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'.

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 simi lar 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

BOOK VI. books of Taut or Thoth into Egypt, the inhabitants of which were equally divided into castes; and, as Sir William Jones half supposes, they constituted in Crete the famous laws of Minos or Menus'. But, though MahaBad is thus made the ostensible founder of the Iranian empire and the primeval author of the division into castes, we by no means lose sight of Nimrod himself. Among the sovereigns who are celebrated as aggrandizers of the monarchy, we see him proudly conspicuous under the name of Mah-Bul or Maha-Beli or the great Belus; that well-known founder of Babylon, who seems to have studiously attempted to blend his own character with that of Noah, and who (unless I be greatly mistaken) gave himself out to be a transmigratory reappearance of the first Beli or MahaBad vouchsafed to mortals for the government of the Universe. This is the blaspheming monarch, who (according to Hindoo tradition) was slain by Vishnou bursting from the midst of a shattered column or pyramid, and who in the pride of unlimited sovereignty was beguiled of empire by the same deity under the humble disguise of a dwarf. Both these Avatars are referred by Sir William Jones to the history of the tower: and, as the first of them seems to describe the bloodshed and discord which prevailed between the rival sects of Scuthists and Ionists, with a reference possibly to some miraculous interference unnoticed in Scripture; so the second ingeniously represents the marring of the whole project, when on the very point of completion, by the unseen finger of God perceived only in the supernatural confusion of languages'.

Thus it was not without reason that the Scythians claimed the highest antiquity in the list of nations, for they were the founders of the first empire after the deluge. Nor was their argument against the Egyptian claim quite so absurd as it appears to be. They contended, that, as they inhabited a mountain whence rivers flowed in every direction, they must be prior to the Egyptians who inhabited a region formed in a great measure by the Nile. By this mountain they meant Ararat or Meru, where their

' Pref. to Instit. of Menu. p. 9. Vide supra book iii. c. 5.

2 As such, he would also claim to be a manifestation of the promised son of the

woman.

Asiat. Res. vol. i. p. 235, 426.

4 Just. Hist. lib. ii. c. 1.

empire commenced while Egypt was yet a desert, and which still was occu- CHAP. IL pied by the same race as those who were the prime architects of Babel. I think with Mr. Pinkerton, that what Herodotus says of the newness of the Scythians is solely to be understood of their newness on the west of the Euxine sea.

Herod. Hist. lib, iv. c. 5. Pinkerton's Diss. on the Goths. part i. c. 2. p. 28.

CHAPTER III.

Respecting the primitive Division of the World among the Children of Noah, the Triads of the Gentiles, the Confusion of Languages, and the Mode of the Dispersion from Babel.

Moses has furnished us with a very explicit account of the primitive division of the world among the children of Noah, when they were constrained to emigrate from the plain of Shinar and to disperse themselves over the face of the whole earth. From this it appears, that, although their emigration was reluctant, yet it was not disorderly. Compelled as they were to relinquish their design by a preternatural confusion of utterance, they did not branch off from the central point in accidentally promiscuous masses; but retired, with some exceptions, according to their families and their tongues and their nations. In the main, the children of Japhet kept together, distinct from those of Shem and of Ham; and afterwards, as they advanced into the wide regions allotted to their great progenitor, divided and subdivided themselves agreeably to their several patriarchal heads. The descendants of the other two brethren had their settlements very much intermingled throughout southern Asia: but even between them a line of distinction may be drawn, sufficiently strong to establish the general accuracy of the Mosaical account. The confusion, to which I allude, origi