“It may appear surprising that the Aracids made no attempt to incorporate the minor states in the empire and create a great and united dominion, such as existed under the Achaemenids and was afterwards restored by the Sassanians.  This fact is the clearest symptom of the weakness of their empire and of the small power wielded by their King of kings.  In contrast alike with its predecessors and successors the Arsacid dominion was peculiarly a chance formation—­a state which had come into existence through fortuitous external circumstances, and had no firm foundation within itself, or any intrinsic raison d’etre.”

A Turanian domination over Iran, it had leave to exist only because the time was pralaya.  When a man dies, life does not depart from his body; but only that which sways and organizes life; then life, ungoverned and disorganized, takes hold and riots.  So with the seats of civilization.  One generally finds that at such times some foreign power receives, as we are getting to say, a mandate (but from the Law) to run these dead or sleeping or disorganized regions,—­until such time as they come to life again, and proceed to evict the mandataries.—­As well to remember this, now that we are proposing, upon a brain-mind scheme, to arrange for ourselves what formerly the Law saw to:—­ the nations that are now to be great and proud manditaries, shall sometime themselves be mandataried; and those that are mandataried now, shall then arrange their fate for them; there is no help for it:  you cannot catch Spring in a trap, or cage up Summer lest he go.—­It seems now we must believe in a new doctrine:  that certain ‘Nordics’ are the Superior Race, and you must be blue-eyed and large and blond, or you shall never pass Peter’s wicket.  One of these days we shall have some learned ingenious Hottentot arising, to convince us poor others of the innate superiority of Hottentottendom, and that we had better bow down! . . .  But to return: 

The Parthians remained little more than Central-Asian nomads:  something between the Huns who destroved civilization, and the Turks who cultivated it for all they were worth (in a Central Asian-nomad sort of way).  All their magnates were Turanian; they retained a taste for tent-life; their army and fighting tactics where of the desert-horseman type:  mounted bowmen, charging and shooting, wheeling and scattering in flight,—­which put not your trust in, or ’ware the “Parthian shot.”  They were not armed for close combat; and were quite defenseless in winter, when the weather slackened their bow-string.  True, Aryan Iran put its impress on them:  so that presently their kings wore long beards in the Achaemenian fashion, made for themselves an Achaemenian descent, called themselves by Achaemenian names.  They took on, too, the Achaemenian religion of Zoroaster:—­so, but much more earnestly and adventurously and opera-bouffe grimly.  Ts’in Shi Hwangti took on the quest of Tao.