return will corroborate all that has been said on the subject. God declares, CHAP. II. that the fortunes of the Israelites bore a strong resemblance to those of the Cushim or Ethiopians, as the Greeks called them: and the resemblance is said to have consisted in the special particular of a national emigration; as the Israelites were brought out of the land of Egypt, so the Philistim were brought from Caphtor, and the Aramites from Kir'. The Philistim then, and the Aramites of whom the very accurate prophet speaks, were plainly Cushim otherwise, no exemplification is afforded of the general assertion, an assertion most remarkably true in numberless instances, that the Cushim strongly resembled the Israelites in the point of national emigration. But the Aramites proper were the children of Shem: how then can they properly be styled Cushim? The prophet himself affords us an answer; alluding, if I mistake not, to the identical colonists, whom I suppose to have been sent into the maritime Aram by the great Cuthic sovereign of Iran, and who thence in the days of Abraham invaded the land of Canaan. He tells us, that his Ethiopic Aramites (called Aramites no doubt, as the Anglo-Saxons are often called Britons, not from descent, but from country) were a collective body of emigrants from Kir: and this Kir, as we learn from Isaiah, was a city or district either of Elam or of Ashur beyond the Tigris.

Such then were the invaders of Canaan: they were military vassals of the great Cuthic empire, planted in maritime Aram, bearing the title of kings, but acknowledging the supremacy of the superior lord who was reputed to sway the sceptre of Asia. of Asia. Aram of the rivers, or Mesopotamia, was subject to him in the very same manner. As comprehended. within the limits of Iran, it was deemed a portion of Cusha-dwip or the Asiatic

' Amos ix. 7.

2 Isaiah xxii. 6. It is remarkable, that these Cuthic Aramites were afterwards, in consequence of their rebellion against their liege lord, carried back by the king of Assyria to Kir; which thus again we find far to the east, where Isaiah had led us to place it. See Amos i. 5. and 2 Kings xvi. 9. Mr. Lowth, though evidently perplexed with Amos ix. 7, follows the obvious sense of the passage; and thence conjectures, that some ancient removal of Aram from Kir, not elsewhere taken notice of, is intended. Abp. Newcome gives a paraphrase of it, which makes the prophet say just what his commentator pleases.

BOOK VI. land of Cush: and the name, borne by one of the most powerful of its feudatory sovereigns, plainly shews, that here also the Cuthic military nobility were the rulers of the children of Aram. Very soon after the time of Joshua, while the Cuthic empire was in its full vigour, the idolatrous Israelites were delivered into the hand of the king of Mesopotamia. This prince of the Aram between the rivers must apparently have had the smaller princes of the other Aram, placed under him as sub-vassals; for his dominions would not otherwise come in contact with those of the Israelites. Be this however as it may, we find him bearing the appellation of Cushan-Rishathaim or Rishathaim the Cushite: just as Abraham is called the Heberite; and Nebuchadnezzar, the Chusdi'. His attempt upon Israel was but a continuation of the policy, which led to the early invasion of Palestine in the days of Abraham: nor was that policy ever abandoned, until at length first the ten tribes and then the two were brought under the yoke of Iran.

And here I cannot refrain from observing, how strictly, and yet (as it were) how undesignedly, sacred history corresponds with profane. As the original Cuthic empire in the double line of Nimrod terminated about a century and a half after the death of Solomon; so it may be concluded, that for some time previous it had gradually been upon the decline under a succession of feeble and degenerate monarchs, not unlike the weak descendants of Clovis or of Charlemagne. This, in the hands of Divine Providence, will account for the ease with which Solomon extended his dominions from the borders of Egypt to the great river Euphrates; agreeably to the express prophecy, which, however unlikely, was destined to be fulfilled. It will also account for the evidently independent state of Aram in the time of Ahab. That country had withdrawn its allegiance from the declining Cuthic empire: and, accordingly, Hazael receives his investiture from Elijah; and afterwards, without the least regard to the ancient superior lord of Aram, he murders his sovereign and usurps his throne. Such historical coincidences, which nothing but an almost accidental combina'Judg. iii. 8. The name Cushan-Rishathaim is, by the Chaldee Paraphrase and the Syriac and Arabic versions, explained as denoting the wicked Cushite.

* 1 Kings iv. 21-24. Gen. xv. 18.

3 1 Kings xix. 15. 2 Kings viii. 15.

tion of remote particulars can bring to light, may be reckoned among the CHAP. r. strongest marks of exact veracity in the inspired penmen.

(3.) Hitherto I have only combined various scattered notices, and have drawn from them certain deductions relative to the polity of the old Cuthic empire: I shall now bring forward a direct and compact proof, that the division into castes was coeval with its foundation; which will necessarily involve the fact, that, as the great Iranian kingdom was governed by the sacerdotal and military castes, as these two castes were of the Scuthic or Cuthic house, and as they could not have administered the government without being scattered throughout the different provinces the population of which consisted of totally distinct races from their own, the feudal system must inevitably have been established throughout the whole country.

