Prodicus, the
Gnostic, possessed secret books of Zoroaster; and, upon the whole, it
may be said that in the first centuries of Christianity, the religion of
Persia was more studied and less understood than it had ever been
before. The real object aimed at, in studying the old religion, was to
form a new one.
Throughout the Middle Ages nothing was known of Mazdeism but the name of
its founder, who from a Magus was converted into a magician and master
of the hidden sciences. It was not until the Renaissance that real
inquiry was resumed. The first step was to collect all the information
that could be gathered from Greek and Roman writers. That task was
undertaken and successfully completed by Barnabe Brisson. A nearer
approach to the original source was made in the following century by
Italian, English, and French travellers in Asia. Pietro della Valle,
Henry Lord, Mandelslo, Ovington, Chardin, Gabriel du Chinon, and
Tavernier, found Zoroaster's last followers in Persia and India, and
made known their existence, their manners, and the main features of
their belief to Europe. Gabriel du Chinon saw their books and recognized
that they were not all written in the same language, their original holy
writ being no longer understood except by means of translations and
commentaries in another tongue.
In the year 1700, a professor at Oxford, Thomas Hyde, the greatest
Orientalist of his time in Europe, made the first systematic attempt to
restore the history of the old Persian religion by combining the
accounts of the Mohammedan writers with "the true and genuine monuments
of ancient Persia.
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