Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/30

 History and Religion. 15 this way, perhaps, should be explained why Tanata, Anahita, or Anaitis, as the Greeks called her, should have played the part of a kind of Aphrodite, akin to the Babylonian Mylitta and the Phcenician Ashtoreth, from the fifth century b.c. in the state religion of Persia. From that day, by the king's command, statues in her honour were set up in every town of any importance all over the kingdom.' Although Anahita was thus early added to the number of gods reverenced by Medes and Persians, " it does not appear that the Iranian tribes had her with them when they separated from the sister clans that were to colonise India, for her name is not found in the Rig- Veda, and seems to have originated in Armenia or Cappadocia." * The same causes operated in the north of Iran in multiplying the number of gods; added to which, under the name of Magi, a priestly order organized itself, and in time stood as intermediary between God and man. The next advance of the Magi, early in the reign of the Achaemenidae and Arsacidx, was to aim at a political r$lei in which ambitious design they succeeded to their heart's content with the Sassanidae, when they became the directing power of a true theocracy. To increase in the mean time and strengthen their power, they resorted to practices with all the characteristics of witchcraft, learnt, it may be, of the superstitious tribes of Turan adjoining on Media» who even then were advancing towards the frontiers of Iran, which they were to force somewhat later. These modifications were not accomplished in a day, but so gradually as to leave intact the chain of indigenous traditions and the doctrine which was supposed to travel back to Zoroaster. During fifteen hundred years, the space covered between the settlement of these Aryan tribes in Western Iran and the triumph of Islamism, the social and religious situation of the country knew inscription of Artaxentes Mnemon, written on the base of columns that have been uncovered at Susa. It runs thus : " May Ahura ^tazd:^, Anahita, and Mithra pro- tect me and all my doings." Bcrosus would seem to have been mistaken when he attributed to Ochus the introduction of the riles connected with Anahita (CuufENT OP Alexandria, /Vv^Sr^jMhimr, I 5). • Anahita certainly figures in the Avesta as the mother of fresh water, but her name is conspicuously absent from rhri[>ter I. of ^■r^sna. With regard to her cult in Cappadocia, where it appears to have been indigenous, see Fr. Lenormant, Essay de commetUaire sur la fragments cosmogoniqucs de Bhosf, pp. 152-154, and Gwtie AnM,f 1876, pp. 14, 15. Digitized by Copgle
 * The testimony of Plutarcb {Arktxerxes, 27) has been fully confinned bj an