Transcriber’s Note: For this book you will need to have a font installed that can render cuneiform characters such as 𐎠, 𐎡, 𐎢. If these do not display for you, then one suitable option is the font ‘Segoe ui historic’. Cuneiform signs that have no Unicode equivalent are given as images.

THE
TRILINGUAL CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

PLAN OF PERSEPOLIS.
(From Curzon’s “Persia and the Persian Question”)

Longmans, Green & Co., London, New York & Bombay.

THE DISCOVERY AND
DECIPHERMENT OF THE
TRILINGUAL CUNEIFORM
INSCRIPTIONS

BY
ARTHUR JOHN BOOTH, M.A.

WITH A PLAN

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1902

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

[The Plan of Persepolis is inserted by kind permission of Lord Curzon of Kedleston from his work ‘Persia and the Persian Question.’]

INTRODUCTION

The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions of Western Asia is worthy of being included among the great achievements of the nineteenth century. Only a hundred years ago it was still possible to maintain that there was no such thing as cuneiform writing, and that the mysterious figures that went by that name were merely a grotesque form of ornamentation. We propose to recount the method pursued by the long succession of scholars who in the end succeeded in solving the perplexing problem that was presented to them. Few, if any, of those who, in the beginning of last century, occupied themselves with the subject, could have imagined the brilliant discoveries that would result from their tedious labours. In these pages we shall be chiefly occupied with the inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings. They were the first to be discovered and studied, and they possess the peculiar advantage of being, with few exceptions, trilingual. They are, in fact, generally found in three parallel columns, and it was seen that the characters and no doubt the languages also varied in each. It was observed that the writing in one of the columns was much simpler than in the others; the number of different signs being limited to about forty-two. It was assumed that they were alphabetical, whereas there could be little doubt from their great number that the signs in the other columns were syllabic or ideographic. Notwithstanding the comparative simplicity of the former, it was not till forty years had been devoted to their study that the riddle was successfully solved. At length the sound of each letter was fully established, and the words they combined to form were found to belong to a language, akin to Zend, to which the name of Old Persian is now given. From its analogy to Zend and Pehlevi it was a comparatively easy task to assign correct or approximately correct meanings to the words, and to arrive at the sense of the short sentences that occur on the monuments. The first stage in the progress of decipherment was reached in 1845, when Professor Lassen of Bonn published a tentative but fairly correct translation of the whole of the inscriptions then accessible, belonging to the first or Persian column. This success was no doubt a matter of great interest to the philologist; but the inscriptions themselves were found to be almost wholly wanting in historical importance. They were nearly all taken from buildings at Persepolis or elsewhere, and they simply commemorated their erection by Darius or by Xerxes or by Artaxerxes Ochus. They are uniformly conceived in the same set form of words, from which at the most some deductions might be drawn as to the relations existing between the Persian and his god Ormuzd. Two of them indeed were varied by a list of the provinces included in the Empire. It is true the inscription at Behistun was not included in this collection; but even it adds little of importance except with reference to the revolt of the Magian impostor. The publication of this inscription by Major Rawlinson, in 1846, marks the successful termination of the task of deciphering the first column, and a complete mastery over the Old Persian language had then been obtained.

It was correctly supposed that the other two columns contained translations of the same Persian text; and the knowledge now acquired of the latter could not but afford an invaluable key to unlock the difficulties of the others. The decipherment of the inscriptions in the second column was attended by even less interest than the first. The language was ascertained to be Scythic, but nothing was found written in it except what was already known from the Persian. It, however, gave rise to a very heated controversy as to who the people were by whom it was spoken, which for a time enlivened an otherwise extremely dull subject. The decipherment of the third column, however, at length led to very important consequences that amply compensated for all previous disappointments. It was clearly recognised that the writing closely resembled inscriptions found on bricks that had been picked up from time to time on the site of Babylon; and hence the third column received, even in the beginning of the inquiry, the distinctive name of the ‘Babylonian Column.’ Only very few specimens of these unilingual inscriptions in the Babylonian character were collected during the first half of the century, and no progress was made in their decipherment. Meanwhile, however, the study of the third column proceeded with the help of the Persian key; and at length the energy of scholars was stimulated by the sudden discovery in Assyria of multitudes of unilingual inscriptions written in a very similar character to that of the Babylonian and the third column. M. Botta began his excavations at Khorsabad, in 1843, and Mr. Layard at Nineveh, in 1845-6, and from that period there was no lack of material. The walls, and even the floors, of the newly discovered palaces were covered with long inscriptions which were afterwards found to record the great achievements of their Royal founders. But of far greater interest and importance than these were the numerous inscribed tablets found in what was called the Library of Assurbanipal. The first stage in the progress of this branch of the subject was reached in 1852, when Major Rawlinson published a complete transliteration and translation of the third column of the Behistun inscription, followed soon afterwards by translations of a few of the unilingual inscriptions recently found. The mastery he had obtained of the language of the third column by means of the Persian key enabled him at length to dispense with its assistance, and to pass on to the unilingual inscriptions where he had no such guide. He found that the language belonged to the Semitic family, and it came as a surprise to the learned world of that day to learn that the polytheistic nations of the Euphrates Valley spoke a kindred language to the Hebrew, and belonged presumably to a kindred race. It was thus shown that the three languages of the Persian inscriptions were representatives, of the Aryan, Turanian and Semitic families. The difficulty of the task that remained was still very great, for it was found that Babylonian and Assyrian were not exactly the same language, but differed from one another at least as much as two strongly marked dialects of the same speech. The decipherer also was greatly impeded by varieties in the method of writing. Two very different systems prevailed in each country, so that there were in fact four different methods of writing the signs to be mastered; and when we consider that the language is written by means of several hundred signs, it was no trifling matter to find that each might be multiplied by four.[1] For a long time, no doubt, the knowledge of Babylonian and Assyrian remained very imperfect, but the labours of many scholars, reaching over fifty years and working upon the extensive materials gradually accumulating, have cleared up most of the difficulties, and both are now almost as well understood as any other ancient language.

With so much work still in hand, it was extremely disheartening to learn from Major Rawlinson that he had descried yet another and totally different language in certain inscriptions sent to him from Southern Babylonia. The intelligence was confirmed shortly afterwards by the discovery in the Library of Assurbanipal of large numbers of tablets that served as phrase-books for the acquisition of this newly found language. Farther investigation showed that it belonged to the Turanian family; and it has received the names of Akkadian and Sumerian. Some years later the cities of Southern Babylonia were more thoroughly explored, especially Tello, by M. de Sarzec, and the number of inscriptions in this language largely increased. They are found written in a linear or archaic character that evidently preceded the use of cuneiform. The conclusion was soon reached that this Turanian language was the original language of Southern Babylonia, and that the cuneiform writing developed from its ancient script. But still more surprising was the discovery that not merely the writing but the religion and literature of later times descended from this ancient source. An immense collection of tablets has been made from the various libraries of Babylonia and Assyria, upon which a large and varied literature is inscribed. It consists of epic poems, legends of creation, astronomical books, legal judgments and contracts. In the field of religion it comprises magical incantations, hymns and penitential psalms. But it was found that all the most important part of this literature was simply translated from the Sumerian, and that Assyrian literature proper is limited to the dry and monotonous records of the kings. It is not the least interesting result of these studies to have shown that the Turanian race lies at the back of the civilisation of Western Asia. From them the Semitic races of the valley of the two rivers derived their law, their religion, the legends of their faith, their heroic literature, their science and art, and all the chief elements of their culture. Scarcely less surprising was the discovery of the immense antiquity of the Sumerian civilisation. The evidence derived from the cuneiform documents, combined with the results of the excavations carefully conducted at Nippur by Dr. Peters and others, have carried back the beginnings of Sumerian history to an almost incredible antiquity, sometimes estimated at B.C. 6000.[2] From the written documents now in our possession, we are able to reconstruct the records of Southern Babylonia from about B.C. 4000, and an entirely new page in the history of the human race has been opened. We can trace the beginnings of civilisation among the lagoons of the Persian Gulf, the rise of a great commerce with the Mediterranean, with Egypt, and possibly with India; the descent of the Semitic nomads into the rich cities created by the industry of the Turanian population; the foundation of a Babylonian Empire reaching across to the Mediterranean at a period still anterior to the reputed age of Abraham. We can note many incidents in the struggle for the possession of Syria in which Egypt for a time remained the victor. We assist at the foundation of the infant kingdom of Assyria some 2000 years after our records begin; all the events of its rise and fall are engraved on our imperishable books of stone, and many incidents in the writings of the Jews have received illustration. Finally, on the fall of Assyria we see the old Empire of Babylon recover from its partial eclipse and flourish for a time under the great Nebuchadnezzar. Then follow the rise of Persia and the extinction of the great Semitic Empires, events on which our cuneiform records have thrown new and important light. Considering that the existence of the old Babylonian Empire was previously entirely unknown; that our knowledge of the Assyrian Empire hitherto depended altogether on a few passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, and some absurd legends collected by Herodotus and Ctesias; that the very existence of a second Babylonian Empire seems to have entirely escaped the knowledge of the Greeks, we are in a position to estimate the gain to the range of our historical information. The inscriptions have also shown the origin of many myths popular in ancient times; and of legends that even still enter into current theology. They have exhibited the Semitic people in the new light of a polytheistic race, and they have illustrated the important position filled by the Turanians at the dawn of civilisation.

It was only natural that the accuracy of many of these results should have been somewhat strenuously contested. M. Renan, for example, could not be induced to believe in the polytheism of the Semitic race, though the images of their gods began to crowd the Louvre in bewildering numbers. M. Halévy disputed the very existence of the Sumerian race and language, and the controversy he excited has not even yet wholly died away. Others cannot reconcile themselves to the subordinate position of the Semite to the Turanian in laying the foundations of all modern culture, and they still endeavour to show that the two races were at least contemporary workers from the earliest times, and contributed equally to the great result. All this is perhaps symptomatic only of a passing phase of irritation, for the evidence on the other side seems too overwhelming to be long withstood.[3]

It is because the trilingual inscriptions have rendered such important service that we have considered it worth while to recount the history of their discovery after they had lain forgotten for some two thousand years, and to explain the steps that were taken in the work of decipherment by the many scholars whose patient toil was ultimately rewarded with success.

TRILINGUAL CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

CHAPTER I
THE DISCOVERY OF ACHAEMENIAN RUINS AND INSCRIPTIONS—BARBARO TO LE BRUYN, A.D. 1472-1718

The trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenian Kings of Persia that have led to the decipherment of the whole cuneiform literature were found chiefly at Persepolis and Behistun; though a single line at Murgab and a short inscription at Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, also contributed to an important extent. Other inscriptions were observed at Van in Armenia; at Naksh-i-Rustam, a few miles from Persepolis; upon the site of the ancient Susa, and so far afield as Egypt. They are all monumental: chiselled upon the walls of buildings to record the name of the king who erected the edifice. They are written in three different methods of cuneiform writing, and reproduce the same text in three different languages.

The inscriptions at Persepolis were the first to attract attention. The ruins where they were found had excited curiosity long before their discovery by European travellers, and many legends had arisen to account for their origin. It was variously reported that they were the remains of a palace of Solomon, or of Cai Caius, a predecessor of Cyrus, or of the great national hero Jamshid. The literary classes described them as the Takht-i-Cai Khusrau, or Throne of Cyrus; and later on as the Khaneh-i-Dara or Mansion of Darius. The early travellers, however, learned that the popular name for them was Chehel Minar, or Forty Minarets, from the lofty columns that form their chief architectural characteristic. But during the eighteenth century Jamshid triumphed over all his competitors, and since then they have been more generally known as the Takht-i-Jamshid, or Throne of Jamshid. The question of their origin was not indeed finally settled till the inscriptions were interpreted. Chardin, at the end of the seventeenth century, and Heeren, a hundred years later, still supported the claims of Jamshid. Although it no longer admits of doubt that the buildings were erected by Darius and Xerxes, there is even yet no complete unanimity as to their original design. The more common belief is that they were the actual palaces of the sovereign, and that one of the buildings was the scene of the conflagration ordered by Alexander. Their dimensions and construction offer considerable difficulties to the supposition that they were the actual residence of the great king, though they may have been adapted for official receptions and other ceremonial purposes.

They lie on the south-east slope of a hill overlooking the plain of Mervdasht about forty miles north of Shiraz. Many other remains belonging to the same period are found on both sides of the neighbouring river Polvar. Three miles further up are the ruins of the fortress city of Istakhr; and four miles across the river are the Tombs of Naksh-i-Rustam. Doubtless the great city of Persepolis included within its circuit the whole of these isolated ruins, though the name has become restricted to those that now specially engage our attention. They rise upon a terrace partly hewn from the solid rock, partly constructed of massive blocks of stone. They now consist chiefly of the colossal jambs of doors and windows, the connecting walls having entirely disappeared. Their chief characteristics are the beautiful columns that formerly gave the place its name, and the profusion of bas-reliefs that ornament the stonework. The platform is of very irregular shape, and is encased by a magnificent wall varying in height from twenty to fifty feet. It is approached from the plain on the west side by (1) a Double Staircase sunk into the line of the wall and rising parallel to it. At the summit is (2) a Porch entered between two buttresses supported by colossal bulls; beyond are two other buttresses with winged, human-headed bulls looking in the opposite direction towards the east. In the centre of the edifice marked by these two entrances there were originally four columns designed to support the roof, of which two only are now standing. Turning to the right, towards the south, is (3) a Sculptured Staircase leading up to the Columnar Edifice. It differs from the one already mentioned by standing out considerably from the line of the terrace; indeed there are two projections, the first no less than two hundred and twelve feet in length; the second, which again projects from the centre of the first, is eighty-six feet in length. At either end of each projection is a single flight of steps; and the whole front is seen to be completely covered with bas-reliefs. Beneath the landing stage of the central projection the wall is divided into three compartments. In the centre is a plain polished slab intended for an inscription, and on either side are armed guards. In the spandrils formed by the ascent of the steps is a favourite device representing a contest between a lion and a bull. On the wall to right and left of the central stairs are three horizontal rows of bas-reliefs separated by an ornamental design of roses. They represent a procession of tributaries, leading animals or bearing gifts, about to ascend the central stairs. At either end is a polished slab occupying the whole height of the wall; but only the one to the west has been filled with an inscription. The Columnar Edifice (4), standing on the terrace above, is designed in the form of a Central Cluster and three colonnades—one in front and one on either side. The centre formed a square of thirty-six columns, and each of the colonnades consisted of two rows of six columns. The total number of columns should therefore be seventy-two, of which only thirteen now remain standing. They differ in height, and belong to two different orders. Those in the front colonnade and central group are lower than the others, and have a capital resembling the Ionic order, except that the volutes rise perpendicularly. In the colonnades a double bull or unicorn rests directly upon the shaft; and it has been generally assumed that similar animals were originally superimposed over the voluted capital to make the other columns of equal height. The edifice covered an area of three hundred and fifty feet from east to west, and two hundred and forty-six feet from north to south. Passing through the columns, and continuing in the same southerly direction, the ruins are reached that have yielded the largest number of inscriptions. First in order are the massive jambs belonging to the building now known as (5) the Palace of Darius; and beyond are the remains of three buildings lining the southern terrace. The one to the right is the scarcely discernible ruins of (6) the Palace of Ochus. In the centre rise the huge pilasters of the great (7) Palace of Xerxes; while beyond to the left is a small ruin called (8) the South-eastern Edifice. Turning back towards the north, between these ruins and the hill are the ruins of (9) the Central Edifice, a building resembling the Porch at the summit of the entrance. Beyond, in a line with the Columnar Edifice are the huge remains of the (10) Hall of the Hundred Columns. On the hill overhanging the Platform are two rock tombs similar to those at Naksh-i-Rustam; and, above, some travellers have traced three distinct walls and towers that formed the defence of the palace and city.

The palaces stand upon an artificial terrace of their own raised above the level of the platform, and the stairs leading up to them have afforded an opportunity for the display of ornamentation in bas-relief. The Porch is invariably protected by colossal guards hewn out of the stone. Over the great door of the main entrances the king is depicted entering or leaving the building, with attendants bearing the royal parasol and fly-chaser. On the doors leading to the lateral chambers he may be seen in dignified conflict with wild animals; or, as in the Palace of Xerxes, these scenes are replaced by attendants bearing viands to the royal table. Some of the most elaborate designs are met in the Central Edifice and in the Hall of the Hundred Columns. In the latter the king appears seated in a chair of state raised above the heads of five rows of warriors; while at the opposite door his throne is similarly supported by three rows of figures representing subject nations. These bas-reliefs are surrounded by an exquisite fretted fringe of roses, diversified above by small figures of bulls and lions; and over the whole the winged figure of Ormuzd is seen to hover.

A large inscription occupies the outside wall of the southern terrace. It is in four tablets, known as the H, I, K and L of Niebuhr. The I inscription enumerates the provinces of Darius: another contains the declaration that that Terrace or Fortress was built by Darius, and, ‘before him there was not any fortress in that place.’[4] Above the animals in the Porch is an inscription of Xerxes in three tablets, declaring that it was erected by him, and that it was one of the many beautiful works accomplished by him and his father Darius ‘in Parsa’ (Inscription D). The unilingual inscription on the sculptured staircase informs us that it also was constructed by Xerxes (Inscription A). As we ascend the south stairs to the Palace of Darius, we observe on the façade below the landing stage three tablets of inscriptions which are repeated upon the landing, on the anta in the south-west corner. It is again Xerxes who speaks, but he tells us that it was Darius who erected that palace (Inscriptions C and Cᵃ). Passing through the great doors we observe above the king and his attendants three tablets of inscriptions. They are in the three languages and run: ‘Darius, the great king, king of kings, king of nations, son of Hystaspes, the Achaemenian, has built this palace’ (Inscription B). Within, round the doors and windows is a single-line inscription written on the top in Persian, ascending on the left in Susian and descending on the right hand in Babylonian (Inscription L). On the west side of this palace is a second staircase, added later, of Artaxerxes Ochus, as we learn from a magnificent inscription on the façade (Inscription P). This inscription is repeated on the stairs leading to the palace of that king.[5] Adjoining the latter is the Palace of Xerxes, approached by two principal staircases, one to the east and the other to the west. On both occur inscriptions declaring Xerxes the builder in words repeated upon the wall above and upon the anta of the great Portico (Inscription E). Entering by the great doors we see a short inscription over the king and his attendants, which is repeated over the side doors and windows and even upon the royal robe (Inscription G).

