process of formation and growth. One element in it seems to have been of
the same blood as a strong pastoral population which was then ranging
the steppes of southern Russia and west central Asia, and would come to
be known vaguely to the earliest Greeks as Cimmerians, and scarcely less
precisely to their descendants, as Scyths. Its name would be a household
word in the East before long. A trans-Caucasian offshoot of this had
settled in modern Azerbaijan, where for a long time past it had been
receiving gradual reinforcements of eastern migrants, belonging to what
is called the Iranian group of Aryans. Filtering through the passage
between the Caspian range and the salt desert, which Teheran now guards,
these Iranians spread out over north-west Persia and southwards into the
well-watered country on the western edge of the plateau, overlooking the
lowlands of the Tigris basin. Some part of them, under the name Parsua,
seems to have settled down as far north as the western shores of Lake
Urmia, on the edge of the Ararat kingdom; another part as far south as
the borders of Elam. Between these extreme points the immigrants appear
to have amalgamated with the settled Scyths, and in virtue of racial
superiority to have become predominant partners in the combination. At
some uncertain period--probably before 800 B.C.--there had arisen from
the Iranian element an individual, Zoroaster, who converted his people
from element-worship to a spiritual belief in personal divinity; and by
this reform of cult both raised its social status and gave it political
cohesion. The East began to know and fear the combination under the name
_Manda_, and from Shalmaneser II onwards the Assyrian kings had to
devote ever more attention to the Manda country, raiding it, sacking it,
exacting tribute from it, but all the while betraying their growing
consciousness that a grave peril lurked behind Zagros, the peril of the
Medes. [Footnote: I venture to adhere throughout to the old
identification of the _Manda_ power, which ultimately overthrew Assyria,
with the _Medes_, in spite of high authorities who nowadays assume that