We have already remarked the importance which the Achæmenids ascribed to the possession of Bactria (p. 23); and we were able at any rate to guess at the civilisation of that district about the year 500 B.C., from the amount of the tribute imposed upon it by Darius. That the economic civilisation was not behind the material was shown by indications in the Avesta. The kingdom which grew up there, as we saw (p. 47), long before the days of the Medes, and in which about the year 800 B.C. the doctrine of Zarathrustra was current, succumbed to Cyrus, the great founder of the Persian empire. If we place the beginning of the doctrine of Zarathrustra, which first made its appearance there, before the middle of the ninth century B.C., at which time the armies of Shalmanesar II. reached the East of Iran, and assume that it came forward about 1000 B.C., we shall hardly place its rise too high. We remember that about this time occurred the great change in the religious conceptions of the Arians in India, the repression and degradation of the old gods by Brahman. It was an analogous development when the good and evil spirits of Bactria were combined into unities, and placed under leaders, when the chief of the deities of light was made the creator of the heaven and the earth, and surrounded with abstract forms, which contest the traditional place and honour of the old god. It is the same religious impulse, the desire to grasp the unity of the divine nature, the same line of combination that we observed in its beginning and progress in India, which comes to the surface in the doctrine of Zarathrustra. We have no reason to contest with the Avesta the fact that Vistaçpa ruled over Bactria when this change took place, or that Zarathrustra, a man of the race of Haechataçpa, gave the impulse to the reform, and that the leading idea in it belongs to him. If Vistaçpa ruled over Bactria about the year 1000 B.C. the growth of the Bactrian monarchy must be placed at least a century before this time, _i.e._ about the year 1100 B.C.
[118] [Cf. Darmesteter, "Zend-Avesta," Introduct., c. iv. § 40, and c. iii.]
[124] "Numa," c. 4; "Quaest. Sympos." 4, 1. [The reading [Greek: Zôroastrên] is doubtful; cf. Wyttenbach.]