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DOWNFALL OF THE SASANIANS, AND THE AFTERMATH

Sketches of Seven Countries, composed at the beginning of the fifteenth century, states that the Magi believe God and Iblis to be two brothers. A thousand years of the world are a cycle of God, and a thousand of Satan.[1]

The Rivayat literature, a collection of questions and answers on ritual observances exchanged between the Parsis of India and their coreligionists in Persia, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, enables us to gain an insight into the theological beliefs of the Zoroastrians of Persia during that time, and as these Rivayats were compiled in India, we shall recur to them when we discuss the Indian period.

The Zoroastrian community in Persia, during these centuries lay steeped in the grossest ignorance and darkness. Although the condition of the Zoroastrians in their fatherland had been growing more and more precarious, they still had succeeded, amid chaos and confusion, in maintaining for a considerably long time their superiority over their Indian coreligionists in the knowledge of their sacred literature. We shall see in the subsequent pages how the Indian Parsis had to look to the Iranians for enlightenment in religious matters. The learned Iranian Mobad Jamasp, who came from Kerman to Surat in 1721, found the state of the intelligence of the Zoroastrian priests in India so low that he resolved to impart religious instruction to some of the leading high priests during the period of his stay in the land. The Dasturs of Surat, Navsari, and Broach consequently became his disciples;[2] and the first of these, Dastur Darab, later became the teacher of Anquetil du Perron. But the times later changed. Zoroastrian scholarship could not thrive in Persia, as it was able to do under the conditions in India. The mother-country to-day has to look to her thriving children living in India for religious instruction, and for masters from the adopted land able to teach the Zoroastrian Persians themselves, as Perșia has not been in a position for more than a hundred years to give any real instruction to the Indian Parsis, or to produce any literary work that could throw light on their sacred books. Zoroaster's teachings had, for a century, been losing their hold upon the community of the faithful in Iran. When the representative of the Society for the

  1. ↑ Eng. tr. by Yohannan and Jackson in JAOS., vol. 28, p. 183–188.
  2. ↑ Patell, Parsi Prakash, vol. 1, p. 23, 24, Bombay, 1888.
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