The Persians were an important branch of the Iranian family.

"The Iranians were the dominant race throughout the entire tract lying between the Suliman mountains and the Pamir steppe on the one hand, and the great Mesopotamian valley on the other."

In this country the Iranians settled at a very early period, probably 2500 B.C., about the time the Hindus emigrated from Central Asia to the banks of the Indus.

Both Iranians and Hindus belonged to the great Aryan or Indo-European race, whose original settlements were on the high table-lands northeast of Samarkand, in the modern Bokhara, watered by the Oxus, or Amon River.

As all information about Zoroaster personally is unsatisfactory, I proceed to speak of the religion which he is supposed to have given to the Iranians, according to Dr. Martin Haug, the great authority on this subject.

Neither of these supreme deities was represented by the early Iranians under material forms; but in process of time corruption set in, and Magism, or the worship of the elements of Nature, became general.

Fire itself in its pure universality was more to the Iranians than any form.

From these and other passages we infer that the religion of the Iranians was monotheistic.

The Iranians believed in one supreme, eternal God, who created all things, beneficent and all-wise; yet this supreme power was worshipped under the symbol of the sun, although the sun was created by him.

This confounding the sun with a supreme and intelligent being makes the Iranian religion indefinite, and hard to be comprehended; but compared with the polytheism of Egypt and Babylon, it is much higher and purer.

When the migration of the Iranians took place it is difficult to determine, but probably between fifteen hundred and two thousand years before our era, although it may have been even five hundred years earlier than that.

It is very singular that the Iranians should have had, after their migrations and settlements, religious ideas and systems so different from those of the Hindus, considering that they had common ancestors.

While the Iranians worshipped a supreme deity of goodness, they also recognized a supreme deity of evil, both ruling the worldin perpetual conflictby unnumbered angels, good and evil; but the final triumph of the good was a conspicuous article of their faith.

It may as well be here said that the Iranians, both Medes and Persians, were acquainted with the art of writing.

They are the same as Ahura-Magda, the Jupiter of the Iranians.

Most of them seemed to be Tadjiks of Iranian origin.

Tsou Yen's philosophy seemed to allow them to calculate when this new order would start; later secret societies contained ideas from Iranian Mazdaism, Manichaeism and Buddhism, mixed with traits from the popular religions and often couched in terms taken from the Taoists.

This sect was influenced by Iranian Mazdaism on the one side and by certain ideas from Lao Tz[)u] on the other side; and these influences were superimposed on popular rural as well as, perhaps, local tribal religious beliefs and superstitions.

For the Shahs of the Kajar house are not Iranian, but purely Turkish.

The creed of the Seljuks was Islam of an Iranian type.

Outside that field, Hungary on the north and Yemen (since Selim's conquest in 1516) on the south were the frontier provinces, and the Ottoman flag had been carried not only to the Persian Gulf but also far upon the Iranian plateau, in the long wars of Murad III, which culminated in 1588 with the occupation of Tabriz and half Azerbaijan.

(Columbia University Indo-Iranian series, v. 10) © 31Dec23, A766829.

(Columbia University Indo-Iranian series, v.11)

IRANIANS, the inhabitants of Iran, a people constituting an important branch of the Indo-European family, including the Persians, Medes, &c. IRAWADI, a river, navigable throughout its whole course, formed by the union of two streams from the mountains of Thibet; flows S. through Burma 700 miles, passing Mandalay, and falling into the Bay of Bengal in a delta, on one branch of which stands Rangoon.

ZEND, name applied, mistakenly it would seem, by the Europeans to the ancient Iranian language of Persia, or the language in which the Zend-Avesta is written, closely related to the Sanskrit of the Vedas it appears.