the Median kings or their people, we are reduced to haphazard notices
gleaned from the chroniclers of other lands, retailing a few isolated
facts, anecdotes, legends, and conjectures, and, as these materials
reach us through the medium of the Babylonians or the Greeks of the
fifth or sixth century B.C., the picture which we endeavour to compose
from them is always imperfect or out of perspective. We seemingly
catch glimpses of ostentatious luxury, of a political and military
organisation, and a method of government analogous to that which
prevailed at later periods among the Persians, but more imperfect,
ruder, and nearer to barbarism--a Persia, in fact, in the rudimentary
stage, with its ruling spirit and essential characteristics as yet
undeveloped. The machinery of state had doubtless been adopted almost
in its entirety from the political organisations which obtained in the
kingdoms of Assyria, Elam, and Chaldæa, with which sovereignties the
founders of the Median empire had held in turns relations as vassals,
enemies, and allies; but once we penetrate this veneer of Mesopotamian
civilisation and reach the inner life of the people, we find in the
religion they profess--mingled with some borrowed traits--a world of
unfamiliar myths and dogmas of native origin.

The main outlines of this religion were already fixed when the
Medes rose in rebellion against Assur-bani-pal; and the very name of
_Confessor_--Fravartîsh--applied to the chief of that day, proves that
it was the faith of the royal family. It was a religion common to all
the Iranians, the Persians as well as the Medes, and legend honoured as
its first lawgiver and expounder an ancient prophet named Zarathustra,
known to us as Zoroaster.* Most classical writers relegated Zoroaster
to some remote age of antiquity--thus he is variously said to have lived
six thousand years before the death of Plato,** five thousand before the
Trojan war,*** one thousand before Moses, and six hundred before Xerxes'