Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/531

Rh has been called in question bj the skepticism of our century. But whether or not there was ever a Zoroaster, it is certain, at least, that Zoroastrianism flourished in Irania, from Tibet to the Tigris, at the time of Alexander; and that it declined before the fashionable Hellenism of the Seleucidæ, or, later, of the Parthian and Gæeco-Bactrian kings. Gradually, however, the Hellenic influence in inner Asia "petered out," as an American miner would say, for lack of fresh Greek blood, till at last hardly anything tangible was left of it save Greek names in Greek letters on coins of barbaric kings. Then a native dynasty, that of the Sassanians, upset the last of the half-Hellenized Arsacidæ, and the Zoroastrian faith, which had lingered on among the people, became, at the beginning of the third century after Christ, the established religion. The Magi had things all their own way, and persecuted Greek thought with the zeal of inquisitors. For four hundred years the creed of the Zend-Avesta held sway in Iran, till the Caliph Omar bore down upon the land with his victorious Mohammedans. The mass of the population were "converted" en bloc by the usual argument of Islam, at the battle of Nahavand; and the faithful remnant, who declined to accept the creed of the Prophet at the point of the sword, fled as best they might to the desert of Khorassan. A few thousand persecuted and despised Zoroastrians, known as Guebres, still linger on in the dominions of the Shah; but the greater part of the incorruptible took ship to India, where they settled for the most part in the neighborhood of Bombay and the other trading towns of the western coast. As they never intermarry with Hindus or Mohammedans, they still remain pure, both in race and religion, and can not be regarded as in any sense representative of the people of India. Their sacred language is still the Zend of the Avesta, and their fire worship is as pronounced as when they fled from Persia.

These historic examples are familiar to most of us. Far more interesting, however, are the prehistoric facts of similar implication, which are known to few save the students of ethnology. It is not everybody, for instance, who is aware that the language of Madagascar is not African at all, but a pure Malayan dialect. The ruling race of the island (till France displaced them) were the very unnegrolike Malayan Hovas. Now, the Malays in their day were the Greeks or the English of the Indian Ocean. Just as the Hellenic race annexed the Mediterranean, turning the inland sea with their colonies into a "Greek lake" (as Curtius calls it), and just as the "Anglo-Saxon" race annexed the Atlantic and the Pacific, colonizing the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australasia, so did the Malays annex the Indian Ocean, penetrating