning, conjointly with Greek. A century afterwards, Persia, by the Mahometan con- quest, fell definitively under the influence of the Semitic spirit, and only escaped from it towards the eleventh century, by the establishment of the native dynasties. Armenia felt the influence of Syria even more com- pletely than Persia, during the ages that intervened between the foundation of Christianity and the Mussul- man invasion. There, as in Persia, the Syriac language represented the Christian influence, and was regarded for a long time as sacred. The Armenian translation of the Bible, and the principal ecclesiastical works, were at first written in Syriac. The spirit of proselytism that actuated the Nestorians, spoken at Court. See Quatremere, " Memoire sur les Nabatiens." VOL. I. F
 * Ibn-Makaffa reckons the Syriac among the languages that were