Note 10 — CHAPTER 3

In perusing this fragment we are struck by the similarity of production of these Hindu Heliadae and that of the celebrated Tatar dynasty from which Jenghiz Khan was descended. The Niruns, or ‘children of light,’ were from an amour of the sun with Alung Goa, from which Jenghiz was the ninth in descent. Authorities quoted by Petis de la Croix, in his life of this conqueror, and likewise by Marigny, in his History of the Saracens, affirm Jenghiz Khan to be a descendant of Yazdegird, the last Sassanian prince. Jenghiz was an idolater, and hated the very name of Muhammadan [see Howorth, Hist. of the Mongols, i. 37 ff.]. A courtier telling Aurangzeb of his celestial ancestry, gravely quoting the affair of the mother of the race of Timur with the sun, the bigoted monarch coarsely replied, “Mama qahba bud,” which we will not translate.