lands.  Here, perhaps, sat Cyrus himself, the founder of the Persian monarchy, and issued orders to rebuild Jerusalem.  Here the son of Xerxes, the Ahasuerus of Scripture, may have brought from Susa the fair Esther.  For this is the famous Persepolis, and on those loftier platforms, where only ruinous heaps of stones now remain, stood that other palace, which Alexander burned in his intoxication three hundred and thirty years before Christ.  “Solitary in their situation, peculiar in their character,” says Heeren, “these ruins rise above the deluge of years which has overwhelmed all the records of human grandeur around them, and buried all traces of Susa and Babylon.  Their venerable antiquity and majestic proportions do not more command our reverence, than the mystery which involves their construction awakens the curiosity of the most unobservant spectator.  Pillars which belong to no known order of architecture, inscriptions in an alphabet which continues an enigma, fabulous animals which stand as guards at the entrance, the multiplicity of allegorical figures which decorate the walls,—­all conspire to carry us back to ages of the most remote antiquity, over which the traditions of the East shed a doubtful and wavering light.”

Diodorus Siculus says that at Persepolis, on the face of the mountain, were the tombs of the kings of Persia, and that the coffins had to be lifted up to them along the wall of rock by cords.  And Ctesias tells us that “Darius, the son of Hystaspes, had a tomb prepared for himself in the double mountain during his lifetime, and that his parents were drawn up with cords to see it, but fell and were killed.”  These very tombs are still to be seen on the face of the mountain behind the ruins.  The figures of the kings are carved over them.  One stands before an altar on which a fire is burning.  A ball representing the sun is above the altar.  Over the effigy of the king hangs in the air a winged half-length figure in fainter lines, and resembling him.  In other places he is seen contending with a winged animal like a griffin.

All this points at the great Iranic religion, the religion of Persia and its monarchs for many centuries, the religion of which Zoroaster was the great prophet, and the Avesta the sacred book.  The king, as servant of Ormazd, is worshipping the fire and the sun,—­symbols of the god; he resists the impure griffin, the creature of Ahriman; and the half-length figure over his head is the surest evidence of the religion of Zoroaster.  For, according to the Avesta, every created being has its archetype or Fereuer (Ferver, Fravashis), which is its ideal essence, first created by the thought of Ormazd.  Even Ormazd himself has his Fravashis,[109] and these angelic essences are everywhere objects of worship to the disciple of Zoroaster.  We have thus found in Persepolis, not only the palace of the great kings of Persia, but the home of that most ancient system of Dualism, the system of Zoroaster.