'A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, in the years 1808 and 1809, in which is included some account of the proceedings of his Majesty's Mission, under Sir Harford Jones, Bart., to the Court of the King of Persia. With twenty-five engravings from the designs of the author; a plate of inscriptions; and three maps.' [‎382] (465/524)

5
383
SHAPOUR.
this reproach followed success, that half the Eastern conquerors, as
the Bouide sultans, the house of T ogrul S hah , G enghiz ,T imur , the
Othman race, &c. have in their turns been represented as springing
from the lowest origin; and a story, almost the same indeed as that
attached to the birth of C yrus , has been recorded of A rtaxerxes,
and forms a new point of resemblance in their history.*
That, however, the father of S apor was not a man of very obscure
descent, may be inferred from the silence of Moses of Chorona, who in
the ninth or tenth century appears as the partizan of the A rsacides ;
as well as from the positive assertion in the inscriptionf at Nakshi
Rustarn, that he was the son of a king; an assertion which might have
been safely made in his name in a distant age, but which would
hardly have been hazarded by himself in a public and triumphal
record, if its fallacy had been familiar to all his contemporaries.
He assumed also in his own name, and that of his father, the divinity
which had been attached to their Kings by the ancient Persians, and
which was continued by the Parthian monarchs. The royalty how-
ever claimed by A rtaxerxes in the inscription, was certainly
limited to his own native Persis, which in fact was always included in
the dominions of the Parthian Kings; though the immediate rule may
have been resigned to a descendant of the Caianim family. The pro
vinces of the monarchy were administered by eighteen Satraps, to
whom the Parthian Kings, like the Moguls, had gradually resigned
almost all the power of the empire; and who, to justify in their nomi
nal superior, the title of the King of Kings, severally assumed the regal
dignity themselves: as in the polity of modern Persia, according to
N iebuhr ,; inferior officers are called Khans and Sultans, titles of
* M irkhond in D e S acy, p. 275. Ancient Universal History, xi. 146.
+ D e S acy, p. SO, &c. mo? ttxttowv See M oses of C hohonje, quoted
in D e S acy, p. 168.
| N iebuhr, ii. p. s3.