5.  The Raja’s unwillingness to touch the ground is an example of a very widespread and primitive belief.  ’Two of those rules or taboos by which . . . the life of divine kings or priests is regulated.  The first is . . . that the divine personage may not touch the ground with his foot.’  This prohibition applies to the Mikado of Japan and many other sacred personages.  ’The second rule is that the sun may not shine upon the sacred person.’  This second rule explains the use of the umbrella as a royal appendage in India and Burma. (Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1st ed., vol. ii, pp. 224, 225.)

6 Ante, Chapter 19, note 3.

7.  During the time he remained the guest of the emperor he resided at Hierapolis, and did not visit Constantinople.  The Greeks do not admit that Shirin was the daughter of Maurice, though a Roman by birth and a Christian by religion.  The Persians and Turks speak of her as the emperor’s daughter. [W.  H. S.] Khusru Parviz (Eberwiz), or Khusru II, reigned as King of Persia from A.D. 591 to 628.  In the course of his wars he took Jerusalem, and reduced Egypt, and a large part of northern Africa, extending for a time the bounds of the Persian empire to the Aegean and the Nile.  Khusru I, surnamed Naushirvan, or (more correctly) Anushirvan, reigned from A.D. 531 to 579.  His successful wars with the Romans and his vigorous internal administration captivated the Oriental imagination, and he is generally spoken of as Adil, or The Just.  His name has become proverbial, and to describe a superior as rivalling Naushirvan in justice is a commonplace of flattery.  The prophet Muhammad was born during his reign, and was proud of the fact.  The alleged expedition of Naushirvan into India is discredited by the best modern writers.  Gibbon tells the story of the wars between the two Khusrus and the Romans in his forty-sixth chapter, and a critical history of the reigns of both Khusru (Khosrau) I and Khusru II will be found in Professor Rawlinson’s Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy (London, 1876).  European authors have, until recently, generally written the name Khusru in its Greek form as Chosroes.  The name of Shirin is also written Sira.

’With the name of Shirin and the rock of Bahistun the Persians have associated one of those poetic romances so dear to the national genius.  Ferhad, the most famous sculptor of his time, who was very likely employed by Chosroes II to execute these bas-reliefs, is said in the legend to have fallen madly in love with Shirin, and to have received a promise of her from the king, if he would cut through the rock of Behistun, and divert a stream to the Kermanshah plain.  The lover set to work, and had all but completed his gigantic enterprise (of which the remains, however interpreted, are still to be seen), when he was falsely informed by an emissary from the king of his lady’s death.  In despair he leaped from the rock, and was dashed to pieces.  The legend of the unhappy lover is familiar throughout the East, and is used to explain many traces of rock-cutting or excavation as far east as Beluchistan’ (Persia and the Persian Question, by the Hon. George N. Curzon, M.P. (London, 1892), vol. i, p. 562, note.  See also Malcolm, History of Persia, vol. i, p. 129).