These inscriptions, as we have said, do little more than record the name of the founders, and with the exception of the I inscription, they give no other information. But they are sometimes accompanied by a religious formula consisting of two paragraphs, of which occasionally the second only is given. It runs:

1. ‘A great god is Auramazda who has created this heaven, who has created this earth, who has created men, who has created happiness for men, who has made Darius [or Xerxes] King, the only King among many, the only ruler of many.

2. ‘I am Darius [or Xerxes] the great King, the King of Kings, the King of the lands of many races, King of this great earth far and near; son of Hystaspes [or Darius] the Achaemenian.’

The inscription at Hamadan contains nothing else.

The early travellers were attracted by Naksh-i-Rustam almost as early as by the Chehel Minar. It lies, as we have said, about four miles distant, across the Polvar, and no doubt it formed part of the great city. The bas-reliefs that excited the most curiosity belong to the Sassanian period and do not concern us here; but the tombs are Achaemenian. They are executed in the face of the rock and are four in number. They are comprised within a space of two hundred yards, and in exterior design they are precisely alike. They are in the shape of a Greek cross, and the transverse section reproduces in half relief the façade of a palace. In the topmost section there rests a rectangular stage ornamented with two rows of human figures, each containing fourteen persons in different costumes, designed to represent the various satrapies of the Empire. Upon it the king is seen standing on a dais; before him is an altar upon which the sacred fire is burning, and above floats the image of Ormuzd. The second tomb from the east is the only one that bears an inscription, and from it we learn that it was the resting place of the great Darius. The façade has four tablets of inscriptions, two in Persian and one each in the Susian and Babylonian languages. The Persian text inscribed in the upper limb of the cross is the best preserved and the most difficult of access. It consists of sixty lines and contains a second and later list of the provinces of the Empire (Inscription NR). Beneath it, between the half columns in the transverse section, is another Persian inscription, originally of about the same length, but so mutilated that only fifteen lines have been partly copied (Inscription NR ᵇ). The names of three of the great officers of the Crown have also been recovered (Inscriptions NR ᶜ, ᵈ, ᵉ), and quite recently the names of seven supporters of the throne have been added.

Ascending the valley of the Polvar, at a distance of forty miles to the north of Persepolis the traveller reaches another large group of Achaemenian ruins, which it is now generally admitted represent Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus. The early travellers were attracted by a curious edifice standing among them which they were told was the Tomb of the Mother of Solomon; but it was not till the nineteenth century that its similarity to the tomb of Cyrus, described by Arrian, struck the imaginative Morier, the author of ‘Hajji Baba.’ At the same time a single-line inscription was found repeated on several pillars with the legend: ‘I am Cyrus, the King, the Achaemenian’ (Inscription M).

The discovery of the Achaemenian ruins and inscriptions, to which we have briefly called attention, dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Till then Persia was almost entirely unknown to European travellers, and only a few scattered notices of the Persepolitan ruins come to us earlier. The first of these dates back to the end of the fifteenth century, and is due to a Venetian ambassador, Giosafat Barbaro, who visited the country in 1472. The account of his mission was not, however, published till 1545. He tells us that a day’s journey from Camara he came to a great bridge across the ‘Bindamyr,’ which he heard had been built by Solomon.[6] Not far distant he perceived a hill where on a level spot, stood forty columns, called from that circumstance ‘Cilminar.’ Some of them are in ruins, but from what remains it is evident the building was formerly very beautiful. Above the terrace there rises a rock on which human figures of gigantic size are sculptured, and over them appears a figure which resembles ‘God the Father in a circle.’[7] Elsewhere he observed a tall figure on horseback who he was told was Samson, and others clothed after the French fashion. ‘Two days distant from this place is a place called Thimar, and another two days farther we come to a village where there is a sepulchre, in which they say the mother of Solomon is buried. Upon it is a kind of chapel on which are engraven Arabic characters denoting “Mother of Solomon.” This place they call Messeth Suleimen, or Temple of Solomon. The door looks towards the east.’ Such is the earliest account in modern times of the famous ruins of Persepolis and Pasargadae, although Barbaro was quite unaware of their identity. It will be observed that he also visited Naksh-i-Rustam, and saw in the Sassanian bas-relief of Rustam the figure of Samson. It is possible that the notes of his journey were fuller than the published account, and they may have fallen into the hands of Sebastiano Serlio, a Bolognese architect. A few years before the appearance of the ‘Viagi,’ Serlio published his celebrated treatise on Architecture, which enjoyed extraordinary popularity, and was translated into many languages.[8] In it he gives a drawing of the façade of an edifice which he had heard was supported by a hundred columns. He had never seen it or its ruins, and seems to have had no idea where the building had stood, though he apparently gives us to understand that it was Grecian. The drawing shows a building with ten columns in front, adorned with Corinthian capitals, and supporting a second story of four columns and architrave. He had heard that only a few of the columns remained above ground, but he decided to present his readers with his conception of what it must have resembled. He ventures so far as to give the dimensions of the columns, although he anticipates that the whole thing will be flouted as a chimera or a dream. He thus gives us the first of a long series of conjectural ‘restorations,’ with which successive generations of architects have enlivened their books and obscured the subject in hand. He is certain that some such building with a hundred columns had existed somewhere, but it never seems to have entered his mind that he had to go so far afield as Persia to find it. Whether the idea was suggested by what he had heard from Barbaro we cannot say; but it is a complete error to suppose that he represented his drawing as ‘the plan and elevation of Persepolis.’[9] The first to suggest the identity was Don Garcia, who, however, does not appear to have read what Serlio had to say on the subject.[10] He thought Serlio had called his drawing the ‘Forty Alcorans’ and omitted its size and proportion. Serlio, on the contrary, says nothing about forty columns, and he gives the proportions of his imaginary edifice, which he leaves us to infer was one of the marvels of Greece.

It was not till the Portuguese found their way round the Cape of Good Hope that communication with Persia became regular and frequent. In 1508, Alboquerque conquered the island of Ormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Even at that time this barren rock was the resort of merchants from India; and under Portuguese rule it rapidly rose to great prosperity. Its king was permitted to retain his rank and a nominal authority, but his dominions, which included the islands of Kesem and Bahrein and the port of Gombrun on the mainland passed under Portuguese influence. In the division of the East among the religious orders, Persia fell to the Augustinians, to be the special field of their missionary labours. They erected a church and convent at Ormuz, which continued for a hundred years to be a centre of their activity. In the reign of Don Sebastian the Father Symon de Morales became its prior and applied himself to the acquisition of the Persian language. Soon after the union of the Portuguese and Spanish thrones, Philip II. instructed the Viceroy of the Indies to send an envoy to the King of Persia in order to settle the details of the commercial intercourse which had arisen between the two countries, and no one was better qualified to undertake the task than Morales, upon whom the selection fell (1583). The route from Ormuz to Ispahan, then the capital of Persia, passed within a short distance of Persepolis; and it is to the long succession of envoys who travelled that way that we are in great measure indebted for our knowledge of these ruins and the mysterious characters engraven upon their walls.

The missions took place chiefly in the reign of Shah Abbas (1587-1628), a monarch whose alliance against the Turk was eagerly sought for by the European powers. He had not only distinguished himself in the early part of his reign by considerable military capacity, but had evinced a strong desire to develop the commercial resources of his country. Indeed, he was as much of a merchant as a soldier. He was the chief, if not the sole, owner of the silk industry, and he sought to attract the merchants of all nations by permitting the freest competition among them. He did everything in his power to render the country agreeable to strangers. He erected sumptuous caravansaries for their accommodation upon the road. He made travelling even in remote districts absolutely safe, by the slaughter, it was said, of twenty thousand robbers. He received men of all nationalities and of the most diverse creeds with equal hospitality. He even sought to attract skilled artisans from Europe to instruct his subjects, and he caused his palaces to be decorated by foreign artists. The period of his reign was peculiarly favourable for the execution of his liberal projects. The Portuguese trade was carried on with great success from Ormuz. About 1595 the Dutch made their first appearance in the Indian Seas, and gave a great stimulus to competition. Nor were the English merchants indifferent to the opening of a new market. So far back as 1861 Antonie Jenkinson visited Persia with that object, but he was not favourably received. In the first year of the seventeenth century, John Mildenhall, accompanied by John Cartwright, a student of Magdalen, renewed the overtures, and they found Shah Abbas even then well disposed to cede a port on the Gulf. In 1609, Joseph Salbancke again reported favourably of the commercial prospects if an English fleet could contend successfully against the Portuguese and Dutch. At length the East India Company, which was founded in 1600, succeeded in opening the trade in 1614, and from that year a British Resident was regularly established at Ispahan. It thus happened that both political events and commercial enterprise concurred at the same time to bring Persia into communication with Europe, and a country that only a few years before was scarcely known became the frequent resort of travellers.

In 1601, Philip II. thought it advisable to renew diplomatic intercourse with this great monarch, and he instructed the Viceroy at Goa to despatch a second mission to Ispahan. The Viceroy chose three Augustinian friars, among whom was Antoine de Gouvea, who has left an interesting account of his travels. Gouvea was the Rector of the College of Goa, and Professor of Theology, and he had acquired a competent knowledge of Persian. The party landed at Ormuz early in 1602, and set out in May to join the king, but they turned aside from the direct route to visit ‘Chelminira,’ or the Forty Columns, which he believed to be the ‘sepulchre of an old king who was buried here.’[11] He found, however, that the tomb was on the side of the mountain, and was generally attributed to Cyrus. He thought it was more probably to be assigned to Assuerus or Artaxerxes, and the tomb close by to his wife, Queen Vasti. The ruins of the Forty Columns were locally known as ‘the Old Town,’ and it was thought that it had been the original site of Shiraz. Old writers confirmed this view, because they said the river Bondamiro[12] (which passes near the ruins) ‘washed the walls of Shiraz.’ Gouvea, following the geographical writers of the time, had no doubt that Shiraz was the ancient Persepolis. It never occurred to him to connect it with ‘the old town’ of Chelminar, to which tradition pointed as the original site of Shiraz. He called attention to the magnificent staircase that leads from the plain to the platform on which the ruins stand. Two staircases, he says, rise from the foot of the mountain, vis-à-vis one to the other, consisting of numerous steps well adjusted, and cut out of immense blocks of stone. The two stairs converge to one common landing place; and, writing evidently from memory, he adds that the sides are adorned with figures in relief, so well made that ‘he doubts if it were possible to execute them better.’ The Porch is, he says, adorned with ‘figures of savage animals cut out of a single block, and so lifelike that they appear as though they desired to excite fear.’ He describes the columns as surmounted by beautiful statues. On the Portico and in various places among the ruins he saw the portrait of the king. He does not mention any of the ruins on the platform; they appear all to come under the comprehensive description of ‘chapels,’ which he says were built of huge blocks of stone. But he noticed the two tombs on the hill, one being ‘the sepulchre of the king, which is not very different from the other.’ He confuses the great entrance stairs leading to the Porch with the sculptured stairs leading to the Court of the Columns; and represents it as approached directly through the Porch. It was a long time before this error was cleared up. Gouvea called attention to the inscriptions. ‘The writing,’ he says, ‘may be clearly seen in many places, and it may explain by whom the building was erected and the purpose it was intended to serve; but there is no one who can understand it, because the characters are neither Persian, Arabic, Armenian, nor Hebrew, the languages now in use in the district; so that everything contributes to obliterate the knowledge of that which the ambitious prince desired to render eternal.’

When Gouvea arrived at the Court, which was then at Machad, the capital of Khorassan (or Bactria), he was met by Robert Sherley, an Englishman, who was then not more than twenty years of age. Sherley, we hear, was naturally of good disposition, though infected by the pestiferous errors he had imbibed in England.[13] He was no match in argument for the Professor of Theology, and after some discussion ‘he was converted and submitted to the Roman Church with seven or eight of his suite.’ Gouvea, as was natural, attributed great importance to these conversions, and although he publicly declared that the primary object of his mission was to kindle a war with the Turk, he lost no opportunity of assuring the king that his heart was set much more on ‘teaching the knowledge of the true God.’ He presented his Majesty with a ‘Life of Our Lord,’ richly bound, and certain religious pictures sent by the Archbishop of Goa; and he continued, in season and out of season, to press the faith upon his acceptance. The Shah, who was surrounded by Christians both in the harem and the Court, treated these importunities with toleration, and his courtesy encouraged the zealous priest to hope that he might number him among his converts.[14] A Persian merchant, who noticed with surprise the civility of the king towards Christians, had already circulated a report in Italy of his approaching admission into the Church, and Gouvea was surprised to meet at Ispahan with an embassy of Carmelite fathers sent by Clement VIII., with instructions to arrange the details attending the conversion of the country. These extravagances prejudiced the position of the Portuguese fathers, and they found that the Shah was beginning to grow weary of the whole affair. He, however, granted them leave to turn a large disused palace into a monastery, and to build a church.

Gouvea quitted Ispahan in company with a Persian envoy bound for Spain, who was the bearer of a letter from the Shah to Philip. The two other fathers remained behind to supervise the interests of their community. While Gouvea was still on his way to the coast, he received the pleasing news that war between Turkey and Persia had actually broken out.

The war was carried on by Rudolph in Europe and Abbas in Asia, till 1607, when the Emperor concluded the Peace of Sitvatorok, without consulting the convenience of his ally. The Shah was extremely displeased by an act that, without any warning, left him to bear the whole brunt of the campaign. It was while he was still suffering from the unfaithfulness of his European allies that Gouvea appeared for the second time at his Court. He left Goa in February 1608, and arrived at Ispahan in June; but it was with difficulty he could obtain an interview with the Shah. On his return to Portugal he was raised to the bishopric of Cyrene. He wrote his book in 1609, before he left Goa, and he evidently brought it with him to Lisbon, where it was published in 1611.

At the Spanish Court he had an opportunity of meeting Don Garcia de Silva Figueroa, who was subsequently to visit Persia as Ambassador, and to interest him in the ruins of Chehel Minar. In view of his projected journey, Don Garcia made a special study of the antiquities of the country in the original authorities, and in such modern books as were then available. He was a Castilian of high rank, and about fifty-seven years of age at the time he left on his mission, in 1614. He had an extremely difficult part to play, and one little suited to his haughty and irascible temper. The Portuguese authorities were greatly incensed at the appointment of a Spaniard, and they threw every obstacle in his way. The Viceroy detained him at Goa on one pretext or another from November 1614 to March 1617, when at length the Ambassador hazarded the voyage to Ormuz in a small vessel of two hundred tons.[15] On his arrival he found the Portuguese governor of the island nearly as intractable as the Viceroy, and it was not till October that he was able to continue his journey. He passed that winter at Shiraz, which he said was certainly the Cyropolis of the ancients and the place of burial of Cyrus, its founder. He found his sojourn intolerably dull: he complains that there was ‘not as much as any bookes except a few pamphlets intreating of Holy Confession, and Navarr’s Summes which the monkes of St. Augustine use.’ In April 1618, he set out for Ispahan, and reached the bridge across the ‘Bradamir,’ which river he had no doubt was the ancient Araxes. A league further on he came to the ruins of ‘Chelminara,’ of which he had heard so much from Gouvea. He did not hesitate to identify them at once with ‘those huge wilde buildings of the castle and Palace of Persepolis’; and he appears to have been the first to make this identification.[16] Gouvea, as we have seen, had no doubt that Shiraz was built on the site of Persepolis. Cartwright, to whose journey we have already alluded, was so convinced of the same that he heads a chapter ‘Description of Sieras, ancient Persepolis,’ and adds: ‘This is the city Alexander burnt at the request of a drunken strumpet, himself being the first president in that wofull misery.’[17]

Don Garcia is warm in his praise of ‘this rare yea and onely monument of the world (which farre exceedeth all the rest of the world’s miracles that we have seen or heard off).’ He found only twenty of the pillars left standing, but there were broken remains of many others close by; and half a league distant in the plain he noted another, and still farther off two short ones. He mentions the numerous bas-reliefs that ‘doe seele the front, the sides and the statlier parts of this building.’ The human figures are ‘deckt with a very comely clothing and clad in the same fashion which the Venetian magnificoes goe in: that is gownes down to the heeles with wide sleeves, with round flat caps, their hair spred to the shoulders and notable long beards.’ Some are seated in ‘loftier chayres’ with a ‘little footstoole neatly made about a hand high.’ He was particularly struck by the ‘hardnesse and durablenesse of these Marbles and Jaspers so curiously wrought and polished that yee may see your face in them as in a glasse.’ He was embarrassed to define the style of architecture, ‘whether Corinthian, Ionick, Dorick, or mixt.’ He called especial attention to ‘one notable inscription cut in a Jasper Table, with characters still so fresh and faire that one would wonder how it could scape so many ages without touch of the least blemish. The letters themselves are neither Chaldæan, nor Hebrew, nor Greeke nor Arabike, nor of any other nation which was ever found of old or at this day to be extant. They are all three-cornered, but somewhat long, of the form of a Pyramide, or such a little obeliske as I have set in the margin (△), so that in nothing doe they differ from one another but in their placing and situation.’ He notes that the threefold circle of walls said to have surrounded the castle ‘hath yielded to the time and weather.’ He mentions also the Tombs. ‘There stand,’ he says, ‘the sepulchres of their Kings placed on the side of that hill at the foote whereof the Castle itself is built.’ He did not himself visit Naksh-i-Rustam, but apparently his servants went, and ‘did see some horses of marble, large like a Colossus and some men also of giantly stature.’ This description is taken from a letter written by Don Garcia from Ispahan in 1619 to a friend at Venice. It was published at Antwerp in the following year, and appeared in English in 1625, in Purchas’ Pilgrims. A more detailed account is found in the ‘Embassy of Don Garcia,’ a work elaborated from his notes or memoirs by a member of his suite, and translated into French in 1667. It contains a very full, and on the whole accurate, description of the ruins. He noticed the irregular slope of the terrace, which he attributed to the exigencies of defence. The double staircase leading to the platform is so constructed that ‘one can easily ride up on horseback.’ On reaching the summit he noticed the Porch, the walls of which, he said, are supported by two great horses in white marble, larger than elephants, each with two wings, and with eyes expressive of the dignity of the lion. Beyond is another door adorned in the same manner, and exactly between the two stands a large column on its pedestal.[18] The Porch leads to the Columnar Edifice, where he saw twenty-seven columns still standing (not, as Purchas says, twenty), but there had evidently originally been forty-eight arranged in six rows of eight each.

