These monitions and prescriptions are rapidly becoming a deadletter, but they possess a certain historical interest.
This led to the search for these, which were not to be found in the bewildering and untested mixtures of the Galenic prescriptions.
The college of physicians, by royal command, put forth such advice and prescriptions as were thought best for the emergency.
Here all the prescriptions of puritypartly connected with national customs, and impossible of execution abroad were diligently observed; and even the injunction not to pollute earth with corpses, but to cast out the dead to vulture and dog, was obeyed in its full force.
Here, again, the theology was further developed, and an attempt made to annul the old dualism by envisaging both Ormuzd and Ahriman as emanations of an original principle of infinite time (Zervan), a doctrine which long enjoyed official validity under the Sassanids till, in the reign of Chosroes I., the sect of Zervanites was pronounced heretical.i But, above all, the ritual and the doctrine of purity were elaborated and expanded, and there was evolved a complete and detailed system of casuistry, dealing with all things allowed and forbidden, the forms of pollution and the expiation for each, &c., which, in its arid and spiritles1 monotony vividly recalls the similar prescriptions in the Pentateuch.