literature — which established the final triumph of the ancient prophet's faith. The details of the war, so far as tradition gives them, I have discussed in another book, but I may repeat the main points here.^ Arjasp of Turan, arch-enemy of the Zoroastrian creed, had invaded Iran for the second time, while King Vishtasp was absent in the south of the kingdom. He stormed the capital at Balkh (now in northern Afghanistan), where the fire-temple was; killed the monarch's aged father, who had offered resistance ; slew Zoroaster himself at the altar, quenching the sacred flame with the blood of the priests mar- tyred at his side; and then carried devastation and rapine wide throughout the land. These atrocities Arjasp perpetrated unopposed, because the king's valiant son Isfandiar, the great crusader of the faith and the sole match for the invader, was in chains, having been imprisoned in a mountain fortress by his own father, through the machinations of a calumniator.
Meanwhile Vishtasp, having been informed of the invasion, marched with all speed from Seistan to join one of his younger sons who was acting as suzerain in Khurasan, but both were worsted by the Turanians, and the king had to seek refuge in the mountains that were now crowning our horizon on the north.
No one except the imprisoned Isfandiar could save the day, and his father accordingly freed him from his dungeon height. Forgetting all feeling of resentment at his wrongs, the gallant prince entered the fight, routed the hosts of Turan by his valor, and drove Arjasp to defeat and death, thus winning eternal glory for Iran.
In the action, the triumph seems to have been gained at a
critical moment by a flanking movement on the part of the
Iranians behind a row of hills in the middle of the plain (midn
1 See Jackson, Zoroaster, pp. 118- account in the history of Tha'alibi
123. Firdausi's Shah Ndmah gives a translated by Zotenberg, Histoire des
poetic account of the war ; see Mohl, rois des Perses, pp. 282-301, Paris,
Livre des rois, 4. 367-389, Paris, 1877. 1900. With it should be compared the prose
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