Thus I have slightly sketched the principal features of the religion which prevailed among the first Persian dynasties; these, not mentioned in other historical books, are we know peculiar to the Desátir and Dabistán, which appeared to sir W. Jones an unexceptionable authority for believing the Iranian monarchy “the oldest in the world.” Upon this, W. Erskine remarked:[84] “Shall I be forgiven for saying, that the history of letters seems to me scarcely to afford an instance of a more perverted judgment on historical evidence?” Silvestre de Sacy[85] too “banishes among the most absurd fables the dynasties of the Mahabadians, and of their successors, which sir William Jones, and after him some other Orientalists, have too hastily adopted, and of which they would to-day blush, since their titles have been produced.” More recently, William von Schlegel[86] said: “It would be useless to conceal to the public that that learned man, endowed with talents so rare, was totally deficient in historical criticism:” This was inferred, because he had admitted, and used in some of his considerations, as genuine, a forgery of Wilford’s Pandit. Besides, “he received without diffidence, and even welcomed with enthusiasm, the traditions contained in the Dabistán, a modern Persian book, written with _the intention to claim for Persia the pre-eminence over India with respect to the antiquity of religious revelations_.” As to “the intention” mentioned, I hope to be able to justify Mohsan Fani. With respect to the Mahabadian dynasties――the light recently acquired upon the ancient history of Persia, reflect rather favorably upon that part of sir William Jones’s opinion, that this country, in its wide extent, was once the original seat of many nations now settled in distant regions. So much, at least, may be considered as established: 1. that the limits of history are to be removed further back than those before fixed; 2. that in the earliest times primitive nations, related by language to each other, had their origin in the common elevated country of central Asia, and that the Iranians and Indians were once united before their migration into Iran and India.[87] This great fact presents itself, as it were, upon the border of a vast abyss of unknown times.