Along with the Armenians, we include the Arabians, Persians, Turks, Mongolians, and Abyssinians, of the present day. Their ancient books, if they ever had any, no longer exist. They have no ancient history, but that which they have recently made up, and which they have modelled after the Bible; hence, what they say of the deluge is borrowed from Genesis, and adds nothing to the authority of that book. It were curious to inquire what had been the opinion of the ancient Persians upon this subject, before it was modified by the Christian and Mahomedan creeds. We find it deposited in their Boundehesh, or Cosmogony, a work of the time of Sassanides, (but evidently extracted or translated from more ancient works), and which was discovered by Anquetil du Perron, among the Parsis of India. According to it, the total duration of the world could only be 12,000 years; hence it cannot still be very old. The appearance of _Cayoumortz_ (the bull-man, the first of the human race), is preceded by the creation of a great water.[175] For the rest, it would be as useless to expect a regular history of ancient times from the Parsis, as from the other eastern nations. The Magi have left none, any more than the Brahmins or Chaldeans. Of this there is nothing more required for proof than the uncertainty which exists regarding the epoch of Zoroaster. It is even asserted, that the little history they may have possessed, that which relates to the Achemenides, the successors of Cyrus to Alexander, had been expressly altered, and this in consequence of an official order to that purpose from a monarch named Sassanides[176]. In order to discover authentic dates of the commencement of empires, and traces of a general deluge, we must therefore go beyond the great deserts of Tartary. Toward the east and north we find another race of men, who differ from us as much in their institutions and manners as in their form and temperament. Their language consists of monosyllables, and they make use of arbitrary hieroglyphics in writing. They have only a political system of morals, without religion; for the superstitions of Fo were imported among them from India. Their yellow skin, their prominent cheeks, their narrow and oblique eyes, and their scanty beard, render them so different from us, that one is tempted to believe that their ancestors and ours had escaped the great catastrophe on two different sides. But however this may be, the epoch which they assign to their deluge is nearly the same as ours.