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Legal purity was to be obtained only by the observance of a multitude of trifling ceremonies and the abstinence from ten thousand acts in their nature wholly indifferent. Especially, everything was to be avoided which could be thought to pollute the four elements all of them sacred to the Zoroastrian of Sassanian times fire, water, earth, and air.
The priests of the Zoroastrians, from a time not long subsequent to Darius Hystaspis, were the Magi. This tribe, or caste, originally perhaps external to Zoroastrianism, had come to be recognized as a true priestly order; and was intrusted by the Sassanian princes with the whole control and direction of the religion of the state.
Bands of harpers and other musicians were placed near him within the enclosure, and he could listen to their strains while he took his pastime. The musical instruments which appear distinctly on the Sassanian sculptures are the harp, the horn, the drum, and the flute or pipe. The harp is triangular, and has seven strings; it is held in the lap, and played apparently by both hands.
Upon the Sassanian coins the so-called star, in reality a representation neither of a star nor of a planet but of the radiate Sun, seems to have been first substituted for the round disc as a representation of the Sun, by Perozes, about A.C. 457; the disc in the horns of a crescent being the symbol on the coins of his father Isdigerd II. and other predecessors.
The Parthian empire was in turn overthrown by Ardashir or Artaxerxes, who about B.C. 226 defeated and killed Ardavan, the last Parthian king, and became the chief founder of the Sassanian dynasty, which ruled Persia until the Mahometan invasion.
It must have been shortly after his rejection of the teaching of Manes that Sapor died, having reigned thirty-one years, from A.D. 240 to A.D. 271. He was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable princes of the Sassanian series. In military talent, indeed, he may not have equalled his father; for though he defeated Valerian, he had to confess himself inferior to Odenathus.
On the fall of the Persian Empire three hundred years after the fall of Babylon, and the establishment of the Greek rule in Asia under the generals of Alexander, Persia proper did not cease to be formidable. Under the Sassanian princes the ambition of the Achaemenians was revived. Sapor defied Rome herself, and dragged the Emperor Valerian in disgraceful captivity to Ctesiphon, his capital.
The polygamy practised by the Sassanian princes was on the largest scale that has ever been heard of, Chosroes II. having maintained, we are told, three thousand concubines.
They are curious on account of their careful elaboration, and furnish important information with respect to Sassanian dress and armature, but they are poor in design, being heavy, awkward, and ungainly.
Now the coins of the Sassanian kings then and for the previous two centuries bore upon them, with scarcely an exception, the so-called "star and crescent"; and it was as the symbol of this Zoroastrian dynasty and of the fair land of Iran, that the Moslems adopted it as their own.
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