He observed that they belonged to two different orders: the one resembled the column in the Porch; the others, he says, have no capitals except that upon one he perceived the half of a horse without its head. Singularly enough he falls into the same error as Gouvea, an error reproduced in some of the earlier engravings of the ruins; and represents the columns as standing upon the same level as the Porch. According to our author, therefore, on leaving the Columnar Edifice he came to a ‘very beautiful stair, which though not so large nor so high as the first, is incomparably more beautiful and magnificent, having on the walls and balustrade a triumph or procession of men curiously clothed, carrying flags and banners and offerings. At one extremity of the procession we see a chariot drawn by horses, in which there is an altar from whence a flame of fire is seen to rise. At the other are combats of animals, among which he observed a lion tearing a bull, so well represented that art can add nothing to its perfection: it is impossible indeed to discover the slightest defect.’ Having ascended the stairs, he reached a court on which he observed a ruined building, consisting of several parts, each part about sixty feet long by twelve feet wide. This is the first distinct mention of what is now known as the Palace of Darius. The walls are six or seven feet thick and twenty-four feet high, and are so profusely adorned with figures in relief that it would require several days to examine them adequately, and several months to describe them in detail. The one that struck him most was the representation of a ‘venerable personage,’ sometimes seated ‘on an elevated bench,’ sometimes walking, accompanied by two attendants holding a parasol and a fly-chaser over his head. He was greatly impressed by the ‘perfection and vivacity’ of the figures; and ‘especially by the drapery and dress of the men.’ They are cut in ‘white marble and incorporated in the black stone,’ the latter being of such exquisite polish that it reflects as clearly as a mirror—so much so indeed that the Ambassador’s dog, Roldan, shrank back in terror from the reflection of his own ferocity. This perfection of polish is the more remarkable, considering the great antiquity of the work, which must date from the monarchy of Assyria, or even earlier. He noted the strange peculiarity that among the immense number of figures there was not a single representation of a woman. He observed inscriptions in some places, but ‘the characters,’ he said, ‘are wholly unknown, and are no doubt more ancient than those of the Hebrews, Chaldeans and Arabians, with which they have no relation; and their resemblance to those of the Greeks and Latins is still less.’ The ruins of the Palace of Xerxes seem to have escaped his notice; but he visited the Hall of the Hundred Columns. It covers, he says, a square of a hundred paces, the ground in the centre being thickly strewn with fallen columns. It looks more like an accumulation of several ruins than the remains of a single edifice. Here also were bas-reliefs upon the walls, larger than life and representing ‘furious combats with terrible and ferocious animals; some resembling winged lions and others serpents.’

He noticed the two famous sepulchres on the side of the mountain overhanging the ruins, above the space enclosed by the walls of the terrace. He observed that they were formed by a wall of black marble thirty feet square, covered with figures in white marble. On the top appears a man of authority, possibly a king or prince, seated on a throne, with several figures standing round him. Before him is an altar with fire burning upon it. Near it is a coffer cut into the rock, which seems to have been the sepulchre. It is seven or eight feet long by three feet wide. The tombs are separated forty to fifty paces from each other but are of similar design. It might, he thought, be at first supposed, as Gouvea seems to have imagined, that the splendid ruins below were intended only as an ‘ornament’ for the tomb of the Great King: but further reflection convinced the writer that they were none other than the Palace and Citadel of the Persepolis described by ancient authors; and indeed there is distinct evidence of the conflagration due to the impetuosity of Alexander.

Till Don Garcia made the elaborate notes from which the writer of the foregoing account derived his information, ‘nothing assured’ was known in Europe concerning these remarkable remains. Sebastian Serlio, we are told in his work on Architecture, only knew of them from ‘an uncertain and barbarous relation,’ and he has given us merely a rough drawing of the edifice, showing forty small columns with Corinthian capitals.[19] Don Garcia even complains that Gouvea could only give him a ‘confused’ account. Don Garcia brought an artist with him, and he took the best means of dissipating the obscurity in which the subject was hitherto involved by having drawings made upon the spot. The artist said he intended to copy the triumphal procession on the stairs, but he probably found the time at his disposal insufficient for this labour, for he afterwards says he actually accomplished the drawing of four of the figures, upon one of which were ‘the characters composed of little triangles in the form of a pyramid.’ But of greater importance than these was the copy Don Garcia ordered to be taken of ‘a whole line of the large inscription which is on the staircase in the centre of the triumphal procession. It is to be found on a highly polished table, four feet in height, in which the letters are deeply cut.’ We are unable to say whether these drawings appeared in the original Spanish edition, but they have not been reproduced in the French translation.

Don Garcia finally reached Ispahan in 1618, where he was detained till August in the following year. His mission turned out a complete failure. One of its principal objects was to secure a monopoly of the Persian trade for Spain. Just as he reached Goa he heard that the Governor of Lara had taken Gombrun from the Portuguese. While he was in Persia, he had the mortification to find that port regularly used every year by the English to land their goods. In 1618, peace was concluded between Persia and Turkey, and the Shah was thus rendered independent of the Spanish alliance, while he was daily becoming more disposed to rely upon the English merchant fleet in the event of an open rupture with the Portuguese of Ormuz. He had always consistently opposed the concession of a monopoly to any one nation, and he now found himself sufficiently powerful to reject the demands of Spain. The discomfited Ambassador left in August 1619, and spent the winter at Ormuz in the hope of a favourable change in the aspect of affairs: and he finally reached Spain in 1622, after an adventurous voyage.

During his residence in the Persian capital, he made the acquaintance of Pietro della Valle, a Roman gentleman of considerable fortune, who had been travelling for some years in the East. In consequence of a disappointment in love he had sought relief in foreign adventure, and at the age of twenty-nine he embarked at Venice for Constantinople. After visiting Egypt and the Holy Land, he crossed the desert to Bagdad. At that time Bagdad was commonly supposed to be built on the site of the ancient city of Babylon. But Della Valle had no difficulty in pointing out that this was evidently an error, for we know that the one city was built on the Tigris, while the other stood on the Euphrates. He made several excursions through Mesopotamia, and visited the mounds near Hillah, which he had no doubt covered the ruins of the true Babylon. He has left an account of the state in which he found them, which may still be read with interest; and he picked up some of the bricks, both baked and unbaked, of which they are composed.[20] These he subsequently brought back with him to Rome, where they were included in his private collection of antiquities. They were perhaps the first specimens that ever reached Europe, and a few of them may still be seen in the Museo Kircheriano. He indulged his antiquarian tastes by endeavouring to ascertain the sites of some of the famous cities of antiquity, and he seems to have been the first to identify that of Ctesiphon correctly. At Bagdad he married a Mesopotamian lady, and afterwards crossed the mountains of Kurdistan into Persia. He was cordially welcomed to the Court by Shah Abbas, who enrolled him among the privileged number of ‘Guests of the King.’

In the autumn of 1621, after a sojourn of nearly five years, Della Valle thought it expedient for many reasons to turn his steps homewards. He had fallen into very bad health, and it was clear that he had ceased to be cordially received at Court, although he professes to have left without having forfeited its favour.[21] Accordingly on October 1, he quitted Ispahan without any formal leave-taking, and followed the usual road to the coast. After several days’ journey he came to the Puli Neu, or New Bridge over the ‘Kur,’ no doubt the ‘Cyrus’ of the ancients, and probably also identical with the Araxes, a word that simply means ‘river.’ He followed its course till he came to a small rivulet called the Polvar, which at first he thought must correspond to the Medus of Strabo, an opinion he subsequently rejected on the ground that the stream was not of sufficient importance. Having crossed it by a bridge, he at length reached Chehel Minar, and pitched his tents close to the ruins.[22] The ‘Geographical Epitome’ of Ferrari, which Della Valle carried with him, represented Shiraz as the probable position of Persepolis, an opinion which Gouvea had not controverted. We have seen, however, that Don Garcia had no difficulty in identifying Chehel Minar with the ruins of the ancient Persian Palace. Della Valle had no doubt often discussed the matter with him during the winter of 1618, which they spent together at Ispahan, and he accepts the identification of the site of Persepolis without hesitation. He was, however, by no means convinced that the ruins upon the Terrace are the remains of the Palace. Without decisively rejecting that supposition, he was more inclined to believe that they were originally designed for a great temple. The scene on the sculptured staircase he regarded as a sacrificial procession; and the imposing figure beneath the umbrella might represent a high priest no less than a king. He could not discover any indications that the principal buildings had ever been roofed, which he considered a strong confirmation of the temple theory. He observed that the ‘horses’ on the Porch were human-headed with wings like griffins, and that their backs were apparently protected by iron harness. He thought the monsters on the other two piers were the same, only facing in the opposite direction. Between them he saw there had originally been four columns, two of which were still standing, and the others fallen to the ground. Turning to the right towards the south, he observed a large vase of marble, about twenty-four feet square, that had evidently been intended for ablutions; and passing farther on in the same direction he came to the sculptured staircase, which he now places for the first time in its correct position beneath the Columnar Edifice. We also learn that the figures on both sides are turned towards the central stairs, and present the appearance of a procession about to ascend the steps. He gives a detailed account of the bas-reliefs, and observes that the different groups are separated from each other by a design representing the cypress tree. The various animals that figure in the procession lead him to think they were intended for sacrifice, and hence that the edifice had been probably a temple. He fixes the position of the inscriptions at the extreme end of the procession. He is much less enthusiastic in his praise than Don Garcia. He does not consider that the figures of men and animals, nor those of trees, are well designed; and he thinks the beauty of the work as a whole consists chiefly in its antiquity and in the magnificence of the marble of which it is composed. Don Garcia had counted twenty-seven columns, but at the time of Della Valle’s visit, only three and a half years later, not more than twenty-five remained. As he approached from the north he observed the traces of two rows of columns stretching from east to west. Beyond them is a vacant space, about sufficient for two rows of columns; and then we come to a central group of six rows of columns arranged from north to south. On either side, to west and east of the central group, but separated from it by the distance already mentioned, there are double rows of columns, as on the north side. He says nothing of any colonnade on the south, where in fact there is none. The columns are about twenty-six and a half feet apart, and some are higher than others, from which he inferred that the building was not roofed, and could not therefore have been the palace of a king. He could not find any trace of a staircase leading to an upper story.

Passing the columns and continuing in the same southerly direction, he observed two small chambers, one on the right hand, near the edge of the Terrace; the other on the left hand, towards the mountain. They are not really chambers, but open courts; nor are they surrounded by walls, but by the jambs of doors and windows. As in the Columnar Edifice, there are no indications that the buildings were roofed, and on that account he believes they were parts of a temple where sacrifices were offered in the open air; he does not consider they were designed for a sepulchre. In addition to the ‘venerable personage’ already noted by Don Garcia, he remarked that men are depicted on the side doors struggling or fighting with lions. Behind this chamber, in a small open court, he saw two high pilasters with inscriptions at the top, but at such an elevation that he could not distinguish the characters. From this point we fail to follow him with equal certainty. He detected a group of columns forming a square of six in a ruin that evidently corresponds to the Palace of Xerxes; and he observed the remains of an aqueduct below. He alludes to another enclosure which may possibly be the Hall of the Hundred Columns, although he thought it could have been no part of the original design of the fabric.

He remarked the great inscription near the lion on the wall of the sculptured terrace below the Columnar Edifice. ‘It occupies,’ he says, ‘the entire height of the wall from top to bottom. One cannot tell in what language or letters these inscriptions are written, because the characters are unknown. They are very large and are not united to one another, but divided and distinct, each by itself alone as in Hebrew: if indeed what I take for a letter only is not a complete word. I have copied five of them as best I could, and they are those that occur most frequently.’[23] The lines of the inscription are filled up ‘so that I cannot tell whether they are to be read from right to left as in Oriental languages, or from left to right as with us.’ He is, however, disposed to believe they are read from left to right, because when the ‘pyramidical figure’ is vertical the head is always uppermost, and when the figure slopes or is placed horizontally the head is to the left and the point inclined to the right. He remarked that the writing was composed entirely of the one pyramidical figure and of an angular character more slender than the other; and it was simply the number and disposition of these two forms that constituted the difference of the letter.

Don Garcia had no doubt that the ruins had been entirely devoted to the secular uses of a palace and citadel. We have seen that Della Valle, though he accepted their identification with Persepolis, could not readily believe that the large roofless buildings had ever been suited for a dwelling, and he therefore inclined to the theory that they were the remains of a temple.

From his tent at Chehel Minar he rode a league to the north to the base of the hills that surround the plain, in order to visit a monument called Naksh-i-Rustam—of which he is the first to give an account. He explains that Rustam is a celebrated Persian hero who lived about the time of Cyrus. Della Valle came to a large square space levelled in the side of the rock, on which various figures larger than life were cut in half relief. The subject represented two men on horseback, the one endeavouring to wrest from the other a ring which he held in his hand. A third person appears on horseback, holding the hand of a man by his side. Elsewhere he observed figures of women, and other subjects to which he could not assign a meaning. Near these sculptures he noticed remains that could only have been intended for sepulchres. Among these were two square pedestals with an aperture above to contain the ashes of the body. Elsewhere he observed on the side of the mountain several openings like windows, possibly intended to admit a corpse. But the most remarkable discovery was a sculpture that could only be reached by ladders. It represented the front of a house; a door in the centre and several columns on each side, supporting an architrave—frieze and cornice. The front was ornamented with various figures which he could not accurately define on account of the height of the monument. But he thought he discerned a man leaning upon a bow and contemplating an altar. Above him, as if suspended in the air, was a figure which appeared to his companions to resemble the Devil. He thought this was probably Jamshid, who had reigned many years before Cyrus, and who is still remembered as a great enchanter, and possibly to be identified with Nebuchadnezzar. He had seen two somewhat similar sepulchres just over Chehel Minar (those noticed by Don Garcia), and one of these he had been able to enter. He found they were excavated from the rock, quadrilateral in shape, and about the height of a man; with three large hollow niches at the sides, which he somewhat fancifully imagined had been used as reservoirs for water. A long stone he observed on the floor appeared to cover the place of sepulture. He thought the city of Persepolis might have covered the whole plain between Chehel Minar and Naksh-i-Rustam.

Della Valle only passed two days among these ruins, and then continued his journey to Shiraz. His intention was to go to Ormuz and take a passage to Goa, from whence he could find his way back to Europe. As he approached the coast, however, he found his journey impeded from a very unexpected cause. The departure of Don Garcia from Ispahan, in the summer of 1619, had been followed by the interruption of the good relations between the Portuguese and the Persians. While the Ambassador was still detained at Ormuz (1619-20) he had the mortification to witness the English merchant fleet arrive and calmly proceed to take the soundings of the harbour of Gombrun, which, since its annexation to Persia, had acquired the new name of Bunder Abbas, or Port of Abbas. In the spring (1620), hostilities broke out between Persia and the Arabs of the opposite coast, who were friendly to the Portuguese. With a view to reprisals the latter threw the Persian merchants at Ormuz into prison. As the year advanced, the Portuguese fleet arrived with positive orders to recover Gombrun and the island of Bahrein, and also to build a fort at Kesem to secure the water supply. The friction that existed between the Portuguese and Spanish authorities delayed the immediate execution of these instructions, and meanwhile the annual English fleet had time to arrive. An engagement at once followed, and the Portuguese were forced to withdraw (January 1621). When the English vessels left the Gulf with their cargo the Portuguese returned, and speedily began hostilities by landing a force on the island of Kesem and beginning the erection of a fort (June 1621). In the autumn they destroyed the Port of the Two Headlands on the mainland, and the Persian army immediately occupied the whole coast line and cut off communications with Ormuz (October). This event occurred just at the time Della Valle was on his journey to Bunder Abbas. He approached sufficiently near to hear the roar of cannon from Ormuz, and after making some useless attempts to cross to the island, he retired to Mina, where, under the protection of the English merchants, he waited the course of events (October 1621). The town was very unhealthy. His wife died, and he himself was reduced to the point of death. As soon as the English fleet arrived the Persians with their assistance commenced hostilities in earnest. Kesem was occupied and the new fort destroyed. Ormuz itself was attacked, and fell after an heroic resistance (April 1622). The Portuguese held the port of Jask on the mainland till the following year (1623), when it was taken by the English to avenge the death of their commander Shilling, and handed over to the Persians. Thus the Portuguese were finally driven from the Persian Gulf, and their trade was transferred to the English and Dutch.[24] Della Valle returned to Shiraz to recruit his health, and it was not till January 1623 that he found a passage in an English vessel to Surat. He reached Rome in 1626, bringing with him the body of his wife, and a large collection of curiosities. He gave an account of his adventures in a series of letters to a friend at Naples: the one which contains his description of Persepolis is dated from Shiraz, October 21, 1621. On his return to Rome he made a collection of his scattered correspondence, but the first part did not appear till 1650, only two years before his death; the portion (Part III.) that contains the letter on Persepolis was first published in 1658. It included the five cuneiform letters he had copied on the spot, and although their publication was delayed for nearly forty years they still seem to have been the first to appear in Europe; for we are not aware that the drawings of Don Garcia ever saw the light.

