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dynasty, laid a siege to Kerman during the end of the eighteenth century, there were about twelve thousand Zoroastrian families in that city alone. About a thousand families have come over to India during the last century. There are about three thousand families left in Iran to-day. Writing to their coreligionists in India in the fifteenth century, they complain that ever since the overthrow of the empire they are living under such troublesome times that the atrocities of a Zohak, or an Afrasiab, or an Alexander, pale before what they have been suffering for nine centuries.^[1] The unfortunate people were denied freedom of thought, safety of life and property, and human justice up to the end of the last century. They retired within themselves, and struggled to eke out an unhappy existence. They slept smarting under the indignities inflicted on them during the day, were haunted by the spectre of persecution in their dreams, and awoke in the morning with gloomy thoughts of the impending morrow. At best they were suffered to exist, they could not live humanly. This was the veritable iron age of Zoroastrianism and its followers, spoken of in the Bahman Yasht. Zoroastrianism had struggled for its very existence during this period in Persia, and its followers during such troublesome times had to practise their religious rites by stealth.

Almost every vestige of Iranian scholarship perishes. The literary edifice of Iran had crumbled along with the empire, after the invasion of Alexander the Great. What little the nation was able to restore during the Sasanian period fell now once more before the devastating fury of the Arabs. Iranian culture never truly emerged from the shock of this final blow. Many of the most famous writers who have contributed to the Arabic literature and science were themselves Zoroastrian converts to Islam or descendants of those who had embraced Islam in earlier days. We look in vain in the extant Pahlavi literature for the literary works of merit on secular subjects by the Zoroastrian writers. These have evidently perished. We meet with occasional attempts on the part of the priests to save the literary tradition from extinction. The fall of the Umayyads and the ascendency of the Abbasid Caliphs in 749, by the help of the Persians, succeeded in supplanting the Arab supremacy by a Persian power. The Abbasids owed their elevation to the throne to the