Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/30

 The Religion of the Veda ancient Persia with her face turned westward. It is to them the Persia that conquers, or controls through her satrapics, Assyria and Babylonia, Pales- tine, Egypt, or parts of Asia Minor. It is to them the Persia that falls down before Greece. In the day of her greatest glory Darius I. Hystaspes carved into the Behistan rock, 300 feet above the ground, the hugh trilingual cuneiform inscription, in which he claims suzerainty over twenty-three countries. To all intents and purposes he claims the earth for his own. Among the countries mentioned are parts adjacent to the extreme north-west of India: Dran- giana, Arachosia, Gandhära, etc. Between 500-330 B.C., the rule of the Achemenidan Persian dynasty had without doubt sent out its loosely attached satrapies to the land of the Indus River. But this did not result in the permanent attachment of one country to the other. Again, the so-called Graeco- Parthian rulers, successors of Alexander the Great in the Persian countries of Parthia and Baktria, from about 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., established principalities in the north-west of India, notably the Indo-Parthian kingdoms of Taxila and Arachosia.' But this politi- cal relation, again, proved unstable and transient. A small number of Parsis, after the Mohammedan 14 ¹See Vincent Smith, The Indo-Parthian Dynasties, in Journal of the German Oriental Society, vol. lx., p. 49 ff.