The description given by Herodotus of the vast army and fleet prepared for the expedition of Xerxes against the Greeks gives us an idea of the extent of the Persian power, and of the wide range of countries and nations over which they held sway. The review held on the Plain of Doriscus was perhaps the greatest military spectacle ever beheld either before or since. Herodotus enumerates no less than 56 different nations, all of them in their national dress and arms. Besides the Persians there were “Medes and Bactrians; Libyans in war chariots with four horses; Arabs on camels; Sagartians, wild huntsmen who employed, instead of the usual weapons of the time, the lasso; the nomadic tribes of Bucharia and Mongolia; Ethiopians in lions’ skins, and Indians in cotton robes; Phœnician sailors, and Greeks from Asia Minor.” All these and many others were there assembled by the despotic power of the Persian king. The system of government employed by the Persians, and the constant reports and tributes sent from every province to the central court of the king, were well calculated to bring to it, as to a focus, the curious lore of the various nations who came in contact with or were subdued by them. The Persians were famed for their knowledge of astronomy and astrology, and were said “to have anciently known the most wonderful powers of nature, and to have therefore acquired great fame as magicians and enchanters.” The close relation between the Persian religious traditions and those of the Hindoos is very striking. According to Mohsan, “The best informed Persians, who professed the faith of Hu-shang as distinguished from that of Zeratusht, believes that the first monarch of Iran, and, indeed, of the whole world, was Mahabad (a word apparently Sanscrit), who divided the people into four orders,--the religious, the military, the commercial, and the servile, to which he assigned names unquestionably the same as those now applied to the four primary classes of the Hindoos.” They added, “that he received from the Creator and promulgated amongst men a _sacred book in a heavenly language_, to which the Musselman author gives the _Arabic_ title of _Desatir_, or Regulations, but the original name of which he has not mentioned; and that _fourteen Mahabads_ had appeared, or would appear, in human shapes for the government of this world.” “Now when we know that the Hindoos believe in _fourteen Menus_, or celestial persons with similar functions, the _first_ of whom left a book of _regulations_, or divine ordinances, which they hold equal to the _Veda_, and the language of which they believe to be that of the gods, we can hardly doubt that the first corruption of the purest and oldest religion was the system of _Indian_ theology invented by the _Brahmins_ and prevalent in those territories where the book of Mahabad, or Menu, is at this moment the standard of all religious and moral duties.”