A literary history of Persia

DOCTORTHE PERSfAMBfcWEN MIN4SJAN,therefore Solomon and Jamshid built these monuments."Accordingly they call Persepolis Takht-t-yamshld^ " the"Throne of Jamshid ;the Tomb of Cyrus, Masjid-i-Madari-Sulaymdnythe Mosque of Solomon's Mother " ;" andanother platform-like structure on a hill adjacent to themonuments in the Murghab plain Takht-i-SulaymAn "theThrone of Solomon." Such identifications were favoured bythe Zoroastrians intheir position with their conquerors,Muhammadan times as tending to improveand secure for them theprivileges accorded by victorious Islam to " the people of theBook" that is, peoples like the Jews and Christians who,though not believers in the Qur'an, possessed ScripturesMuhammad. The most notable of these falserecognised byidentifications is that of Zoroaster with Abraham, and of theAvesta with the Suhuf (" Leaflets " or " Tracts ") supposedby the Muhammadans to have been revealed to him, andthem as one of the five revelations made to therecognised byfive great Prophets, the other four beingthe Pentateuch( Tawrdt) of Moses, the Psalms (Zubur or Mazdmlr] of David,the Gospel (////) of Jesus Christ, and the Qur'&n ofMuhammad. But of course well-informed writers likeIbnu'l-MuqafiV knew that these identifications were wrong,just as well as we now know that Sir William Jones's identificationsof Kay-Khusraw and Shiruye with Cyrus and Xerxesare wrong. Thus Ibnu'l-Muqaffa4(quoted by Dinawan, ed.Guirgass, p. 9) says : " Ignorant Persians, and such as have noscience, suppose that King Jam was Solomon the son of David,but this is an error, for between Solomon and Jam was aninterval of more than 3,000 years."It is now well knownthat Jam (the termination shld y frequently dropped,is a mereepithet or title, as it is in Khurshid, " the Sun," representingthe Avestic Khshaeta^ " chief, sovereign, brilliant ") is identicalwith the Tama of the Hindu and the Tima of the Avesticmythology, though this hero of the Indo-Iranian legendappears under rather different aspects in the three cases. With9