Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/201

 190 History of Art in Antiquity. CHAPTER HI. funereal architecture. The Ideas of the Persians as to a Future Life. What were the ideas of the companions of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, the Persians of the fifth and sixth century, in respect to a life beyond the grave, and what homage did they render to the dead ? It is impossible to say. Neither Herodotus nor other Greek writers make any reference to the cult of the dead, whilst the only sepulchral inscription that has come down to us has no allusion thereto; we mean the long text engraved on the tomb of Darius Hystaspes.' If, in default of classical information, we turn to the authority of the Avesia, for those primitive notions we have seen universally diffused among the peoples of Egypt and Syria, that we shall find among the Greeks and the Romans, and should also have met among the Aryans of India closely related to the Iranians had our path led to the valleys of the Tigris and the Indus, all that can be culled there are childish conceptions, vague in the extreme It has been shown that the Ferouhers, who play so important a part in Mazdian mythology, were originally deified ancestors, like the "Pitria" of the Hindoos;' but in the system of the AveUa^ such as it appears after having been subjected to a long and gradual process of elimination at the hand of a sacerdotal school, the Ferouhers have become "the sfMritual form of the being, independent of and older than its material existence." They have ceased to have any communication with the bodies they once animated; they are genii pure and simple, the allies of Ahurcl-Mazda, Plate LXXIV., d. i. Digitized by Google
 * MftNAMT, La Aekimtmdes^ pp. 96-98.
 * J. Darmestetbr, Ormasd a AJkrmaM, pp. t$o-i3a;Iiif/vdtttdMati Fmdidad,