Chapter XXXI: Section I: The Persian Language

Scanty as are the Christian names derived from the Persian race, they are very curious and interesting, partly on account of the changes that they have undergone, and still more because the language whence they are derived belongs to the same group as our own, and testifies in many of its words to the common origin.

To begin with the sovereign to whom all alike look up; him who is “called by name in the book of Isaiah,” as the shepherd who should restore Judah after the Captivity. Kuru is a name said to be older than the Sanscrit and of unknown signification; although some derive it from Khur, one name for the sun. Kureish was the original form; Koreish to the Hebrews; Kyros to the Greeks, whence the Romans took the Cyrus by which he is known to Europe. His only namesake in his own line was he who invited the 10,000 from Greece and perished at Cunaxa, and of whom is told the story of his willing acceptance of the water of the river Kur or Cyrus, whose name sounded like his own. When the Sassanids revived the old Achæmenid names they pronounced the royal word as Khoosroo, and the Byzantines recorded it as Chosröes, when Chosröes Nushirvan, or the magnanimous, almost rivalled the glory of his ancestor—Kai Khoosroo, as the _Shahnameh_ called him.

Not only had the fire-worshippers revived the name, but it had been borne by various Christians in the East, one of whom, a physician of Alexandria, suffered in one of the persecutions, having been detected in visiting a Christian prisoner. He was buried at Canope, in Egypt, and was called in the Coptic calendar Abba Cher, or Father Cyrus; in the Greek, Abba Cyrus. His relics were afterwards transported to Rome, where the Church built over them was called, by the Italians, Saint Appassara. Like a fixed star, the original Cyrus had shone through adjacent darkness, evident by his lustre, but his lineaments lost in distance, and thus Ferdosi makes him a mere mythical hero. Herodotus copied some distorted tradition; Xenophon pourtrayed imaginary perfection in his _Cyropædia_; and moderns have taken even greater liberties with him. _Artaban, ou le grand Cyrus_, the ponderous romance of Mlle. de Scudery, was a stately French tale of love and war, containing a long amorous correspondence between Cyrus and his beloved, the model and admiration of the _précieuses_ in their glory, and absolutely not without effect upon nomenclature. In one village in Picardy there still exist living specimens of Oriane, Philoxène, Célamire, Arsinoe, Calvandre, all derived from vassals named by their enthusiastic seigneurs in honour of the heroines of the fashionable romances, and still inherited by their posterity long after the seigneurs and the heroines are alike forgotten.

Either from his being mentioned in the Bible, or from the _Cyropædia_, Cyrus has had some currency as an English baptismal name.[23]

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