Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/326



Alexander consigns the Zoroastrian scriptures to the flames. Cyrus had made Persia the queen of Asia, and it was in Persia that East and West first met. The history of the Achaemenians was a long struggle of wars with nations, and a considerable part of this warfare was a conflict with the West. Alexander crushed the Iranian armies at Arbela, and wrested the sceptre from the hands of Darius III, in 330, and the structure of the Iranian empire was shattered to pieces. Great as was this national catastrophe, still greater was the spiritual loss involved in the destruction of the holy scriptures of Zoroastrianism, which perished in the conflagration of Persepolis when the great conqueror, in a fit of drunkenness, delivered the palaces of the Achaemenians to the flames. Fire, the most sacred emblem of Iran, was wantonly utilized in consuming the Word of Ormazd. The ill-fated Darius had ordered the two archetype copies to be preserved in the Dizh-i-Nipisht and Ganj-i Shapigan. The first, deposited in the archives of Persepolis, perished in the conflagration. The second copy of the sacred writings, in the Ganj-i Shapigan, we are informed, was done into Greek, though more probably it met with a similar fate. Ahriman had sent Zohak and Afrasiab as the scourges to Iran, but their ravages paled before the irrevocable harm done by this fact of Alexander's wanton vandalism. Literary Iran has known him as her arch-enemy, and the Pahlavi writers have branded him 'accursed,' 'evil-destined,' and an envoy of Ahriman. After a long period of darkness, following his ill-destined invasion of Persia, Iran once more recovered her political autonomy, but she never regained, in their pristine fulness, the holy works of her great prophet.