Meanwhile Persepolis was visited by an English traveller, whose description long anticipated that of Della Valle. It will be recollected that Gouvea met a young Englishman, Robert Shirley, at Ispahan in 1602, and won him over to the Catholic faith. Shirley was subsequently employed by Shah Abbas as Envoy to the European Courts, and he resided for many years in Spain. The fall of Ormuz put an end to his mission in that country, and in 1623 we find him in England. He was a somewhat absurd person who adhered to Oriental costume, and went about in a red turban surmounted by a cross. A singular occurrence cast suspicion on the validity of his credentials as a Persian envoy. A native Persian arrived on the scene, who treated Shirley’s pretensions with contempt, and gave himself out as the only true representative of the Shah. The documents that could alone settle the dispute were all written in Persian, and no independent person could then be found in the whole of England who was able to read a word of that language. The controversy grew warm, and the native Persian enforced his position by knocking his rival down. At length it was determined to send an English ambassador to Ispahan to clear up the matter, and Sir Dormer Cotton was selected. He was accompanied by Sir Thomas Herbert, who has left an account of his adventures. They sailed from Tilbury on Good Friday 1626 and reached Bunder Abbas in January 1627. He found the English in enjoyment of high favour in consequence of the assistance they had lately rendered in driving the Portuguese from the Gulf. They were ‘privileged to wear their flags displayed at the top of their publick houses’ or consulates, and there were many merchants, both English and Dutch, living in the town. Nor does it appear to have been a wholly undesirable residence. Herbert speaks in praise of the ‘Buzaar,’ the numerous coffee-houses, sherbet-shops, and other places of entertainment. Its prosperity had increased immensely since the fall of Ormuz, ‘which of late was the glory of the East, but had now become the most disconsolate.’

The description Herbert gives of Persepolis in the first two editions of his Travels, which appeared in 1634 and 1638, is extremely meagre and imperfect.[25] He says it was built by ‘Sosarinus, who lived in the Median dynasty, the third Emperor from Arbaces, who gave end to Sardanapalus.’[26] It flourished for two hundred and thirty years till destroyed by Alexander. He does not believe that Shiraz was ever a part of Persepolis, thirty miles distant, though the one may have risen out of the other. He remarks that the ‘whole basis’ or platform ‘is cut by incredible toyle out of the solid marble rock twice the compasse of Wyndsor Castle.’ It is approached by ‘ninety-five easie staires, dissected from the durable black marble,’ ‘so broad that a dozen horsemen may ride up abreast together.’ The total ascent, however, is not more than twenty-two feet, and at the summit is a gate ‘engraven with a mightie elephant on one side and a Rhynoceros on the other.’ These majestic figures are thirty feet high; and a little beyond are two other piers ‘wherein is engraven a Pegasus.’ Between them he noticed two columns, and was consequently more accurate than Don Garcia. ‘Of like work, bulk and matter are two gallant Towers.’ The gate leads to the famous Columns, of which only nineteen now remain standing, and one other below in the plain. ‘Howbeit the ruines and ground of four score more are yet visible: this great roome was the Hall.’ He at first estimated the height of the columns at ‘fifteen foote,’ but later (1638) he modified this to from fifteen to twenty cubits. And they ‘rise beautifully in forty squares or concave parallels; every square has three full inches.’ ‘Adjoining is another square roome whose blacke marble wals are yet abiding.’ It has eight doors ‘exquisitely engraven with images of Lions, Tygres, Griffons and Buls of rare sculpture and perfection: a top of each door is the image of an Emperour in state with staffe and scepter.’ Elsewhere he amplifies this account. ‘In other places (for the wals are durable) Battailes, Hecatombs, triumphs, Olympick games, and the like, in very rare sculpture and proportion.’ The country people gave different accounts as to whom this figure was intended to represent, and they variously proposed Jamsheat, Aaron, Sampson and Solomon, but they excluded Rustam. This room measured ‘ninety paces from angle to angle, in circuit three hundred and sixty paces, beautified with eight dores,’ and joining it were two smaller apartments, one seventy by sixty, the other thirty by twenty paces. He was told that the first was the Chamber of the Queen and the other the nursery. He was particularly struck by the appearance of the latter. ‘The wals are,’ he says, ‘rarely engraven with images of huge stature, and have been illustrated with gold which in some places is visible, the stones in many parts so well polisht that they equal for brightnesse a steele mirrour.’ He was at a loss to assign this wonderful building to any of the known styles of architecture: ‘whether this Fabrick was Ionick Dorick or Corinthiack I cannot determine, but such to this day it is that a ready Lymmer in three moneths space can hardly (to do it well) depict out all her excellencies.’

He also noticed the tomb mentioned by Don Garcia. It lies, he says, ‘somewhat further, over heaps of stones of valewable portraictures.’ ‘It is cut out of the perpendicular mountaine,’ and represents ‘the image of a King (which may be Cambyses) adoring three deities, the fire, the sunne and a serpent.’ He also mentions ‘Nasci Rustam,’ the monument of Rustam, situated, he says, five miles west of Persepolis.[27]

Herbert gives an engraving of the ruins, which is the first general view ever taken of Persepolis in modern times. It only occupies a portion of a small folio page, and it is scarcely possible to imagine any drawing more inaccurate and grotesque. We ascend to the platform by a series of about fourteen steps leaning straight up against it, at right angles to the line of the terrace. At the summit there is not a trace of the Porch, but we pass through a narrow opening with posts on either side. On the top of one of these appears an elephant with its proboscis stretched out in a menacing attitude. On the top of the other post we observe an unpleasant creature leaning forward, possibly intended for a tiger. When we have made our way through these inhospitable guardians and gained the platform, we find the whole of it on the left-hand side occupied by columns. Facing the entrance, at some distance from it, we see three doors and the high wall of a roofless building, and behind it a lofty and ragged mountain. Behind the columns on the left at a great elevation we observe a kneeling figure, worshipping a serpent coiling round a cross, and beyond, an altar on which fire is burning. To the right, on the same level, we observe a human-headed centipede. This misleading picture is reproduced evidently from the same plate in the second edition of 1638. It was not till the appearance of the second edition that he thought it worth while to notice the existence of the cuneiform letters. ‘In part of this great roome,’ he says, referring to the Palace of Darius ‘(not farre from the portall) in a mirrour of polisht marble wee noted above a dozen lynes of strange characters, very faire and apparent to the eye, but so mysticall, so odly framed as no Hieroglyphick no other deep conceit can be more difficultly fancied, more adverse to the intellect. These consisting of figures, obelisk, triangular and pyramidall yet in such simmetry and order as cannot well be called barbarous. Some resemblance, I thought some words had of the Antick Greek shadowing out Ahashuerus Theos. And though it have small concordance with the Hebrew, Greek and Latine letter, yet questionlesse to the Inventer it was well knowne and peradventure may conceale some excellent matter though to this day wrapt up in the dim leafes of envious obscuritie.’[28]

The letter of Don Garcia had appeared in Purchas the year before Herbert sailed for India, and it is obvious he had it before him when he wrote his own account. Indeed he refers to Don Garcia, though he does not acknowledge his own obligations to him. Don Garcia in his letter did not mention the sculptured stairs, one of the most remarkable features of the ruin; Herbert has likewise passed it over in silence. Don Garcia remarked that it was possible to ride up the stairs to the platform. Herbert adds that twelve horsemen might ride abreast; forty years later he recollected that he had actually witnessed this feat accomplished. Both writers express doubts in nearly the same language as to the style of the architecture; they both compare the cuneiform letters to ‘pyramids’ and ‘obelisks,’ and they both note their dissimilarity to Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Herbert had, however, the merit of giving the earliest published account of the Palace of Darius.[29] His description of the animals on the gate and his measurements are also wholly his own.

Having spent two days at Persepolis, he followed the mission to Asheraff, on the Caspian, where Shah Abbas was holding his Court. The result was extremely disappointing. The Shah indeed received Sir Dormer Cotton with his usual courtesy, and declared his continued friendship for Sir Robert Shirley. He acknowledged the services Shirley had rendered, and protested his willingness to punish his traducer, if that miscreant had not unfortunately escaped his vengeance by death. But the Shah was then an old man, and he appears to have fallen under the influence of a favourite Minister. This functionary interposed so successfully that the Ambassador could never obtain a second interview, and, after considerable delay, the courtier assured him that he had the royal authority to declare that the credentials of Sir Robert Shirley were fictitious. This startling communication was certainly false, and no doubt it originated with the Minister himself; but it was no less decisive of the matter. Overcome by disappointment, both Sir Dormer and Shirley fell ill and died shortly afterwards. Herbert continued his journey, and after visiting Babylon, returned to Surat, on his way home.

The account he gave of the ruins to his friends excited considerable interest, which was stimulated by the publication of two editions of his Travels. He often expressed his regret that adequate drawings were not made by a competent artist before the monument was irrevocably destroyed: ‘The barbarous people every day defacing it and cleaving it asunder for grave stones and benches to sit upon.’ The result of these representations was that Lord Arundel sent out a young artist for the express purpose, who unfortunately died before he reached his destination. It seems indeed that the ruins were for a time really exposed to considerable danger. In consequence of the writings of Della Valle and Herbert, they were visited by so many foreigners of distinction that the Governors of Shiraz found their revenues seriously taxed by the obligations of hospitality. Several, it was said, were ruined, and at length one of the Governors made a deliberate attempt to destroy the cause of so much inconvenience. But the solidity of the structure offered serious obstacles to the execution of this design.

Meanwhile Persia was beginning to attract more general attention, and in 1637 it was visited by a German named Oelschloeger, more euphemistically styled Olearus. His ‘Beschreibung’ was first published at Schleswig in 1647, and a revised edition appeared in 1656.[30] It is a magnificent folio in black-letter, richly adorned with a profusion of excellent engravings and a number of maps. The book was translated into Dutch in 1651, into French in 1656, and into English in 1666. Olearus was born in Anhalt in the first year of the century, and entered the service of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. The Duke had recently founded the town of Friederichstadt, and he desired to open a trade with Persia by way of Russia. He accordingly sent a commission to Moscow and Persia to negotiate the business, and Olearus was attached to it as secretary.[31] They left Gottrop in October 1635, but it was not till the end of March 1636 that they even reached Moscow. They continued their journey in the end of May, and arrived at Ispahan in April of the following year (1637). Shah Abbas had died in 1629, but they were well received by his successor, Shah Sefy, and the usual interchange of presents followed. One of the Ambassadors, a merchant named Brugman, displayed very undiplomatic conduct, and the embassy failed in its purpose. It accomplished the return journey somewhat more rapidly, in about a year and a half (December 21, 1637, to August 1, 1639). Olearus did not visit Persepolis himself, but a member of the mission, the ‘hochedel gebornen’ Mandelslo, proceeded to India by the well-known route to Ormuz and passed the ruins. Olearus devoted himself to Persian studies, and translated ‘Gulistan.’ But his chief service is the excellent edition he published of the travels of Mandelslo, which he enriched by copious notes of his own taken from various sources.[32] We learn from this work that, on his way from Ispahan to the coast, in 1638, Mandelslo came to a large village called Meshid Maderre Soliman, which, he said, derived its name from a tomb half a mile distant. It was explained to him by the Carmelites of Shiraz that no doubt it was the resting place of the mother of the great Shah Solimans, though the popular opinion in the neighbourhood was that it was the tomb of Solomon himself. He gives an excellent description of the chapel of white marble resting upon successive tiers of square blocks of hewn stone; and adds that in his day there might still be seen within the chapel strange letters in unknown characters engraved upon the walls. These, however, were afterwards ascertained to be merely verses from the Koran, written in Arabic. He has given a drawing of it, which conveys a fair impression of its appearance, and is curious as the earliest known representation of the tomb of Cyrus. Continuing to the south, he reached Persepolis. He heard many fabulous accounts of its origin, some ascribing it to Tzemschied Padschach, others to Solomon, and some even to Darius; but his informants were clear that it had been destroyed by ‘Iskander as they call Alexander.’ The ascent is made by four stairs with ninety-five marble steps. On reaching the summit he found the remains of four walls, apparently designed for gates. On the two first were horses carved in stone, with curious head-stalls and saddles. On the other two the horses have lion heads and are adorned with crowns and wings. He also, like Herbert, entirely omits to mention the sculptured stairs, and passes direct from the gates to the describe the columns. He found nineteen standing, and eleven others partly ruined, but no doubt the original number was forty. He could not decide whether the building had been roofed. Passing on, a slight ascent brought him to two moderate-sized chambers, of which the door and window posts remained as well as the walls, the latter remarkable for their beautiful shining marble. On the sides of the doors he observed figures larger than life, some sitting and others standing. They wore long beards and their hair descended to the shoulder, while their robes extended to the feet. Not far distant are other chambers, but of these nothing remains except the door and window frames. ‘Not far from these rooms,’ he continues, ‘is a square column in which is a polished stone, some say of jasper, in which are engraved singular characters or writing, which no one can read. They seem as if they had been inlaid with gold.’ The rest of the platform is beautiful and level, and measures about 300 by 200 paces. Mandelslo has illustrated his description by an engraving that scarcely does justice to the text. After the statement that the platform was reached by four stairs, we were not prepared to find in the illustration a single row of steps leading straight up at right angles. The translator, Davies, seems to have thought that by the four stairs were meant a single flight at each corner of the platform. The four ‘walls’ of the Porch appear as a series of detached stones placed in a row, one after the other, along the western line of the terrace. The animals are cut out of the front of each stone, but they have no appearance of supporting any portion of the structure. Beyond, at some distance to the east, is a small square building, having on one side the slab with the inscription. There is no indication whatever of the sculptured terrace, which is indeed wholly forgotten in the text. The columns, however, at length appear for the first time in the true direction to the right of the entrance. From them an immense wall extends right across the platform to the east. It is pierced below by one large and three other smaller doors. Above, apparently belonging to a second story, are a series of seven or eight double windows, while still higher we observe several figures of men and animals. This great structure obscures the view of the tombs on the hill, and they are not mentioned in the text. Olearus, in his notes, refers to Barbaro, and, at second hand, to Don Garcia. But his chief reference is to Herbert, from whom he quotes the whole of the account given in the earlier editions of the Travels.

Mandelslo’s book was translated into English by John Davies, and it appeared in 1662, four years after its original publication; but the illustrations were not reproduced.[33] The translator has adopted the very singular method of incorporating with the text the notes that Olearus added from other writers. Mandelslo is thus made to appear as if he had quietly appropriated without acknowledgment the observations made by Barbaro, Don Garcia, and Herbert. The translator is, however, wholly responsible for this peculiar result. At the time Olearus issued his edition (1658) the text, taken together with the notes, probably resumed all that was then known concerning Persepolis and the cuneiform letters; and the translator made no independent additions.[34] But in the same year (1658) the third volume of Della Valle’s Travels was at length published, in which he gives the account of his visit to the ruins. His fame soon became well known in England, and a translation of his Travels to India appeared in 1665, along with those of Sir Thomas Roe.

