A literary history of Persia

REGICIDE AND ANARCHY 181in the middle of the ruby, splinteringit in pieces and transfixingMasriiq's forehead.The death of their king was the signalfor the rout of theAbyssinians,whom the victorious Persians massacred withoutmercy, though sparing their Arab and HimyaritePwsunatrapy. allies ;and Yaman became a Persian province,governed first by its conqueror, Wahriz (and fora part of his lifetime by Sayf), then by his son, grandson, andgreat-grandson, and lastly, in the time of Muhammad, by aPersian named Badhan of another family. Even in earlyMuhammadan days we hear much of the Banttl-Ahr&r^ or" Sons of the Noble," as the Persian settlers in Yaman werecalled by the Arabs.With the death of Nushirwan (A.D. 578), which happenedshortly after these events, the decline of the Sasanian Empirebegan. Proud and formidable to outwardR d I fthl s^n ifn appearance as was the Persian power against&u"h[wl" which the warriors of Islam hurled themselves inthe following century,it was rotten to the core,honeycombed with intrigues, seething with discontent, and tornasunder by internecine and fratricidal strife. Nushirwan 's ownson, Amisha-zadh the Christian, revolted, as has been alreadymentioned, against him. His successor, Hurmazd the Fourth,provoked by his folly and ingratitude the formidable revolt ofBahrain Chubin, which led directly to his estrangement fromhis son Khusraw Parwiz ;the flight of the latter and his twouncles, Bistam and Bindu'e, to the Byzantines ;and his ownviolent death. Parwiz in turn, after a reign long indeed(A.D. 590-627), but filled with strife, intrigue and murder, wasmurdered by his son, Shiru'e, after a travesty of judicialattainder which did but add senseless insult to unnaturalcruelty. After a reign of only a few months, which heinaugurated by the murder of eighteen of his brothers, theparricide sickened and died ;and a fearful plague whichdevastated Persia seemed the appropriate sign of Heaven's