elves was negative, because in pralaya. One might say
roughly that a nation under the dominance of a people more highly
or actively cultured than itself, tends to lose the integrity of
its own culture,--as has happened in Ireland and Wales under
English rule:--they take on, not advantageously, an imitation of
the culture of their rulers. But under the dominance of a
stronger, but less advanced, people, they tend to seek refuge the
more keenly in their own cultural sources: as the Finns and
Poles have done under the Russians. This explains in part the
difference between Egypt and Persia it the dawn of the new
West-Asian manvantara. We have seen that in the former the seeds
were ready to sprout, and did,--in Ammonius Saccas and his movement.
They were Egyptian seeds; but the soil and fertilizers were so
Greek that the blossom when it appeared seemed not Egyptian, not
West-Asian, but Neo-Greek; and turned not to the rising, but to
the setting sun. The new growth affiliated itself to the
European manvantara that was passing, not to the West-Asian one
that was to begin. Persia was in a different position.

Certain events went to quicken the Persian seed within the
Parthian empire. One was the rise of the Yueh Chi. During the
period between the end of the brilliance of the Western, and the
beginning of that of the Eastern Hans, these people were
consolidating an empire in Northern India, and figuring there as
the Kushan Dynasty: their power culminated, probably, in the
reign of Kanishka. They had wrested from the Parthians some of
their eastern provinces;--really, the overlordship of these
rather than the sovereignty, for the Parthians held all things
lightly except the ground they happened to be camping on; and
this made a change in the center of Parthian gravity which was of
enormous help to the Persians.

The heart of Persiandom was the province of Fars or Persis, the
mountain-land lying to the east of the Persian Gulf, and between
it and the Great Persian Desert. Mesopotamia, where were
Ctesiphon, the Parthian's chief capital, and Seleucia, their
greatest city,--the richest and most populated part of their
empire, stretches northward from the very top of the gulf, a long
way from Fars; and the main routes eastward from Mesopotamia run
well to the north of the latter avoiding its mountains and desert
beyond. So this province is remote, and well calculated to
maintain appreciable independence of any empire n