in its mental and material aspects that no source whatever is left from
which to wring reliable information about Zoroastrian Iran. The
following limited pages are devoted to a disproof of this age-long
error.

For a connected story of Persia prior to the battle of Kadisiya, beside
the Byzantine writers there is abundant material in Armenian and Chinese
histories. These mines remain yet all but unexplored for the Moslem and
Parsi, although much has been done to extract from them a chronicle of
early Christianity. The archaeology of Iran, as I have shown elsewhere,
can provide vital clue to an authentic resuscitation of Sasanian past.
Pre-Moslem epigraphy of Persia is yet in little more than an inchoate
condition. Not only all Central Asia but the territories marching with
the Indian and Persian frontiers, where persecution of the elder faith
could not have been relatively mild, the population professing Islam
have been unable to abjure in their entirety rites and practices akin to
those of Zoroastrianism. Within living memory the inhabitants of Pamir
would not blow out a candle or otherwise desecrate fire. While science
cannot recognise the claims of any individual professing to have studied
esoteric Zoroastrianism hidden in the hill tracts of Rawalpindi, the
myth has a value in that it indicates the direction in which humbler and
uninspired scholars may work. These regions and far beyond, teem with
pure Iranian place-names to this day; and you meet in and around even
the Peshawar district individuals bearing names of old Iranian heroes
which, if the theory of persecution-mongers be correct, would be an
anathema to the bigoted followers of Muhammad.

* * * * *

It is, above all, Arabic literature which upsets the easy fiction of