We have seen, on the authority of the Dabistan, that the Pishdadian dynasty of Persia was preceded by the Mahabadian; which for many ages had swayed the sceptre of Iran, and which must clearly be identified with that Cuthic or Scuthic line of kings who were lords of Asia during fifteen centuries from Nimrod to Thonus Concolerus. Now Maha-Bad, the pretended founder of this dynasty, who was at once the first king of Iran and the monarch of the whole earth, is said to have received from the Creator and to have promulgated among men a sacred book in a heavenly language and his subjects believed, that fourteen Maha-Bads, or fourteen transmigratory manifestations of the same Maha-Bad, had appeared or would appear in human shapes for the government of the world. Thus conversing with the Deity, and acting by his immediate authority, MahaBad divided the people, who composed his universal sovereignty and who therefore comprehended the whole race of mankind, into four castes or orders; the religious, the military, the commercial, and the servile: and to these he assigned names, which Sir William Jones assures us are unquestionably the same in their origin with those now applied to the four primary classes of the Hindoos.

From the preceding account of the first monarchy of Iran, Sir William argues most justly, that Maha-Bad is palpably the same character as the Indian Menu; that the fourteen Maha-Bads are the fourteen manifesta

Pag. Idol.

VOL. III.

3 K

BOOK VI. tions of Menu; that the celestial book of Maha-Bad is the celestial book of Menu; that the four castes, into which Maha-Bad divided mankind, are the four castes, into which Menu similarly divided mankind; and consequently that the Hindoos, when they first planted Hindostan, brought with them the early history and polity of Iran from which they had emigrated, and exhibited them as their own local history and polity. He adds, that the word Maha-Bad is evidently a Sanscrit compound, being equivalent to the great Bad or the great Buddha: so that we have an additional proof, if any were necessary, of the identity of Maha-Bad and Menu; for Menu and Buddha are certainly the same person 1.

Here then, in singular conformity with the records consulted by Trogus and Epiphanius, we find also in the east a very full account of an ancient monarchy, which had subsisted in Iran long before the rise of the later Assyrian empire and the dynasty of the Pishdadians: for it is incontrovertible, that the Mahabadian sovereignty can only be the same as the Scuthic sovereignty of Trogus and Epiphanius. Here therefore we have the polity of the Cuthic empire unequivocally described to us: and this polity proves to be the identical polity; which, both from the philosophy of government and from such scattered notices as we had been able to collect, we had argued must have been established throughout the primeval empire of Iran.

VII. It is most curious to observe, how completely the Persic, and thence ultimately the Hindoo, records unfold the Machiavellian politics of Nimrod and his Cuthic associates.

Maha Bad, as he appears in the Dabistan, is clearly Noah or the MenuSatyavrata of the Hindoos, though blended, like that Menu, with the anterior character of Adam or Menu-Swayambhuva. Nimrod places him at the head of the dynasty, which he himself really founded; carefully intimates, that he was the sovereign of the whole world; and thus insinuates, that mankind ought to remain in one unbroken community, and that the successor of Noah was by right an universal monarch likewise. In a similar manner and for a similar purpose, as we learn from Epiphanius, Scu

'Disc. on the Pers. Asiat. Res. vol. ii. p. 59.

thism, which in the progress of increasing corruption became Ionism, was studiously carried up as high as the deluge; that so the odium of innovating, either in politics or religion, might be speciously avoided. Agreeably to such a plan, the division of mankind into castes, which, by forming the sacerdotal and military orders out of the house of Cush, placed in the hands of that great family the whole authority of the state, was represented at first as highly agreeable to the venerable Noah; afterwards it was declared to be his special ordinance, and no mere novel contrivance of ambition; and at length, by the aid of the priesthood, the plea of divine right was called in, and the division into castes was declared to be an institution of the Deity himself speaking from heaven to the first king Maha-Bad. Accordingly, as it was well known that Noah had actually conversed with God, and as it can scarcely be doubted that he had preserved many antediluvian books in the Ark, he was fabled to have received from the Creator a book of regulations in a celestial language, which marked out the particular polity and the general laws under which the empire was to be governed. Now this very book is still in existence: for Sir William Jones, and with good reason, does not scruple to identify Maha-Bad's book of regulations with Menu's book of divine institutes or ordinances. In that volume then, which the learned orientalist has translated into English, we have in fact an accurate sketch of the constitution, which was framed for the oldest empire in the world. It contains many good regulations; for government cannot subsist without them: but the master key note, which runs through the whole, is the inculcating of an excessive veneration for the sacerdotal and military orders. Exactly according to the plan, which (as Bp. Warburton truly remarks) was adopted by all the ancient legislators, and which no doubt was borrowed from the Babylonic prototype, the prescribed polity is made to rest upon the authority of heaven; and the four divinely appointed castes are represented as springing from Brahma himself, incarnate in the person of the first man Menu. Hence the division was an ordinance of God: and, if the inferior castes presumed to resist the two superior, they would fight not against man, but against the Deity. Nor was it solely into Hindostan that these original laws were carried from Iran: to omit other countries, they were conveyed as the

CHAP. I.