Scholarship on Mithras begins with Franz Cumont, who published a two volume collection of source texts and images of monuments in French in 1894-1900, "Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra" "Texts and Illustrated Monuments Relating to the Mysteries of Mithra". An English translation of part of this work was published in 1903, with the title "The Mysteries of Mithra". Cumont’s hypothesis, as the author summarizes it in the first 32 pages of his book, was that the Roman religion was "the Roman form of Mazdaism", the Persian state religion, disseminated from the East. He identified the ancient Aryan deity who appears in Persian literature as Mithras with the Hindu god Mitra of the Vedic hymns. According to Cumont, the god Mithra came to Rome "accompanied by a large representation of the Mazdean Pantheon". Cumont considers that while the tradition "underwent some modification in the Occident ... the alterations that it suffered were largely superficial".