The scanty literature of the Sassanian age was somewhat augmented by a notable collection of Sanskṛit fables which was brought to the court of the Persian king, Koshrou,[21] and translated into the Persian, or Pahlavī tongue. This collection comprised the fables of the Panćatantra and the Hitopadeśa, and from it the later European fables of La Fontaine probably originated. THE MOHAMMEDAN CONQUEST. The warring tribes of the desert massed themselves together under the banner of the crescent. They were animated by Mohammed’s doctrine of anarchy—the claim of a common right to their neighbors’ goods, and trained to dash into the very jaws of death by his promise of a sensual heaven to every man who fell upon the battle-field. Therefore these fearless sons of the desert, stimulated by hunger and avarice, swept with irresistible force over the fair provinces around them. They raided the great cities of Central Asia, and gathered to themselves the treasures, which had been hoarded by the Aryan and the Turk. When in the seventh century they saw Persia weakened by internal dissensions and foreign wars, they gladly gathered under the standard of Omar to descend upon the wealth of her cities. It was an old quarrel that they longed to settle with the Sassanian kings, reaching back through the history of their tribes to the time when they had raided northern Persia, and had been driven back by Ardeshir—they remembered, too, that Shapur had afterward ravaged Arabia to the very gates of Medīna, and seized their territory down to the shores of Yemen, on the southern sea. All the force of traditional hatred and revenge was therefore added to their avarice, and lust for power, when these fearless warriors sprang to the saddle and rode to the conquest of Persia. Their terrible war-cry of Allah-il-Allah, rang through rifled cities, and seemed to rise from the very dust which was spurned from the feet of Arabian horses, until Persian nationality was crushed by the invaders. Her treasures of literature were again destroyed, so far as the conquerors could complete their work of devastation, and the altar fires of the Pārsīs were quenched in the long night of Mohammedan rule, while the Korān supplanted the Avesta even upon its native soil. LITERATURE OF MODERN PERSIA. Modern Persian literature may be said to begin with the reconstruction of the National Epic.[22] This work marks an important era, in even the language of Persia, for it seems to close the biography of that peculiar tongue. There has been but little, of either growth or decay, in its structure since that period, although it becomes more and more encumbered with foreign words.