The ancient Persian seems to have given the Ottoman at long range a number of his ideas of government, such as the exaltation of the monarch, the separation of officials of the court from those of the government proper, the division of the ministry into five departments, the council of state, the giving of large powers to local governors, and the beginnings of the so-called “legal” system of taxation.[26] From him also seems to have come the policy of allowing subjects who professed alien religions to form separate organizations, which lived in a measure under their own laws. One writer goes so far as to say: “All investigations into the oldest state regulations of the Orient, into the origin of monarchical forms and constitutions, into the ceremonial of courts and the hierarchy of officials, lead back to the great kingdom of the ancient Persians, from whom they have come down more or less modified, to the Arabs, who sat as caliphs on the thrones of the three continents, to the Seljuk Turks and the Byzantines, who at the same time grew up on the ruins of the Saracen and Roman kingdoms in Asia and Europe, and through both to the Ottomans who swallowed up the kingdoms of Iconium and Byzantium.”[27] The Sassanian Persians handed down through the Moslems the completed “legal” system of a land tax of two sorts based on cadasters, and a capitation tax levied on those who practised a foreign religion. They may also have contributed many features of the Ottoman feudal system. During the Abbassid period the Persians and the Turks who gradually displaced the Arabs in the civil and military administration of the Saracen Empire were thrown into very close contact with each other. It was only natural, therefore, that the Persians, who possessed the more advanced culture, should influence the Turks in many directions. Their chief direct gift lay in the domain of poetry and literature, a field in which they added a vast number of words and ideas to the original Turkish stock.