Page:Monier Monier-Williams - Indian Wisdom.djvu/22

 with and, so to speak, Aryanizing the primitive inhabitants, and driving all who resisted them to the south or towards the hills.

But India, even after its occupation by the great Aryan race, appears to have yielded itself up an easy prey to every invader. Herodotus (IV. 44) affirms that it was subjugated by Darius Hystaspes. This conquest, if it ever occurred, must have been very partial. The expedition of Alexander the Great to the banks of the Indus, about 327 B.c., is a familiar fact. To this invasion is due the first authentic information obtained by Europeans concerning the north-westerly portion of India and the region of the .five rivers, down which the Grecian troops were conducted in ships by Nearchus. Megasthenes, the ambassador of Seleukos Nikator, during his long sojourn at Palibothra (see note, p. 231), collected further information, of which Strabo (see p. 281, note), Pliny, Arrian, and others availed themselves. The next immigrants who appear, after a long interval, on the scene are the Parsis. This small tribe of Persians (even now, according to the last census, not more than seventy thousand in number) were expelled from their native land by the conquering Muhammadans under the Khalif Omar in the seventh century. Adhering to the ancient religion of Persia—the worship, that is, of the Supreme Being under the symbol of fire—and bringing with them the records of their faith, the Zand-Avasta of their prophet Zoroaster (see p. 6), they settled down in the neighbourhood of Surat about noo years ago, and became great merchants and shipbuilders. For two or three centuries we