Nearly thirty years had now elapsed since the last edition of Sir Thomas Herbert’s book was published (1638). He was still living, and no doubt he became sensible of the deficiency of his own account of Persepolis in comparison with that of Della Valle. It appears also that a Mr. Skinner had recently returned from Persia, with whom Herbert had the advantage of conversing. He had, moreover, preserved ‘the mixt notes’ he took at the time of his visit, nearly forty years before, and with a memory thus refreshed he sat down to compose a greatly enlarged account of the famous ruins.[35] He also gave instructions to the engraver Holler to execute an entirely new design of the place, which was accomplished in 1663. The view is still characterised by the most surprising inaccuracy. It is upon a much larger scale, and is a far more pretentious work than its predecessor. We now ascend to the platform by a double staircase parallel to the line of the terrace, but it is still erroneously represented projecting prominently from beyond it. At the summit we observe the four animals and the two columns of the Porch. There is, however, no trace of the walls the animals supported. In front are an elephant on one side and a rhinoceros on the other, having ‘visages with beards and long hair like men, agreeable to that fourth beast which Daniel looked upon.’ One of the other animals is ‘like unto a Pegasus,’ ‘trapped with warlike mail’; but the fourth ‘is so disfigured that it cannot be described.’ Turning to the right, we see at the edge of the terrace a tombstone of the usual pattern, engraved apparently with cuneiform letters. It stands entirely by itself, and is no doubt the jasper or marble table referred to in the text. Beyond it, upon the same level, are a large number of columns and the ruins of many others are to be seen strewn upon the ground. He tells us ‘there be but 19 pillars at this day extant, yet the fractures and bases of 21 more are perspicable.’ ‘It is evident,’ however, he continues, ‘there were in all a hundred pillars when the place was in perfection, as appears by the vacant spaces and also bases ... which are yet visible.’ The entire centre of the picture is occupied by a raised platform, no less than thirty feet above the level of the porch and columns. It is approached by a double staircase constructed in precisely the same manner as the first. The north wall of this elevated terrace stretches across, west to east, from the columns below to the hill that bounds the platform on the east, and it is completely covered from end to end with bas-reliefs. This sculptured wall was entirely forgotten by Herbert in his earlier editions, and it is now described elaborately, the description being evidently borrowed from Della Valle, a few errors being introduced, possibly from the ‘mixt notes.’ Having ascended to this elevated terrace, we come to a huge two-storied building, open at the top, resembling a modern factory gutted by a fire. It is divided into three compartments, and is represented as occupying the whole western side of the platform. Both within and without, from top to bottom, we observe the walls are entirely covered with bas-reliefs. On turning to the text for an explanation, we find, however, that the building still possesses its former modest dimensions; but ‘the walls and broken arches were wrought or pourtrayed with figures resembling some great persons on horseback, after whom proceed several others in sacerdotal habits.’ He has still a clear recollection of the ‘gold that was laid upon the Freez and Cornish, as also upon the trim of Vests.’ Turning away from this wonderful building, we observe a small ruin in the north-east corner, standing like the one just described upon the upper platform. This corresponds in position to that occupied by the Hall of the Hundred Columns, and the description he gives of it is one of the most singular portions of his narrative. He came, he says, to a large square room, where he observed bas-reliefs of a great person, and ‘sundry petitioners, but in several habits, as men of several nations,’ besides guards armed with spears. Near this he penetrated into a vault, ‘flagged at the bottome with square marble stones,’ which led him into a ‘fair room or chappel,’ ‘supported by four pillars 4 yards about, 8 in heighth and 4 yards from each other.’ He found the entrance elaborately sculptured with the figures of men, apparently priests, with uplifted hands. By another subterranean passage he reached a second chapel, also supported by four pillars seven yards high. Upon the arch is a man of colossal size with a lion couchant at his feet. Near him a king seated on a chair of state and on either side two rows of flamens. A few paces thence he beheld two giants, who by pure force subjugate two lions, and not far off a great prince, holding a sceptre or Pastoral Staff. On one side of him stand the Satraps, and on the other the Magi or priests. Opposite is a prisoner in chains, who he conjectures may be Daniel or Croesus. Beneath are six ranks of guards carrying spikes. Such is the first detailed account we have of the Hall of the Hundred Columns, and the elaborate sculptures with which it is adorned. It is remarkable that the accumulation of rubbish should have been so great that Herbert says ‘’tis presumed that the greatest part of the pile was vaulted underground’; and that, according as he burrowed laboriously through the débris, each of its great doors should appear to him like vaulted chapels.[36]

The hill that overhangs the platform on the south-east is shown by the drawing to be covered by a wonderful work of art. Four rows of figures support a stage whereon we observe a kneeling figure; but the serpent is now seen grovelling upon the ground, and the centipede of the earlier edition has developed into ‘a demon of as uncouth and ugly a shape as well could be imagined.’ ‘It is of a gigantic size ... discovering a most dreadful visage twixt man and beast. This monster has seven several arms.’ He now treats us to three lines of inscriptions ‘for better demonstration, which nevertheless whiles they cannot be read, will in all probability like the Mene Tekel without the help of a Daniel hardly be interpreted.’ He agrees with Della Valle that each character might represent a word—or at least a syllable. He also agrees with the same authority that the writing ran from left to right, but in the sample he gives us, two or three characters are placed upside down which, if they had fallen under Della Valle’s notice in that position would have entirely upset his argument from their ‘posture and tendency.’ Herbert compared the characters with ‘twelve several alphabets in Postellus and with the fifty-eight alphabets which Purchas had borrowed from the learned Gromex,’ but he could not perceive the least resemblance. They are, he says, ‘like Pyramids inverted, or with bases upwards, or like Triangles or Deltas.’ He, however, recommends the study to ‘ingenious persons who delight themselves in this dark and difficult art or exercise of Deciphering.’ The language must have been known to Daniel, who was probably the architect of this palace as of ‘Shushan and Ecbatan’; for we know that he was a ‘civil officer’ under ‘Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Astyages, Darius and Cyrus.’

During the remainder of the century we are chiefly indebted to French travellers for the gradual accumulation of more correct information upon this subject, and it was greatly to their advantage that they could always depend upon a hospitable welcome and much store of information from the friendly Superior of the Capuchins at Ispahan. When Persia was first rendered accessible to Europeans by the liberal policy of Shah Abbas, numerous missionaries flocked to the capital in the hope of winning converts to the Roman faith. We have already seen that the Augustinian Friars who arrived with Gouvea were awarded a disused palace as a monastery. They were followed, in 1608, by Carmelites from Rome. In 1627, Father Pacifique, of the French Order of Capuchins, obtained permission to establish missions at Ispahan and Bagdad; and during the second half of the seventeenth century their house became a resort of the principal European travellers. The rule of Père Raphael du Mans covered the whole of that period. He is first heard of at Ispahan, in 1644, where he remained as Superior of the Order till his death, in 1696, at the age of eighty-three. Not long after the settlement of the Capuchins, the Jesuits also made a similar attempt, but without much success; they were, however, given permission to open schools at Tauriz and a few other places in the south of Persia. It must be recollected that the object of these religious persons was not so much the conversion of Mahomedans—an attempt which when discovered was always rigorously punished—as the extension of the Roman sway over the Georgian and other native Christians. Resident agents of the Dutch and English East India Companies had also long been settled in the country. The Shah presented them with handsome residences at Ispahan and Shiraz; and they had permanent establishments at Bunder Abbas. The French still remained at a great disadvantage. Their first East India Company was formed in 1604, but for more than thirty years it did not fit out a single ship. At length its term of privilege expired without its ever having been exercised (1635), and a merchant of Dieppe despatched a vessel on his own account. A small Company was eventually formed and an attempt made to found a trading colony at Madagascar in imitation of those possessed by the English and Dutch at Bombay and Ceylon (1643); but no result followed and its privileges likewise lapsed. In 1664 another effort was made, and three agents were sent to Persia to reside at Ispahan, Shiraz, and Bunder Abbas, while two envoys were accredited to the Court. These efforts were, however, productive of little result, and were chiefly felt by the enmity they excited among the Dutch against the eminent French travellers who are now to engage our attention.

The names of Tavernier, Daulier Deslandes and Thévenot fill the latter half of the seventeenth century. Tavernier enjoyed an exceptional reputation as a traveller and merchant throughout the whole of that period. He was born at Paris, in 1605, of a Protestant family, and began his wanderings at the early age of fifteen. At first he followed the profession of a soldier of fortune, but he soon exchanged that precarious calling for the more lucrative pursuit of a travelling jeweller. He visited the East altogether six times between the years 1632 and 1668. His chief dealings were with the Shah of Persia, but he also extended his travels to India, and he was the first Frenchman to visit the Court of the Great Mogul. He brought back jewels from the mines of Golconda and from the pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf, and after having them polished and set in Paris, he sold them at greatly enhanced prices to Indian princes and to the Shah of Persia. He was the first to reveal the riches of the East to his countrymen, and he enjoyed the favour of Louis XIV., from whom he received a patent of nobility. It was on the occasion of his sixth and last journey to Persia, in 1664, that he was accompanied by Daulier Deslandes, a young artist who was included among his eight ‘serviteurs,’ and who passed the year with him.[37] Although travelling together in this manner for the sake of convenience, Daulier was in fact charged with a special mission on behalf of the French merchant company.[38] The two travellers left Ispahan in 1665 on their way to Bunder Abbas, and they seem on that occasion to have visited Persepolis together. Some days later they overtook M. de Thévenot at Bihry, in Lars (March 26) and the whole party proceeded to the coast. Tavernier went on to India, but Daulier and Thévenot returned to Persepolis (May 1665), and it was probably during this second visit that Daulier found time to make his investigations.[39] He published the account of his travels in 1673, and among the illustrations that adorn his book there is one of Persepolis or, as it is called, Tchelminar.[40] The engraving is vastly superior to anything that had yet appeared: indeed the fanciful and erroneous pictures given by Herbert and Mandelslo do not deserve to be put in comparison with it. We now for the first time obtain some idea of the real appearance of the ruins. The view is taken from the west, and shows correctly the peculiar features of the stairs, sunk into the wall of the terrace, and ascending in double flights parallel to it. We observe also the remarkable indentations in the formation of the platform, which Della Valle thought were designed for its defence. The four walls of the Porch, separated by the two columns, are intelligibly drawn, though their height is inadequate and the animals do not stand out with sufficient boldness. The fourfold ascent by single flights to the upper platform is clearly shown; and for the first time we find the Columnar Edifice of Xerxes correctly placed above. The still more elevated position of the Palace of Darius is plainly marked and its ruins fairly represented. The absurd appearance it presented in the drawings of Herbert and Mandelslo now finally disappears, and we obtain something like a correct view of the southern portion of the platform. Beyond the door and window frames of the Palace of Darius we observe to the south-east the ruins of the somewhat similar edifice of Xerxes. The latter is depicted upon a much higher elevation, and the western staircase leading to it comes too prominently into view. The east side of the platform is still indistinct. The Central Edifice and the Hall of the Hundred Columns are somewhat confused: the latter edifice appears erroneously placed upon the central platform. No adequate representation of the Tombs upon the hill is attempted. The description that accompanies the plate evinces much accurate observation. He treats the platform as divided into three different elevations, and in many places he observed that the rock itself was the foundation of the edifice. The first animal he met on the porch resembles an elephant; the others, looking east, have wings. Strangely enough he dismisses the sculptured stairs with a mere passing notice. He merely observes that the Columnar Edifice is reached by two single flights ‘whose sides are ornamented by bas-reliefs.’ Following Della Valle, he correctly divides the columns into a central group of thirty-six and porticoes on the three sides; but he was wrong in conjecturing that the front row consisted of only eight columns in two rows of four, and in supposing that they were intended to support idols. Only nineteen were then standing, but there were two in the Porch, and another in the plain five hundred paces from the platform. He noticed two others at a distance of three leagues ‘to the left.’ He observed that the columns of the central group have a double capital resembling those in the Porch, and have round bases. From this great ruin he ascended ten or twelve steps to the remains of some chambers, evidently the Palace of Darius. In front, he ‘saw the vestiges of several small columns,’ the first reference we have to the ruins of the Palace of Ochus. Turning towards the mountain, he came upon other chambers, apparently the Palace of Xerxes from the description of the steps descending abruptly to a lower platform. He also notes ‘a fine building with bas-reliefs,’ possibly the Hall of the Hundred Columns. He mentions the two sepulchres, where he observed a man with a bow sacrificing to an idol which resembles a satyr. He was unable to visit Naksh-i-Rustam. He was greatly impressed by the general effect produced by these ruins, and he considered them ‘one of the finest remains of antiquity.’ He dwelt especially upon the immense number of bas-reliefs; he estimated that there were at least two thousand, many of them only showing their heads above ground. In addition to the general view, he has drawn a few of the bas-reliefs, among others that of the man sacrificing to the satyr. Others represent the personage beneath the parasol, or fighting the lion. These sketches are insignificant in size and execution, but they are a great advance upon the preposterous attempts of his predecessors. He shows an inscription round an arch, but it is of a purely imaginative character; and he merely records the existence of letters ‘which no one can read,’ many of which, he adds, were gilt. He adopted the opinion of Père Raphael that the edifice was a Temple and erected by Assuerus, though he tells us that others maintain that it was the Palace of Darius.

A year after the publication of the ‘Beautés de la Perse’ a much more prosaic narrative appeared (1674), written by Daulier’s travelling companion, M. de Thévenot.[41] De Thévenot was born at Paris, in 1633. He found himself at an early age in possession of independent means, and he began his travels at nineteen. He first visited England, which seems to have been then regarded as the training ground where the traveller might be inured to the perils of foreign adventure (1652). He subsequently visited Holland and Germany, and he spent a few years in Italy. He had the advantage of meeting M. d’Herbelot at Rome, who afterwards gained a great reputation as a linguist and Orientalist. It may have been the incentive communicated from this source that determined Thévenot to visit the East and to devote himself to the acquisition of Eastern languages. The two friends planned a journey together, but at the last moment d’Herbelot was prevented from leaving. Thévenot left Rome in 1655, at the mature age of twenty-two, and passed a considerable time visiting the islands of the Mediterranean, Turkey, the Levant and Egypt.[42] After an absence of seven years, he returned to Paris and published an account of his journey, which appeared in 1664, in two volumes. He had taken pains to acquire several Oriental languages, Turkish, Arabic and Persian, and while staying in Paris, he devoted himself to the study of such sciences as were then within reach. The proof-sheets of his book were scarcely dry when he left for Persia (October 1663). His route lay by Aleppo to Mosul, which he reached about the end of July 1664. From thence he dropped down the Tigris to Bagdad, and struck across by Hamadan to Ispahan, where he arrived in October.[43] Here he remained the guest of Père Raphael till February 1665, when he took the opportunity of going to Bunder Abbas in the suite of Tavernier. The larger portion of the baggage mules were employed in carrying the merchandise of that enterprising traveller to the coast; but it does not appear that he himself joined the party till they were far on the road. They arrived at Bunder together, and here Thévenot was destined to meet with a severe disappointment. The French were at that time making an attempt to revive their East India Company, a step that roused the jealousy of the Dutch to such an extent that they positively refused to give him a passage. They wished to preserve the secrets of the trade entirely to themselves, and Thévenot feared that even if he were received on board, their patriotism might go to the length of imperilling his life.[44] At Bunder Abbas itself, where the Dutch had recently become completely the masters, he scarcely found himself safe. The only person he could trust was the agent of the English Company, who took him under his protection and gave out that he was an Englishman. He was compelled, therefore, to return to Shiraz, and it was on this occasion that he enjoyed the companionship of Daulier Deslandes. They visited the ruins of Persepolis, and Thévenot made copious notes of his impressions. In the autumn he made his way to Bassora, where he found a passage to India on board an Armenian vessel. He seems to have returned in the spring of 1667 in company with Tavernier.[45] On their way from Bunder Abbas they once more visited Persepolis, and upon this occasion they found Chardin there. Thus by a singular accident the three great travellers stood together among the historic ruins.[46] Thévenot died soon afterwards, at the early age of thirty-four, at Maiana, the ancient Atropatena, thirty leagues from Tauris (November 1667). Two volumes of his Travels, up to the time of his arrival at Surat, were published in 1674, and a third, on India, in 1684. A complete edition appeared in five volumes in 1689. Numerous others followed, and before the end of the century the work had been translated into English, Dutch and German.

It cannot be said that Thévenot’s description of Persepolis contributed much to the elucidation of the plan of the building. He, however, gives an accurate though somewhat complicated description of the double staircase. He explains for the first time the position of the animals on the pilasters of the Porch—their heads facing the front, and their half bodies in demi-ronde adorning the inside of the passage. He thought they were cut out of a single block, those facing the stairs representing elephants and the others griffins. He gives a fair account of the sculptured wall, which previous travellers had so frequently overlooked. He describes the projection in the centre, with a single stair at either end, and the single flights at each end of the terrace. They are, he says, almost entirely buried beneath rubbish, which may perhaps account for their having so frequently escaped observation. ‘Nevertheless one sees several figures on that portion of the wall of the terrace which is above ground.’ He noticed the combat—a lion and bull—and the three rows of bas-reliefs, representing, as he thought, a sacrifice or a triumph. He observed the various arms of the men, and the different animals, the sheep, oxen and dromedary, that figure in the procession. He conducts the reader up the stairs to the platform strewn with columns, some buried, some broken, and others marked only by their bases. Seventeen were then standing, and he conjectured that there were originally twelve rows of nine in each. He remarked the strange style of the capitals, and fancied they had been surmounted by statues, or perhaps by idols. He proceeds to the square building beyond, where he beheld ‘an old man followed by two valets,’ one holding a parasol and the other a crozier. But at this point his narrative becomes confused and we follow him with difficulty. In his description of the eastern part of the platform, however, he enumerates six distinct buildings, which appear to be formed by the ruins of the Great Hall of the Hundred Columns and those of the Central Edifice united. Although the description of the arrangement of these buildings is hopelessly confused, we obtain for the first time an adequate account of the remarkable bas-reliefs found among them. He describes the personage seated upon a chair of state, a staff or sceptre in his hand, while beneath him are three rows of figures, one over the other, with uplifted arms, supporting those above. The winged figure is, he says, an idol seated upon an arc, with the body passed through a ring. He found another similar piece of sculpture with three rows of figures among these ruins, and he also mentions the great bas-relief in the north door of the Hall, where the seated personage is elevated above five rows of figures, but he failed to notice that these were guards.[47] He divides the edifices on the platform into three rows of buildings one behind the other from west to east, the first two ‘rows’ containing, he says, each four buildings and the third five, of which the third is the largest, and we thus arrive at the thirteen buildings in all. His description of the Tombs is more intelligible. They resemble, he says, the façade of a temple cut into the rock. Below are four columns with capitals representing the head and throat of an ox. In the centre is the entrance to the tombs. They support an architrave approaching to Doric in style, and ornamented by lions. Above are two rows of arcades composed of human figures about two feet in height. Over them, in the centre, is an idol, resembling a winged man. On the right is a person praying, and to the left a pedestal surmounted by a globe. At either end is a portion of a round column with the head of a bull, and below, on each side of the second row are two men, one over the other, armed with pikes. It was impossible to gain access to this tomb, for it was full of water, but on entering the other to the south of it he found three sepulchres cut into the rock like the basins of a fountain. In the centre of the cave is a slab that appears to cover a tomb. Beyond the platform, to the south, he observed a single column still standing, and to the north the ruins of a porch. On his way to Naksh-i-Rustam, he observed on his right hand another column standing. He was inclined to believe that Chehel Minar had been a temple, for it is evident the buildings have never been roofed, and the site itself was not large enough for a palace.[48] Finally, he apologises for the confusion in which part of his narrative is involved, and protests, probably with truth, that if he had added anything more to his description he might only have increased its obscurity.

