aroundworldortra00peebiala-1

260 AROUND THE WORLD.
THE PARSEES.
Youth is the dreamland of life. Reading, when an academic
student, of the famous Persian King Darius, contemporary
of Buddha, leading an invading army into
India, and also of Zoroaster the great Persian religionist,
implanted in my soul a deep desire to know something practically
of Persian character and religion. Next to Central
Persia itself, India, containing over a hundred thousand " fireworshipers,"
was just the place, inasmuch as they tenaciously
retain most of the customs of their ancestors. Exceedingly
clannish, dressing in Oriental, robe-shaped apparel, generally
white, the Parsees do not intermarry with other nations, nor
do they like to eat food prejjared by other people. They
consider themselves the chosen of God, and the subjects of
special angel ministry. Fair-complexioned, their general
appearance is graceful and commanding. They are the Jews
of Bombay, the bankers, the money-lenders, the traders.
On Malabar Hill they have great wealth and elegant villas.
Pious Parsees pray sixteen times each day, maintain their
own schools, and take care of their own poor.
ZOROASTER, FOUNDER OF THE PARSEE FAITH.
It is difficult to determine with exactness the precise
period of the world's saviors. That eminent Oriental
scholar, M. Haug, puts Zoroaster — Zarathustra Spitama—
2300 B.C., thus antedating Moses. But far better authorities
than Haug or R{inan are the earliest Greek writers. It
is a momentous consideration, that all' the Greek authors who
wrote upon the Magi and the Parsee reHgi on, previous to the
Christian era, put Zoroaster back to a period of full six
thousand years B.C.
Xanthos of Lydia, one of the first writers upon the subject,
living about 450 B.C., was a younger contemporary of
Darius and Xerxes. His reckoning makes Zoroaster to have
been living at a period nearly 6500 B.C.