“I consider (with Kinneir) the city of Herat to be same with the ancient Aria, or, as it was also called, Artacoana. We are told that Alexander on his march to Bactriana inclined to the south to visit Aria. We must carefully distinguish between the terms Aria and Ariana, as used by the Greeks. The former was applied to a province which we shall have occasion to describe in the sequel. The latter is equivalent to Iran, and appears to have been formed from the ancient term in the Zend language, Eriene. The whole of Iran composes a sort of oblong, the Tigris and Indus forming its sides to the east and west; the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean bounding it to the south; and the Caspian, with Mount Taurus and the river Oxus, shutting it in to the north. These were also the limits of the ancient Ariana (see Strabo, p. 1048), except that, towards the west, its boundary was an imaginary line separating it from Persia Proper. Of this more extensive district, Aria (according to Strabo) formed only a part, distinguished by its superior fertility. Herodotus appears to have been unacquainted with the term Aria; he merely mentions the Arii as a nation allied to the Medes. “Aria, lying to the east of Media, derived its name from the river Arius, the modern Heri: and the Arians and Medes were originally the same race; the Medes, according to Herodotus, having originally borne the name Arians. It is apparent, from the same place (Herod. vii. 62) that what were called the _Median habits_ were not confined to Media Proper, but extended to the countries lying eastward, and as these touch on Bactria, we cannot be surprised at the conformity which prevailed.” These latter quotations I have thought fit to introduce to show the ignorance of the modern Greeks,--those of Cyrus and Herodotus’s days--compared with their Pelasgic predecessors--_Iran_, the real name for all those countries of higher Asia as far as the Indus,[210] being called, in the Zend, _Eriene_, the Greeks, whose intercourse with the East now for the first time began, without troubling their brains to ascertain what the word in either form meant, transmuted this latter into _Ariana_, whereas their forefathers, the Pelasgi, a literary and a religious tribe, changed its namesake in the West, our own _Iran_--which in the Pahlavi dialect was called _Erin_, and in the Zend would also be called _Eriene_--into _Ierne_, thereby evincing their knowledge of the import of the term, and registering their subscription in its _sacred_ attributes.[211] The following, however, is more to the point, and in itself sufficient to redeem the professor’s entire work from any occasional inclination to Grecian subserviency. “It cannot be doubted that at some remote period antecedent to the commencement of historical records, one mighty race possessed these vast plains.