Two years later, Tavernier added his contribution to the subject[49] (1676). Although he seems, as we have said, to have visited Persepolis along with Daulier, in March 1665, yet he was evidently but little influenced by his opinion. He had seen the ruins several times, and his judgment on the subject had been no doubt already formed. He tells us that on the occasion of one of his visits he was accompanied by an artist named Angel, a Dutchman, who, it appears, was commissioned by Abbas II. to make drawings of the ruins; and the estimates they formed are in striking contrast to those of Daulier. Tavernier was too much concerned with practical affairs to be greatly interested in antiquarian research; and his eye, trained to dwell on the minute beauty of the precious stones, saw little to admire in colossal mounds of chiselled marble. Nor was the prosaic Dutchman who accompanied him more susceptible to this form of beauty. Angel spent eight days in making drawings of the various ruins, and in the end expressed regret that he had wasted so much of his time. As for Tavernier, he declared he did not consider them worth the labour of a quarter of an hour. The bas-reliefs seemed to him to be wretchedly executed, and he could only recollect to have counted twelve columns.

Shortly afterwards there appeared a book by Jean Struys, a Dutchman, whom Sir W. Ouseley rightly styles ‘the lying traveller.’[50] In it there is an engraving of what is called the ‘Tomb of Persepolis,’ which is such a grotesque misrepresentation that we can scarcely believe even Struys responsible for the vagaries of the artist he employed. He observed that the number of columns had been reduced to eighteen, and he estimated their height at thirty-eight feet. He was especially struck by the beauty of the staircase; and he was the first to make the correct suggestion that the animals guarding the porch were lions. He noted the numerous bas-reliefs whose beauty had not yet been effaced by time; but he fancied he saw battle scenes depicted among them. He thought the cuneiform ‘characters strangely resembled the Arabian, though no one has yet been able to decipher them.’[51]

An agent of the East India Company, Mr. S. Flower, made a collection of various inscriptions, and among others of ‘one consisting of two lines in the nail character, or pyramidal shape, such as is impressed on some bricks lately found in the neighbouring countries.’ These appeared in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ of 1693, and were reproduced by Dr. Hyde, who, quoting Flower, says that the characters are not found except at Persepolis, though some missionaries say they are known and in use in Egypt. He adds that they appear to be written from left to right. The inscription as copied in Hyde is punctuated after each letter,[52] and exhibits a miscellaneous collection of characters selected from the three descriptions of writing.

From what has been said it will be seen that down to the end of the seventeenth century, or a hundred years after the visit of Gouvea to Persepolis, the chief authorities upon the subject were still Don Garcia and Della Valle. Herbert perhaps enjoyed a wider popularity, but so far as his account was correct he depended chiefly upon other writers. The description given by Mandelslo and Daulier added little to the knowledge already acquired. Mere verbal descriptions, however, even by the most graphic writer, could never convey so vivid an impression to the mind as a pictorial representation. The drawings made by Don Garcia were not reproduced by his translators, and if they enriched the original Spanish edition, that work is so little known, that it has not even yet found its way to the British Museum. The drawings of Della Valle had not then[53] and, we believe, have never since been published. Mandelslo gave a tolerable drawing of the tomb at Murgab; but his view of Persepolis is little better than the plates in the earlier editions of Herbert. The English translator omitted them, and it is little likely that a book written in German and published in the remote town of Schleswig ever enjoyed a wide circulation. The engraving given by Herbert, even in his latest edition, is still grossly incorrect. It was executed by an artist who had never visited the spot, and Herbert was himself entirely unable to convey a true idea of the appearance and position of the different ruins. Daulier Deslandes at length made a great advance upon all his predecessors, and placed the student in a position to form a tolerable conception of the general aspect of the buildings.

Still less progress had yet been made towards the reproduction of the cuneiform letters. Della Valle had given five of the characters in the Italian edition of his Travels, but his French translators omitted them. Herbert contributed three lines; Daulier gave a short inscription taken from an arch; and Flower had quite recently increased the available material by two lines. They were all very imperfectly copied, but it was known that large numbers of similar inscriptions appeared in various parts of the ruins. Dr. Hyde, the learned Orientalist, concluded that they were not letters at all, but simply designed as ornamentation. He entirely repudiated the suggestion, which was already current, that they had any resemblance to Chinese.[54] He went so far as to upbraid the artist for having been the cause of so much torment to critics and men of learning. The whole matter was, he declared, beneath his notice, and he would not have alluded to it if he had not feared that his silence might be misconstrued.[55]

This opinion was occasionally repeated both in France and Germany down to the close of the eighteenth century. Early in that century, however, the materials for forming a more accurate judgment began rapidly to accumulate. The three travellers Chardin, Kaempfer and Le Bruyn all made important contributions to the subject. Chardin was the son of a rich jeweller in Paris, and early in life he was sent on business to Persia and India. On his return in 1681 he settled in England and was knighted by Charles II., who afterwards sent him to Holland as his ambassador. Chardin’s three visits to Persepolis were made as far back as 1666, 1667 and 1674, but his account of it did not appear till 1711. It was published at the same time in two different forms: in three volumes quarto and in ten volumes duodecimo, but with the same text and plates. This edition was somewhat expurgated to avoid giving offence to the Catholics, but another came out in 1735, which included the suppressed passages. Chardin died in London in January 1713, two years after the publication of the complete edition of his Travels, but before he had time to finish the most cherished work of his life, which was a Commentary on the Bible, based upon his knowledge of Oriental customs. It is said he was assisted in the composition of his works by Charpentier, a Member of the French Academy, and the magnificent drawings, twenty-three in number, made of Persepolis, are the work of M. Grélot, whom he brought with him for the purpose.[56] They convey a most admirable impression, and the student can for the first time realise the splendour of the ruins: which he could never have grasped from the confused description of travellers.

They include two general views upon a large scale. In the first a few inaccuracies detract somewhat from its value. We observe birds of a highly imaginative design perched upon the columns of the Porch; but whether they are designed to represent portions of the capital, or merely temporary visitors, does not appear. The sculptured stairs are incorrectly represented, showing only a single ascent, and without the projecting flight in the centre—a deficiency removed in the description given in the text. The columns are massed too closely together; the Palace of Darius is placed on the south-west extremity of the platform, in the position that should be left vacant for the Palace of Ochus; and the stairs appear on the north instead of on the south side of the Palace. On the other hand, we find the Hall of the Hundred Columns correctly placed for the first time on the same elevation as the Porch. The second view is more valuable. It is taken from about the same place as Niebuhr subsequently selected. The eye first rests upon the Hall of the Hundred Columns with the cistern and entrance porch to the right. Looking southwards, the Columnar Edifice is seen to occupy a prominent position, and beyond it lies the Palace of Darius, standing upon its own terrace, but, by an unaccountable error, with the façade turned to the east instead of the south. It appears unduly cramped between the columns and the Palace of Xerxes, which rises upon its terrace at an apparent elevation considerably higher than that of Darius. The double stairs leading to it on the east, and the straight flight down to the southern terrace are given. Under the hill we see a tolerable representation of the south-east edifice, and as we turn back to the Hall of the Hundred Columns we observe a poor representation of the Central Edifice. There is a tendency to represent the ruins in too perfect a condition: the lower portion of the massive piers at the entrance have the appearance of being intact; the eastern stairs of Xerxes are also represented as far too well preserved, and the artist has entirely omitted the great mound opposite the Central Edifice. Apart from these defects, the drawing gives an intelligent design of the place, and it will enable the reader to recover from the nightmare into which he may have fallen after reading the account of Thévenot, and even the description of Chardin himself. The other plates are devoted to separate drawings of the more remarkable objects. One (Plate 54) makes the first attempt to reduce the platform to scale; but the buildings are not indicated upon it. Another gives the Great Staircase (Plate 55); two are devoted to the Porch (Plates 56 and 57); two to the Sculptured Stairs (Plates 58 and 59); two to the Columns of the Hall of Xerxes (Plates 60 and 61). The bas-reliefs are treated with special attention. Besides those on the Porch and the Sculptured Stairs, we are shown the King walking beneath the parasol (Plate 62); seated upon the chair of state above the five rows of guards (Plate 63); and again over the three rows of suppliants (Plate 64). Special plates are devoted to his contests with wild animals (Plate 65), and to the guards at the entrance to the Palaces (Plate 66). A plate is devoted to each of the Tombs on the hill (Plates 67 and 68), and another to a general view of the tombs at Naksh-i-Rustam. By means of these admirable drawings the Persepolitan ruins received their first adequate illustration. Daulier had indeed contributed a general view of some excellence; but the few and insignificant sketches he attempted of the bas-reliefs were the only drawings that had yet appeared. It is doubtful whether anything much better has since been produced than the magnificent views of the sculpture on the Great Portal of the Hall of the Hundred Columns and the drawing of the Tombs overhanging the Platform. The sculptured staircase is drawn upon an immense scale. It fills two plates, one opening out in length equal to twelve pages of the book, and the other to five or six pages. The execution is admirable as a work of art, and as such it has perhaps never been surpassed. In point of fidelity to the subject it may not be more in error than many of its successors. At that period the sculptures were no doubt in a more perfect condition than they since became after a lapse of a century or two, and Chardin describes them as being in his day ‘still so complete and so sharply defined that the work appears to have only just come from the sculptors’ hands.’ The plates are no doubt far from reaching photographic accuracy; but this objection applies, if not equally, to the later drawings of Porter and Flandin. When we look at the general view of the platform and observe the remarkable precision with which the various ruins are marked upon it, we are surprised to find the description in the text so complicated and confused.[57] The pencil of the artist seems to have followed with perfect clearness the relation to each other of the various parts of the ruins; but in Chardin’s account of them, from the point where he leaves the Columnar Edifice, we become lost in his description of a perfect maze of apparently isolated structures. When we advance from ‘the marvellous temple choir,’ as he calls that edifice, and proceed to follow his ‘straight line,’ we can only very dimly recognise where we are going. It is not, indeed, till we arrive at the Tombs that we once more recover consciousness of our position. While nothing can be learned of the general disposition of the ruins from the account of Chardin, he has furnished a careful description of detached portions of the edifice. From him we learn that there are inscriptions over the animals on the Porch. He gives a long and minute description of the bas-reliefs on the sculptured staircase. He shows that the dress and arms of the various figures are intended to indicate the countries from which they came, and he accompanies his dissertation with much learned commentary. He thought the Columnar Edifice had originally consisted of twelve rows of ten columns, or one hundred and twenty in all; and he is quite sure he counted three rows with ten in each. He noted also that ‘the capitals are different, not only in their ornamentation but also in the fact that some are single and others double.’ The conflict between men and animals depicted on the side doors he thought represented the struggle of heroes with different nations, which, as in the Book of Daniel, were symbolically represented by animals. He considered the stately personage under the parasol united in his own person the offices of both priest and king. The winged figure seemed to him to represent the soul ascending to heaven, amid the clouds of sacrifice; and he rejected the impious conjecture that it denoted a serpent or satyr or worse. He was fully convinced that the ruins were those of a temple and that the Columnar Edifice had been the ‘choir’ where the victims were immolated. The great difficulty of supposing that the principal buildings had ever been roofed favoured the supposition of its ecclesiastical character. He reviews at great length the different opinions as to its origin; some ascribe it to the period before the Deluge, others to Solomon; but he finally decides in favour of Jamshid, the fourth King of Persia, who, he ascertained, had flourished about the time of the descent of Jacob into Egypt.[58] This opinion as he takes care to emphasise, would throw back the construction of the edifice many centuries before Darius. The idea that the ruins represented the castle and palace of Persepolis was first advocated by Don Garcia, but it had long lost its popularity and the rival opinion first put forward by Della Valle, that they were the remains of a temple had already secured the adhesion of Daulier and Thévenot. Chardin now gave it the support of his authority, and he affected to scout the opposite view as ‘a vain and ridiculous tradition,’ although later investigation has affirmed its truth. He was followed by Kaempfer, and encouraged by the English traveller Fryer, who qualified the opinion that it was ‘Cambyses’ Hall’ with the doubt that it might after all ‘be the ruins of some heathen temple.’[59]

Passing to the tombs, he rightly conjectured that the round object above the fire altar represented the sun, ‘the great divinity of the Persians.’ More adventurous than Thévenot, he effected an entrance into the northern tomb over the Hall of the Hundred Columns, and describes it as a square space of twenty-two feet and twelve feet high. At the side he noticed two tombs of white marble sixty-two by twenty-six inches and thirty inches high, both full of water. Chardin thought that the entire façade of the tomb was concealed after its construction by a covering of earth. It was the common belief of the country people that Nimrod had been buried in the first of these tombs and Darius in the second, but Chardin thought that both had been occupied long before the time of Darius.

He mentions the column in the plain three hundred paces from the platform, perfect except the capital. From this spot across to Naksh-i-Rustam ruins may be seen scattered over the whole plain and it was here he thought the city of Persepolis had stood, with the Temple to the east and the Tombs to the west. It reached northwards between the hills where fallen columns, pieces of architraves and bas-reliefs might be observed, and he was told that there were traces of ruins within a circuit of ten leagues.

Chehel Minar is honeycombed by subterranean passages, possibly drains or aqueducts, and Chardin explored several of them. He found one of sufficient height to walk through upright, and he advanced nearly a mile, when he was forced to return. The people of the country told him it extended for six leagues and leads to subterranean tombs. A similar passage connects the temple with Naksh-i-Rustam.

Chardin noted many inscriptions among the ruins, sometimes even upon the robes of the figures.[60] He observes that the strange characters are sometimes three inches in height, and there can be no doubt that some of them, especially the capitals, were gilt. This was in fact the opinion of several of the early travellers, such as Mandelslo and Daulier Deslandes; while Herbert saw gilding on the bas-reliefs themselves. The writing is composed of only two kinds of characters: one resembles an oblique triangle, the other a pyramid. The first has ‘la pointe ou angulaire, ou en bas ou en travers.’ The second may assume six postures: ‘when perpendicular, the pointed end may be either top or bottom; when horizontal, either to left or right; when diagonal, it may point either way.’ It may be read not only from left to right, but also from top to bottom like Chinese. Some consider the writing is purely hieroglyphical, but Chardin thinks it is a true writing like our own—but it will be impossible ever to tell whether it has vowels, or anything else about it. In order to illustrate his opinion concerning the various directions in which the characters might be read, he made a copy of the inscription that runs round the window of the Palace of Darius. This is the first complete inscription ever copied, and unfortunately it contributed much to impede the progress of decipherment.[61] Although consisting of only one line, it is in three different scripts, and its inspection served at once to confirm the opinion of Chardin that the wedges might be turned in any direction—for to the left of the window we see the thick end of the wedge at the bottom; on the right of the window it is in the reverse position; while on the top it is turned to the left. It was long before it was discovered that this inscription was to be read, like the legend running round a coin—the line to the left being written running up; and the line to the right running down; so that in reality the wedge always preserves the same direction.

He visited Naksh-i-Rustam, and was the first to give an account of the Inscriptions on the second tomb. The one above consists, he says, of fifteen lines; the other near the cornice and the door is shorter. He induced his valet, by an offer of three crowns, to explore the interior, and he was probably the first European who ever accomplished the task. He was encountered at the narrow entrance by an immense flight of pigeons, at first mistaken for demons, who were terrified by his intrusion and hastened to make their escape. He reported that the cave measured forty paces in a straight line from the entrance and thirty on either side. Facing the entrance he noticed the lids of three sarcophagi upon the ground, and to right and left were four tombs each six feet long.[62]

The general impression left upon his mind by the contemplation of Persepolis was that the ruins were the most magnificent he had ever seen.[63] Although not without fault, they are, taken as a whole, characterised by excellent taste and worthy of admiration for the amount of labour that lies concealed as well as for that which is displayed. He attributed the destruction of the building more to the religious zeal of the Mohamedans than to time. Istakhr early became the seat of a Viceroy of the Khalifs, and since then the work of demolition has never ceased. Even Shah Abbas adorned his palace at Ispahan with some of its marbles, and others found their way to Shiraz. Not long before Chardin’s visit the governor of that place gave orders that sixty men should be employed in systematic destruction directed chiefly against the human figures; but fortunately his orders were not fully carried into execution.

The year after the appearance of Chardin’s account of Persepolis Engelbert Kaempfer published his Travels, (1712) which include a description of the same monument.[64] He was a German physician who went to Persia in 1684 in the capacity of secretary to the Swedish Envoy, and he subsequently remained as surgeon to the Dutch fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf. His visit to Persepolis occurred twelve years later than that of Chardin, but unfortunately he was not accompanied by a skilful artist (1686). He treats us to five drawings of Persepolis and three of Naksh-i-Rustam. The former include two general views of the Platform, one taken from the west and the other from the east: the Porch, the sculptured stairs and the great door of the Hall of the Hundred Columns. They are quite unworthy to be compared either in design or execution with those of Chardin. But if it were not for the exceptional excellence of the latter, we should feel more grateful to Kaempfer and his successor Le Bruyn. As it is, Kaempfer’s drawing of the sculptured stairs almost carries us back to the archaic period of art represented by Herbert, and may best be described as grotesque. He is more successful in the treatment of the façade of a tomb at Naksh-i-Rustam. He has, however, merits peculiar to himself. The first attempt to draw the platform to scale was made by Chardin; but Kaempfer improved upon this example by marking the position and outline of the principal ruins upon it; and has thus afforded the student invaluable assistance to guide him through the intricacies of all future descriptions. He has added to its clearness by numbering each of the ruins: a system he has also followed in his general view.

