and was deposited in the library at Persepolis.  But what was the fate of this archetype?  Parsi tradition has an answer.  Alexander the Great—­“the accursed Iskander,” as he is called—­is responsible for its destruction.  At the request of the beautiful Thais, as the story goes, he allowed the palace of Persepolis to be burned, and the precious treasure perished in the flames.  Whatever view we may take of the different sides of this story, one thing cannot be denied:  the invasion of Alexander and the subjugation of Iran was indirectly or directly the cause of a certain religious decadence which followed upon the disruption of the Persian Empire, and was answerable for the fact that a great part of the scriptures was forgotten or fell into disuse.  Persian tradition lays at the doors of the Greeks the loss of another copy of the original ancient texts, but does not explain in what manner this happened; nor has it any account to give of copies of the prophet’s works which Semitic writers say were translated into nearly a dozen different languages.  One of these versions was perhaps Greek, for it is generally acknowledged that in the fourth century B.C. the philosopher Theopompus spent much time in giving in his own tongue the contents of the sacred Magian books.

Tradition is unanimous on one point at least:  it is that the original Avesta comprised twenty-one Nasks, or books, a statement which there is no good reason to doubt.  The same tradition which was acquainted with the general character of these Nasks professes also to tell exactly how many of them survived the inroad of Alexander; for although the sacred text itself was destroyed, its contents were lost only in part, the priests preserving large portions of the precious scriptures.  These met with many vicissitudes in the five centuries that intervened between the conquest of Alexander and the great restoration of Zoroastrianism in the third century of our era, under the Sassanian dynasty.  At this period all obtainable Zoroastrian scriptures were collected, the compilation was codified, and a detailed notice made of the contents of each of the original Nasks compared with the portions then surviving.  The original Avesta was, it would appear, a sort of encyclopaedic work; not of religion alone, but of useful knowledge relating to law, to the arts, science, the professions, and to every-day life.  If we may judge from the existing table of contents of these Nasks, the zealous Sassanians, even in the time of the collecting (A.  D. 226-380), were able to restore but a fragment of the archetype, perhaps a fourth part of the original Avesta.  Nor was this remnant destined to escape misfortune.  The Mohammedan invasion, in the seventh century of our era added a final and crushing blow.  Much of the religion that might otherwise have been handed down to us, despite “the accursed Iskander’s” conquest, now perished through the sword and the Koran.  Its loss, we must remember, is in part compensated by the Pahlavi religious literature of Sassanian days.