The Persians were famed for their knowledge of astronomy and astrology,
and were said “to have anciently known the most wonderful powers of
nature, and to have therefore acquired great fame as magicians and
enchanters.”

The close relation between the Persian religious traditions and those of
the Hindoos is very striking. According to Mohsan, “The best informed
Persians, who professed the faith of Hu-shang as distinguished from that
of Zeratusht, believes that the first monarch of Iran, and, indeed, of
the whole world, was Mahabad (a word apparently Sanscrit), who divided
the people into four orders,--the religious, the military, the
commercial, and the servile, to which he assigned names unquestionably
the same as those now applied to the four primary classes of the
Hindoos.”

They added, “that he received from the Creator and promulgated amongst
men a _sacred book in a heavenly language_, to which the Musselman
author gives the _Arabic_ title of _Desatir_, or Regulations, but the
original name of which he has not mentioned; and that _fourteen
Mahabads_ had appeared, or would appear, in human shapes for the
government of this world.”

“Now when we know that the Hindoos believe in _fourteen Menus_, or
celestial persons with similar functions, the _first_ of whom left a
book of _regulations_, or divine ordinances, which they hold equal to
the _Veda_, and the language of which they believe to be that of the
gods, we can hardly doubt that the first corruption of the purest and
oldest religion was the system of _Indian_ theology invented by the
_Brahmins_ and prevalent in those territories where the book of Mahabad,
or Menu, is at this moment the standard of all religious and moral