But of still greater importance was the attention he directed to the Inscriptions. It is to him we owe the designation of ‘cuneiform’ from the wedge-like appearance of the signs that compose the groups—a name they have since retained. He considered that the writing was ideographic, as in the Chinese; it was unknown elsewhere, but here it was found cut into the doors, windows, statues and walls, and it was certainly contemporary with the construction of the edifice. He was told that the hollow formed by the excision was formerly filled in with gold, which had been removed by the cupidity of subsequent ages, though he fancied he could still detect traces of it in some places. He was particularly struck by the appearance of an inscription on the south wall of the Terrace. It occupied a slab no less than ten paces in length, and was divided into four tablets, each containing twenty-four lines. He copied the one on his right hand as carefully as the difficulties of the situation would permit; he was unfortunately prevented from copying the others, but he observed that the characters in them varied to a certain extent. The inscription he gave was afterwards known as the ‘L of Niebuhr,’ and belongs to the third or Babylonian system of writing.[65] He has transcribed the whole of the twenty-four lines, and it was by far the longest text that had ever yet been published to the world. Although the copy is defective when compared with the perfection that has since been achieved, yet as a first attempt upon so large a scale it deserves high commendation. He also gives the trilingual inscription round a window in the Palace of Darius, but in this he had been anticipated by Chardin.[66]

He is careful also to direct the reader’s attention to the position of inscriptions in other parts of the ruins. He mentions the inscription over the animals in the Porch (of which, however, we had already heard from Chardin), but he also fixes the position of the inscription in twenty-four lines on the sculptured stairs;[67] of the three inscriptions on the south stairs of the Palace of Darius;[68] of the three inscriptions, each of six lines, over the bas-relief on the great doors of the same edifice,[69] and of the three inscriptions, each of four lines, in the corresponding position in the Palace of Xerxes.[70] Kaempfer favoured the opinion then most generally accepted that the building was a temple rather than a palace, and he considered that the columns were designed to support a roof.[71] He gives the earliest description we have of the central edifice, and he explains clearly the nature of the building. It consists, he says, of the remains of three massive doors and the bases of two columns and although these ruins are few in number he declares they are superb.[72]

He remarked that two months would be scarcely long enough to sketch the principal objects, and he could only spare three days.

Nearly twenty years later the ruins were visited by another traveller who had more time at his disposal. Corneille le Bruyn arrived early in November 1704 and occupied himself for three months in sketching and measuring the various edifices.[73] Unfortunately, the result is scarcely equal to the effort. His book, which was published at Amsterdam in 1718, contains eight plates of Persepolis; but they are greatly inferior to those of Chardin and are executed on too small a scale to assist the student in following the diffuse and confused description given in the text. Two plates are devoted to four general views taken from different points. In these the buildings are indicated by letters, which refer the reader to the text, and they enable him to apprehend some of the more obscure statements made by the writer. One plate is devoted to views of the great stairs and entrance portico. Two others reproduce the figures on the sculptured stairs. Though inferior to the same views given by Chardin, they are immeasurably superior to the one by Kaempfer and fall little short of those subsequently executed by Niebuhr. The remaining plates contain a number of small vignettes, which convey but a poor impression of the objects they are designed to represent. Le Bruyn has, however, devoted one of the plates to Inscriptions and this is the most important work he has achieved in connection with this subject. He has copied five separate inscriptions, four of which were now published for the first time. (1) The Inscription on the Sculptured Stairs.[74] (2) The Inscription on the pilaster in the Portico of the Palace of Darius.[75] It is in three tablets, each tablet containing from thirteen to fifteen lines. (3) The Inscription seen over the King in the same palace.[76] It is also in three tablets, each containing six lines. (4) The Inscription in the folds of the royal robe—of which seven lines are given.[77] (5) Finally, he has reproduced the window Inscription already published by Chardin and Kaempfer, but instead of representing it as it occurs round a window, he has placed the three lines under one another in parallel lines.[78] By this simple change of position he has shown the fallacy of the theory that the lines at the sides may be read from top to bottom: or that the wedge can occur with the point upwards. Le Bruyn is a more accurate copyist than Kaempfer, and in some respects he even excels Ouseley, a hundred years later. With Le Bruyn the cuneiforms assume the bold and regular appearance with which we are now familiar, although he confuses many of the letters by too great compression.

Le Bruyn appears to have been one of the first travellers to attempt to make a collection of these antiquities to send home to Europe. The extreme hardness of the stone severely taxed the strength of his tools, and it was with considerable difficulty that he secured a piece from a window covered with cuneiform characters, and some other smaller objects. These he despatched through the agent of the Dutch East India Company to the Burgomaster of Amsterdam. So far as we know, the only other specimens of cuneiforms that had hitherto been seen in Europe were those picked up by Della Valle on the site of Babylon and sent to the Kircherian Museum.

He was not very happy in some of his criticisms. He described the animals on the Entrance Portico as having a likeness to the Sphinx with the body of a horse and the feet of a lion. He imagined that the animal attacked by the lion on the sculptured stairs was a horse or even an ass. The object that separates the various groups in the same place he describes as a vase. He considered the capital surmounting the columns was the figure of a kneeling camel. He is about the only competent observer, with the exception of Niebuhr, who discerned female figures among the sculptures.[79] He appears to say that there are no less than forty-six of these in the Palace of Darius alone: among them are the King’s attendants bearing the fly-chaser and parasol. He estimates the total of human figures among the ruins at 1300; and, judging by the number of bases, he considered there were originally not less than two hundred and five columns.[80] He gives the measurements of the buildings, the size and number of the figures with a detail that becomes irksome and bewildering. The reader often regrets that he did not make better use of his pen and pencil, and spare him some of the results of the measuring tape. He is by no means too lavish of his praise. He censured the figures as stiff and devoid of animation; the nude he found represented without anatomical skill and the draperies without taste. He admits, however, that the ornamentations, when they occur, are beautiful. He was of opinion that all the stone for the construction of the various edifices came from the neighbouring mountains, where he observed all the various shades found at Persepolis. He had the good sense to reject the foolish theory supported by Chardin as to the Jamshid origin of the ruins; and he could see no evidence that they had ever been used as a temple. On the contrary, he considered that they had been a palace, and his conviction that the columns had originally supported a roof lessens the difficulty of accepting that view. He argues with some force and great diffuseness that it could only have been the Palace of the Achaemenides destroyed by Alexander: an opinion confirmed by later investigation, and one that greatly facilitated the attempt made by Grotefend to decipher the inscriptions.

CHAPTER II
NIEBUHR TO DE MORGAN. A.D. 1765-1897

It was more than sixty years before any farther contribution was made to the knowledge of Persepolis. In 1761, however, the King of Denmark, Frederic V., fitted out an expedition chiefly for the purpose of exploring Arabia. Five commissioners were nominated, to each of whom a special branch of inquiry was assigned. Among them was Carston Niebuhr, the father of the writer whose historical works agitated the early part of last century. They left Copenhagen in January of that year, and reached Constantinople after an adventurous voyage. From thence they went to Egypt, and finally to Yeman, where they arrived in 1763. Here three out of the five explorers died, and the two survivors left for Bombay in 1764. Soon afterwards another died, and Niebuhr, the sole survivor, determined to return home, and to take Persia and the Euphrates Valley on his way. He received many courtesies from the English merchants settled at Bushire and Shiraz, especially from Mr. Hercules, the agent of the East India Company, in whose house he lived at Shiraz. Through his influence Niebuhr went on to Persepolis, furnished with the best introductions to the chiefs of the neighbouring villages. He arrived on the 13th of March, 1765, and remained till the 3rd of April. He afterwards returned for two days to compare his sketches with the original. He wrote in German, and the French translation appeared in 1780.[81]

The magnificent views of Persepolis given to the world by Chardin, and the very useful plan drawn to scale by Kaempfer, had already afforded ample material for forming a tolerably accurate conception of the general aspect of the ruins. Little remained now to be done except to work for the archæologist, to whom the minutest attention to detail was the first necessity. Niebuhr, unfortunately, cannot claim to have accomplished this difficult task, so far at least as his drawings are concerned. He has, however, contributed ten plates of illustrations of considerable artistic merit. Following the example of Kaempfer, he begins with a ground plan on which the various edifices are distinctly indicated by letters. This is followed by a general view looking towards the west; three plates are devoted to the sculptured stairs; one to the mysterious animals on the porch that continued so long a stumbling-block; the Palaces of Darius and Xerxes each occupy a plate, and two others portray the seated figures in the Hall of the Hundred Columns. He was so satisfied with this achievement that he thought even the student would have no need of any farther assistance from the artist’s pencil.[82] This is, however, so far from the case, that even the general reader has some cause to complain.[83] Niebuhr has conveyed an entirely false conception of the appearance of the sculptured terrace by the omission of the broken line of sculpture, of which one half still remains above the other two. He has also had the temerity to represent the figures as though they were perfect, though he states in the text that the larger number on one side are so mutilated that they are without their heads.[84] It would be impossible in his drawings to distinguish the different nationalities; it is difficult even to detect the ‘Kaffir,’ as he calls the famed Ethiopian.[85]

On the other hand, the description he has given of the ruins has the merit of being more concise than that of Chardin, and we follow him throughout with clearness. He was disposed to accept the theory that the edifice was originally a temple, the seat of an ecclesiastical chief, comparable to the Roman Pontiff, who had gradually passed into a secular prince. He did not doubt that it finally became the residence of the Achaemenian Kings, and was the edifice destroyed by Alexander.

It is not necessary to refer to many of his criticisms. He had little hesitation in deciding that the animals on the Porch were griffins (licornes), and that a double griffin ornamented the capital of the columns. Besides griffins, he fancied he discerned women among the bas-reliefs, especially in the Palace of Xerxes.[86] He, however, made the important observation that in the Columnar Edifice or Hall of Xerxes the columns of the central cluster are four feet lower than those at the side, and that there are the remains of four walls that seem to indicate an entrance from the north. He did not consider that the evidence was sufficient to conclude, as was generally done, that this edifice must have been necessarily open at the top; on the contrary, he suggests the possibility that the central group of columns supported a second stage, and the side colonnades a terrace.[87] He thought it probable that the whole assemblage of columns—seventy-two in number—had originally formed one immense building, which would have exceeded in size the Hall of the Hundred Columns. With regard to the latter, he had no doubt that it also had been roofed, and he observed numerous fragments of columns both in the great hall and in the portico. Della Valle had long ago traced the bases of thirty-six columns in the Palace of Xerxes; Niebuhr now adds the observation that there are four in each of the side rooms. He was also the first to observe the third tomb to the south of the others near Persepolis that has been left incomplete.[88]

But his principal merit lies in the great service he has rendered towards the solution of the mystery of the cuneiform letters. It is true he neglected to furnish a complete copy of all the inscriptions, which, with the time at his disposal, he might perhaps have accomplished; but the contributions he did make are of great value.

(1) He copied the inscription on the west end of the sculptured terrace, 25 lines, known as Inscription A.

(2) The six-line inscription in three tablets over the king in the Palace of Darius: B, C, D.

(3) The corresponding inscription in the Palace of Xerxes: E, F, G.

(4) He also copied the large inscriptions in four tablets on the outside south wall of the platform: H, I, K, and L. They each fill twenty-four lines, and an idea of the size of the letters may be formed from the fact that the original covers a space twenty-six feet long by six feet high.

Of these Le Bruyn had already copied the A inscription in the drawing he gives of the stairs, the six-line inscription of Darius (B, C, D), and a line of the inscription of Xerxes from the royal robe; while Kaempfer copied one tablet (L) of the inscription on the south terrace.[89] The others now appear for the first time. It has already been observed that Kaempfer was the first to draw the characters with a bold and steady hand; in this he has been followed by Niebuhr, so that his copies differ in no respect from those produced in the present day. The few remarks he has made upon the subject are of peculiar value and very materially assisted later scholars. He was the first to observe that the inscriptions are written in three different ‘alphabets,’ and that these always recurred together.[90] So slow is the progress of discovery, however, that he never seems to have advanced to what might appear to be the obvious conclusion that the three tablets are repetitions of the same text in different languages. He noted that the ‘alphabet’ in one of the tablets of the series was comparatively simple, and consisted of no more than forty-two different signs.[91] These he copied out, and they appear in Plate 23. He thus limited the first step in decipherment to the interpretation of a comparatively small number of signs. Till then the greatest confusion was produced by the appearance of detached portions of inscriptions, selected indifferently from all the three kinds of writing, a process that inspired the fear that the number of signs to be mastered was practically unlimited. Having clearly detected each separate letter from among the number of confused signs in a line of inscription, he farther assisted the student by marking off each separate letter by a full stop or colon in the copies he made of the inscriptions themselves.[92] From the division of the signs into letters he does not seem to have made the next step and apprehended the division of the lines into words by the diagonal wedges in the Persian column. He, however, directed attention to two different copies of the same inscription, where in one the letters that end the third line are in the other the first that occur in the fourth line; he pointed out that this practically settled the direction in which the writing should be read.[93] He also showed that the lines supposed by Chardin to be written from top to bottom are not in reality upright, but should be placed on their side, and when horizontal the letters correspond to those already known.[94]

Before leaving the neighbourhood of Persepolis, Niebuhr visited Istakhr and Naksh-i-Rustam, but he did not go on to Murgab. At Istakhr he saw two columns still standing, and he noted the massive blocks of the gateway.[95] He made no attempt to enter any of the tombs, which he says could not be done ‘without the risk of losing one’s life.’ That risk, such as it was, was, however, undertaken in the following year by Mr. Hercules, who had provided himself with tools in the case of necessity; but he found that some earlier visitor had pierced a hole through the top, and that there was nothing but dust remaining. Niebuhr has not noticed the inscription on the Tomb of Darius; but his accurate copies of the Pehlevi made at this spot and at Naksh-i-Rejeb opposite were the first that enabled Silvestre de Sacy to translate that language.

We shall see in a future chapter that before the close of the century the writings of Le Bruyn and Niebuhr had attracted a fair share of attention among European scholars; and the copies they had made of the inscriptions became the object of sedulous study, especially in the North. In Göttingen, the interest excited by the description of the ruins of Persepolis gave rise to an extremely heated controversy between Heeren and Herder. The former, in an early edition of the ‘Historical Researches,’ maintained that they were of Achaemenian origin. Persepolis, he says, ‘as the residence and place of sepulture of the Persian kings, was considered in the light of a sanctuary, and held to be the chief place in the kingdom.’ Herder, on the other hand, contended for its Jamshid origin, and supported his opinion in a series of very acrid ‘Persepolitan Letters.’[96] The question was of more importance than might at first sight appear, for upon its decision depended the royal names that should be looked for in the inscriptions. George Grotefend, a student in the University, who made the first successful attempt to decipher them in 1802, adopted the opinion of Heeren, and his investigations were largely based upon the conviction that the names of Darius and Xerxes could not fail to be found hidden in the cuneiform characters.

