I have endeavored to trace the most remarkable features of Persian and Indian religions from among those which are contained in the Dabistán. In them we recognise resemblances, and, in more than one point, even coincidences, which appear not merely taken from each other in the course of time, but rather originally inwoven in the respective insti­tutions. This may be explained, partly by the general probability that nations, passing through the same stages of civilisation, might agree in several parts of religion, politics, and philosophy, and chiefly by the fact, now generally admitted among the learned,* that in very remote times, a union of all the Arian nations, among whom the Persians and Indians are counted, existed in in the common regions of central Asia. Sir W. Jones* goes so far as to say: “We cannot doubt that the book of Mahabad, or Manu, written in a celestial dialect, means the Veda.” William von Schlegel most ingeniously surmises,* “that the name of Zand may be but a corruption of the Sanscrit word chhan­das , one of the most usual names of the Vedas.” The fourteen Mahabadians are to him: “Nothing else but the fourteen Manus, past and future, of the Brahmanical mythology.”* Thus we should have to thank Mohsan Fani for a confirmation of the above-stated historical fact; the Mahabadians were nothing else but Mahabodhis, in good Sanscrit, “great deified teachers;” he would have placed them, as did lately Burnouf, Lassen, and Charles Ritter, somewhere on the highlands of Iran, and he invented nothing.

From the ante-historical dynasties descending to later times, let us consider that, according to respect­able traditions,* there existed friendly and hostile relations between Iran and Persia in the time of the Iranian king Feridun, 1729 years before our era: he reconducted with an army a fugitive Indian prince, and rendered India tributary. Two other invasions took place under the Persian monarch Manucheher,* after which the Indians recovered their liberty. Under Kai Kobad* flourished Rustum, who ruled, beside other countries, Sejistan and Kabul, con­quered the Panj-áb, and carried war into the bosom of Arya varta. This country was also attacked by Afrasiab, a Turan prince,* then possessor of Persia. Ferdusi's Shah-namah indicates expeditions of Feramurs, a son of Rustum, to India, under the reign of Kai Khosrú. We arrive at the epoch of Gushtasp, who ordered the Indus to be explored, and although he had not, as Herodotus asserts,* con­quered the Indians, he entertained religious rela­tions with that nation. After Alexander's con­quest of Persia, Sassan, the son of Dara, retired to Hind, where, devoted to the service of God, he died.* After a very obscure period of Persian his­tory, Ardeshir, directed by a dream, brought an offspring of Sassan from Kabulistan to Istakhar. We cannot doubt that at all times a communication was open between Iran and India, where Bahram Gor married an Indian princess, and whence Nushir­van received a celebrated book and the game of chess. In our seventh century, the Muhammedan Arabians, driven by the spirit of conquest, turned their arms towards India, but stopped on the bor­ders of the Indus. It was reserved to Muhammedan Moghuls, mixed with Persians, to establish in the midst of India an empire which, after eight hundred years, disjoined by various disorders, fell into the hands of the English.

This rapid sketch is perhaps sufficient to explain any mixture, fusion, and resemblance of Persian and Indian doctrines and institutions, if even we were not disposed to seek their fountain-head in the sacred gloom of the remotest antiquity. Whatever it be, in any case, it will no more be said, that the Dabistán was written “with the intention to claim for Persia the pre-eminence over India, concern­ing the antiquity of religious revelations.”* In fact, Mohsan Fani never explicitly alludes to a com­parative antiquity between the Persians and Indians, and implicitly acknowledges the anteriority of the Indian religion over the Zoroastrian, in a part of Persia at least, by relating that Gushtasp was con­verted from the former to the latter by Zardusht, by whom also the Indian sage, Sankhara atcharya, was vanquished.

After a more accurate examination, the resem­blance between the said religions will be found to exist certainly in particular principles and tenets, but not at all in the general character or the spirit of these religious systems. Nothing can be more dissimilar than the austerity of Mezdaism and the luxuriancy of Hinduism in the development of their respective dogmas, and particularly in their wor­ship, as was already observed.* We cannot how­ever deny, that not a little of the similarity in the account of different religions belongs to the author of the Dabistán, who most naturally confounded the ideas of his own with those of more ancient times, and used expressions proper to his particular creed when speaking of that of others. Thus he employs very often the term angels for that of divinities, and carries the mania of allegorising, so peculiar to the later Muhammedan Súfis, into his description of the Indian mythology. This sort of substitu­tion, or these anachronisms of expression, are to be remarked in the narrative of other authors, praised for general correctness and veracity; I can here so much the more readily call to mind similar inaccu­racies in the accounts which Greek historians, and in particular the philosophic Xenophon, gave of Persia, as I may add, that in many points they agree with our Mohsan Fani.