Her soul was buried very deep indeed, if it remained with her at all.  In Persia, on the other hand, West Asia retained much more clearly its cultural identity.  Persianism was submerged for about thirteen decades under the Seleucids; then the Parthians cut in, and the drowning waters were drained away.  The Parthians had no superior culture to impose on the Persians; whereas the Greeks had,—­because theirs was active and in manvantara, while that of the Persians themselves was negative, because in pralaya.  One might say roughly that a nation under the dominance of a people more highly or actively cultured than itself, tends to lose the integrity of its own culture,—­as has happened in Ireland and Wales under English rule:—­they take on, not advantageously, an imitation of the culture of their rulers.  But under the dominance of a stronger, but less advanced, people, they tend to seek refuge the more keenly in their own cultural sources:  as the Finns and Poles have done under the Russians.  This explains in part the difference between Egypt and Persia it the dawn of the new West-Asian manvantara.  We have seen that in the former the seeds were ready to sprout, and did,—­in Ammonius Saccas and his movement.  They were Egyptian seeds; but the soil and fertilizers were so Greek that the blossom when it appeared seemed not Egyptian, not West-Asian, but Neo-Greek; and turned not to the rising, but to the setting sun.  The new growth affiliated itself to the European manvantara that was passing, not to the West-Asian one that was to begin.  Persia was in a different position.

Certain events went to quicken the Persian seed within the Parthian empire.  One was the rise of the Yueh Chi.  During the period between the end of the brilliance of the Western, and the beginning of that of the Eastern Hans, these people were consolidating an empire in Northern India, and figuring there as the Kushan Dynasty:  their power culminated, probably, in the reign of Kanishka.  They had wrested from the Parthians some of their eastern provinces;—­really, the overlordship of these rather than the sovereignty, for the Parthians held all things lightly except the ground they happened to be camping on; and this made a change in the center of Parthian gravity which was of enormous help to the Persians.

The heart of Persiandom was the province of Fars or Persis, the mountain-land lying to the east of the Persian Gulf, and between it and the Great Persian Desert.  Mesopotamia, where were Ctesiphon, the Parthian’s chief capital, and Seleucia, their greatest city,—­the richest and most populated part of their empire, stretches northward from the very top of the gulf, a long way from Fars; and the main routes eastward from Mesopotamia run well to the north of the latter avoiding its mountains and desert beyond.  So this province is remote, and well calculated to maintain appreciable independence of any empire not born in itself.  The Parthian