Meanwhile the new century opened with a continuance of the explorations, and one of the most fruitful discoveries was the inscription of Cyrus found by Morier at Murgab. For some time previous the disturbed state of the country had led to a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between Persia and European countries. Foreigners, who had been so cordially welcomed by Shah Abbas became almost unknown. Englishmen were gazed upon in the streets of the capital as ‘monsters of an unknown genus,’ and thought to be Chinese.[97] At length Captain (afterwards Sir John) Malcolm was sent by the Indian Government to solicit an alliance for common action against the Afghans. The French, however, viewed this friendly alliance with jealousy, and in 1805 they sent M. Jaubert, a well-known Orientalist, to detach the Shah from the English alliance.[98] The French envoy was successful; a Persian mission visited France, and concluded a treaty with Napoleon, in May 1807; an embassy under General Gardanne followed. These intrigues were, however, immediately met by a special mission from England, headed by Sir Harford Jones; and James Morier was appointed secretary. Morier was descended from a Huguenot family who, after leaving France, settled first in Switzerland and afterwards in Smyrna, where they engaged in business. Here James was born, about 1780. Not long after, his father came to England, became a naturalised subject, and sent his sons to Harrow. A reverse of fortune compelled him to return to Smyrna, where James again resided till about 1800. His father was appointed Consul at Constantinople in 1804, and died there of the plague in 1817. He had, however, the good fortune to secure appointments for three of his sons in the diplomatic service, and a commission in the navy for a fourth. Morier reached Bushire at the end of 1808, but upon this occasion he only spent a few months in the country. He returned in 1810, once more filling the position of secretary to an embassy of which Sir Gore Ouseley was chief. Ouseley brought his brother William with him in the capacity of private secretary and Mr. Gordon, a brother of Lord Aberdeen, was also attached to the mission. While the party was detained at Shiraz, in 1811, they scattered in pursuit of archæological discovery. Morier revisited Persepolis; Sir W. Ouseley went to Fasa, which was then considered to be the ancient Pasargadae; while Gordon undertook the dangerous journey to Susa.[99] Morier remained in Persia for six years, devoting himself to study; and he has secured a lasting fame as author of ‘Hajji Baba.’ Upon the occasion of his first visit in 1809, he spent only two days at Persepolis, and he added nothing to the knowledge already existing with reference to it. He, however, went to Naksh-i-Rustam, and his friend Captain Sutherland succeeded, as Mr. Hercules had done before, in entering the tomb farthest to the left.[100] He afterwards continued his journey along the valley of the Polvar, ‘between mountains whose brown and arid sides presented nothing to cheer or enliven the way.’ When he had travelled, as he supposed, about forty miles, and was still some two miles from Murgab, he turned from the direct route to view the ruins known in the country as ‘Mesjid Madre Suleiman,’ or Tomb of the Mother of Solomon. He observed the three pilasters of what is now termed the Palace of Cyrus, and conjectured at once that they belonged to a Hall, ‘the interior of which was decorated with columns.’ They were surmounted by a short inscription, of which he made a copy. He next observed a ‘building of a form so extraordinary that the people of the country often call it the court of the deevis or devil.’ He gives an excellent drawing of the well-known tomb, and adds: ‘if the position of the place had corresponded with the site of Passagardae as well as the form of this structure accords with the description of the Tomb of Cyrus, I should have been tempted to assign to the present building so illustrious an origin.’ He shows that the plain in which it stands was once the site of a great city, ‘as is proved by the ruins with which it is strewed’; the cuneiform inscriptions indicate that it was of the same ‘general antiquity’ as Persepolis; the two structures correspond in description, and in fact the only evidence on the other side is the absence of the inscription which Aristobulus declares he saw upon it. The place had been visited twice before, once by Barbaro in the fifteenth century, and again by Mandelslo in 1638. Mandelslo, indeed, gives an admirable drawing of it, which later artists have scarcely excelled. But till it was seen by the imaginative Morier no one had suggested that it was the Tomb of Cyrus. The opinion was readily accepted by Grotefend,[101] and it guided him to no small extent in the decipherment of the name of Cyrus in the inscription brought from the immediate vicinity.[102] When, however, Morier paid his second visit to Murgab in 1811, he was so overawed by the ponderous learning of his travelling companion Ouseley, that he tacitly allowed the subject to drop. On this occasion he succeeded in gaining access to the interior, but found nothing worthy of mention. He also noticed for the first time a very remarkable bas-relief of a winged human figure, and over it a repetition of the inscription he had already copied.[103]

Kaempfer had set the example of collecting specimens, and we fear the gentlemen of the embassy were only too ready to follow in his steps. They even went so far as to bring stone-cutters with them, provided with the requisite tools to carry their design into effect. We afterwards hear rather ominously of ‘the specimens in the possession of Sir Gore Ouseley and Lord Aberdeen.’[104] Morier published in 1812 the account of his ‘First Journey,’ containing the famous Cyrus inscription, and in 1818 the account of his ‘Second Journey’ followed. These works were well received, and can still be read with interest, but the fame of the author rests on his ‘Hajji Baba,’ which appeared in 1824.

Ouseley, who accompanied the embassy, was a very learned Orientalist, who was perhaps somewhat oppressed by the weight of his own accomplishments.[105] He was born in Ireland, in 1771, and after serving for a time in the army, he retired in 1794, and devoted himself wholly to his favourite pursuits. He became a thorough Persian scholar, and the author of many books bearing on Persian history and antiquities. He was therefore well qualified to accompany the embassy, and it was a source of keen pleasure to him to visit the country under such advantageous circumstances.

We have said that he turned aside from Shiraz to visit Fasa or Pasa, in the hope of finding the tomb of Cyrus; but, like Della Valle, he discovered nothing except a venerable cypress tree, which ‘is said to have been for above one thousand years the boast and ornament of the place.’[106] He finally came to the conclusion that Pasargadae and Persepolis were one and the same place, and firmly opposed the claim put forward by Morier on behalf of Murgab. Ouseley seems to have spent five days in all among the ruins of Persepolis, and he made excellent use of his time. He added another to the increasing number of general views (Pl. 40), and contributed a few small sketches of various parts of the building (Pl. 41). He rendered considerable service by the accurate copy he made of the cuneiform inscription round the window frames of the Palace of Darius. He found it repeated no less than eighteen times, and by a careful collation he was able to present a complete reading of the mutilated text.[107] He finally dispelled the erroneous idea that it was to be read from the top downwards; and he pointed out that certain of the characters found on bricks and gems from Babylon are never to be seen at Persepolis.[108] His description of the ruins is painstaking, but the subject was now almost exhausted. He agrees with Niebuhr that the Hall of Xerxes was roofed, and also that it may have supported another stage. He went farther and suggested the comparison with the façade of the tombs, an idea which Fergusson afterwards turned to excellent account.[109] But the chief value of his narrative consists in the full account he gives of Murgab and the illustrations that accompany it. Mandelslo and Morier had, as we have seen, both sketched the tomb; Ouseley adds a third sketch and by no means the best; but his other drawings are quite new, and from them the reader gains his first impressions of the plain of Murgab. They afford excellent views of the principal remains—the terrace, the square building, the palace, the caravansary, and the winged figure. He gives a satisfactory account of each, and when he comes to the palace, we find it described simply as ‘a cluster of pillars and pilasters.’ Notwithstanding all his prepossessions, he could not fail to be struck by the strange likeness of the Murgab tomb to the description given of the tomb of Cyrus, and he adds: ‘I should not have hesitated to believe it the tomb of Cyrus had the discovery of it rewarded my researches in the vicinity of Pasa or Fasa, or if, as Mr. Morier says, its position had corresponded with the site of Passagardae.’ As it was, he even ventured to express the opinion that it was a building of ‘doubtful antiquity.’[110] He visited it just an hour after Morier had made his sacrilegious entry; the startled female custodian had meanwhile returned, locked up the sacred shrine, and fled; so he was unable to satisfy his curiosity by a near inspection. He copied the Cyrus inscription from a solitary monolith to the north of the palace, and there were thus three independent versions of the same inscription taken from three different parts of the ruins.[111] The copy made by Ouseley was sent to the Director of the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg and through him it fell under the notice of Grotefend. Ouseley succeeded in making a magnificent collection of Persian manuscripts, especially relating to history and geography. His later years were spent in France, and he died at Boulogne, in 1842.[112]

Two hundred years had now elapsed since Gouvea called attention to the ruins of Persepolis. A considerable amount of literature had accumulated on the subject, and large numbers of plans and drawings of the principal objects were taken, which materially assisted the student. On looking back over these, however, it was curious to observe how widely the descriptions differed from each other, and how irreconcilable were the various views of the same monument. The explanation was not far to seek. Most of the travellers could only spare a few days from more pressing occupations to devote to the work. They were afterwards compelled to complete from memory the hasty sketches they had made on the spot, and although many of them display considerable skill in the use of their pencil, only a few had any professional knowledge of drawing. They were, moreover, all alike at the mercy of the engraver, and some thought they had good reason to complain of the treatment they received at his hands. But there was another cause that led to inevitable discrepancies. Few of them aimed to produce the minute accuracy of a photograph, or could resist the temptation of idealising the work before them: on the one hand, Le Bruyn exaggerated the ruin wrought by time; on the other, Niebuhr repaired its ravages. According to the one, the sculptured staircase is a confused mass of mutilated figures; according to the other, it appears as perfect as when first completed by the sculptor. Nor was it only in the drawings that inaccuracies were to be detected. The measuring tape itself seemed to yield different results in different hands. It was impossible to find agreement even as to the number of steps in the great staircase. According to one, there were only ninety-five (Herbert); according to another, one hundred and thirteen (Kaempfer); and other accounts ranged between these two extremes.

It was with the professed object of giving a final and authoritative representation that would satisfy the curiosity of the minute student that Sir Robert Ker Porter undertook to go over the old ground once more. He was an accomplished artist and he consequently possessed qualifications many of his predecessors were without. He arrived at Murgab on June 12, 1818, and left Persepolis on July 1, so that he was not more than eighteen days engaged in the study of the numerous antiquities in the neighbourhood. At the conclusion of his stay, he congratulates himself upon finding that: ‘I had drawn nearly every bas-relief of consequence, had taken a faithful plan of the place, and copied several of the cuneiform inscriptions.’[113] His industry during the time must certainly have been extraordinary. He surveyed the sites of Murgab and Persepolis, and made two ground-plans of both places. The former was now made for the first time, but the latter had been taken as early as the days of Kaempfer. He took two drawings of Murgab, four of the Achaemenian remains at Naksh-i-Rustam, six of the Sassanian sculptures, and two of the same period at Naksh-i-Rejeb. In addition to this he made twenty-four drawings of the monuments of Persepolis—some of them upon a large scale—and copied inscriptions that occupy four plates: that is to say, he accomplished in eighteen days work that now fills forty-two plates of engravings. This is certainly wonderful, but if he had executed less than one-quarter, the result would perhaps have been more satisfactory. In addition to the drawings, he measured the various buildings and the more important objects in each; and took notes for his very elaborate description of the dress, the arms, and other minute details of the various figures in the numerous bas-reliefs. Herbert had long ago expressed the opinion that ‘a ready Lymmer in three moneths space can hardly (to do it well) depict out all her excellences,’ and certainly the twelve days (from June 22 to July 1), which were all that Porter actually spent at Persepolis, were wholly inadequate for the purpose. In looking through Porter’s drawings, we find indeed ample evidence of haste, and of the absence of that minute accuracy which it was his special object to achieve. Yet his book is still perhaps the best that exists upon the subject in English. The drawings of his competitors are certainly not more accurate, and his careful and minute descriptions are quite unrivalled. His merit lies in the thorough investigations he made upon the ground itself, in the painstaking and, upon the whole, accurate measurements he took of each monument, and in the clear and explanatory account he has given of the various subjects depicted on the bas-reliefs. The care with which his investigations were made was rewarded by the discovery of the remains of the second edifice at Murgab, which had escaped the notice of Morier and Ouseley. His visit to Naksh-i-Rustam resulted in the earliest drawings we possess upon an adequate scale of the façade of a tomb, and it was completed by a ground plan of the interior.[114] He expressed his conviction that the third tomb with the long cuneiform inscription was in all probability that of Darius, an opinion afterwards proved to be correct.[115] The long debate as to the nature of the enigmatical animals on the Great Porch at Persepolis was still undecided. Even Mr. Morier adhered to the notion that they were horses, but Porter’s keen eye at once identified them with the bull, which subsequent discoveries at Nineveh has confirmed.[116] He also showed that the capital of the columns was composed of two half bulls, but he does not seem to have recorded that they are elsewhere varied by half griffins.[117]

Porter had no doubt that the Takht-i-Jamshid represented the ruins of the palaces of Persepolis, although the subject had not yet passed beyond the region of controversy. He inclines, however, to the compromise favoured by Niebuhr, and dwells upon the pontifical character of the sovereign, especially after the death of Zoroaster, when, he says, Darius assumed the title of Archimagus. He accepted Morier’s suggestion that Murgab was the site of Pasargadae and its principal monument the tomb of Cyrus.[118] He had a thorough belief in the decipherment of Grotefend. He not only accepted his recognition of the names of Darius and Xerxes, but he followed him when he traced their descent from Jamshid. That hero was, he thought, none other than Shem, whom sacred writ planted in that very region of Persia, and possibly Persepolis bore his name from the very earliest ages.[119] Porter did not himself advance our knowledge of the inscriptions. He copied the inscription at Murgab, but that had been previously done by Morier and Ouseley, and, as he candidly remarks, he ‘found that we all differed in some of the lines from each other.’[120] He also copied a portion of the inscription (A) on the sculptured staircase, of which Niebuhr had already given a satisfactory rendering;[121] and finally he took the trouble to execute an extremely imperfect copy of the four tablets of inscriptions on the south wall, which had also been much better done by Niebuhr.[122]

Notwithstanding its many defects, his book continued for thirty years to be the chief authority on the subject.[123] Heeren popularised the general result in the fourth edition of his ‘Researches’ (1824), and it thus became equally well known to German readers. Texier complained, in 1842, that there was absolutely no book in French upon the subject, and he had to refer to Porter for his information.[124] It was not till after the publication of the elaborate works of Texier and Flandin, which did not appear till 1849-51, that Porter was in any way superseded. Even then the form in which the great French authorities are published has rendered them inaccessible except to students in a great public library. The general reader would have remained in complete ignorance of the results but for the opportune publication, in 1851, of Fergusson on the ‘Palaces of Persepolis,’ and Vaux on ‘Nineveh and Persepolis.’

Within this long period, the area of discovery widened. Hamadan was identified with Ecbatana by D’Anville and Rennell, and it soon became an object of curiosity. The city stands 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, in a plain at the foot of Mount Elvend (the Orontes), and is surrounded by vineyards, orchards and gardens. Morier visited it in 1813, and discovered in the outskirts of the city a base of a small column of the identical order found at Persepolis, and near it he observed a large irregular terrace, perhaps the foundation of the Palace. Rawlinson afterwards detected five or six other bases of the same type. Three years before Morier’s visit, Kinneir had observed an inscription some seven miles distant, carved on the surface of the rock on a steep declivity of Mount Elvend.[125] ‘It consists,’ says Morier, ‘of two tablets, each divided into three longitudinal compartments, inscribed with the arrow-headed character of Persepolis. These inscriptions are called by the Persians Genj-nameh, or “Tales of a Treasure.”’[126] When Porter passed through Hamadan, he also went in search of the mysterious stone which he heard bore unintelligible writing. After a fruitless ascent of one of the highest peaks of Mount Elvend, he was fortunate enough in the course of his descent to come across the object of his expedition. The stone, he says, consists of ‘an immense block of red granite of fine texture,’ and the inscription is in excellent preservation. The natives believe that whoever succeeds in deciphering it will find a key that will enable him to discover a large treasure in the mountain, and hence the name they give it. Porter only reached it when the day was far advanced, and he had not time to make a copy.[127] Bellino, of whom we shall hear later, made another attempt, in 1820, but unfortunately he was attacked by fever at Hamadan, and died without accomplishing his object.[128] At length Mr. Stewart and M. Vidal, the consular dragoman at Aleppo, obtained copies about 1827, and communicated them to M. Schulz, who was then at Van. Professor Schulz of Hesse had been commissioned by the French Foreign Minister to undertake a scientific journey to the East, and he reached Van in July 1827, where he made copies of no less than forty-two cuneiform inscriptions. Long afterwards they were found to be written chiefly in the old Armenian language; but one was in the three varieties adopted by the Achaemenian kings. It was engraved on a large square tablet escarped on the precipitous face of the rock about sixty feet above the ground. It was divided into three columns, each column consisting of twenty-seven lines. Unfortunately, Schulz was murdered in 1829, and his papers ultimately found their way into the hands of M. Lajard of Paris, by whom they were sent to M. St. Martin for publication.[129] St. Martin, as we shall see, had early busied himself with cuneiform inscriptions, but in consequence of his early death, the papers of Schulz fell into the possession of the very eminent Orientalist Burnouf, by whom they were used with singular ability. The inscriptions found at Mount Elvend and at Van[130] became the subject of his ‘Mémoire sur deux Inscriptions,’ which appeared in 1836, and which marked the first great advance in cuneiform decipherment that had taken place since the memorable effort of Grotefend thirty-four years before.

Till the publication of Burnouf’s essay in 1836, the task of decipherment had made but small progress, and so far as we are aware, no copy of a Persian inscription had yet been published that had been taken by anyone with the smallest knowledge of the meaning of the characters. Mr. Rich, the British Resident at Bagdad, was, however, a zealous student of Grotefend, and in constant correspondence with him. He kept him supplied with copies of the few inscriptions that were then brought to light from the ruined mounds of Mosul and Hillah. His German secretary Bellino, who was also much interested in cuneiform discoveries, generally acted as the medium of communication; and Grotefend’s later pamphlets are full of recognition of the services he had received from both scholars. Rich was a man of very unusual attainments.[131] When still quite a boy, he mastered several Oriental languages, and in later years, amid the pressure of official life he never lost his interest in these subjects. He collected large numbers of Oriental manuscripts, and his mind was filled with the lore they contained. His house at Bagdad became the rendezvous of all the more eminent travellers who passed that way in the early years of the century. His hospitality acquired a reputation not inferior to that of Père Raphael at Ispahan during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Rich was equally ready to place his vast stores of Oriental knowledge at the disposal of his guests, and his official position enabled him to afford them substantial assistance. It was peculiarly fortunate that so eminent a man should have held that office at a time when public interest was first awakened to the archæology of the ancient cities of the East. He was himself able to render important services in this field of inquiry, and he made a collection of antiquities, afterwards acquired by the British Museum, which, though limited, as it is said, to a single small case, was still unequalled then in Europe, and was the beginning of the vast collection that now fills the Babylonian and Assyrian rooms. In the summer of 1821, he found himself at Bushire on official business, and well-nigh overpowered by the excessive heat. He accordingly decided to make a short trip to Shiraz, where a friend, who had just returned, gave him the refreshing intelligence that ‘the climate even then, in July, was so cold that one was obliged to put on a fur jacket and actually suffered from cold.’[132] Mr. Rich had, however, no cause to complain of the cold. The usual temperature, he found, was 90° at the hottest time, but it fell during the nights to 71°, which he considered ‘deliciously cool without being chilly.’[133] It was impossible for him to be so near Persepolis without gratifying his curiosity. ‘My expectation,’ he says, ‘was greatly excited. Chardin, when I was a mere child, had inspired me with a great desire to see these ruins.’ He was, however, merely travelling for health; and he had no intention of undertaking the onerous duties of an itinerant antiquarian. There was indeed no longer any necessity. ‘The ruins have been so accurately described, measured, and delineated by our friend Porter that nothing remains to be done; and I can abandon myself entirely to the luxury of imagination, of which the line, compass and pencil, and the intolerable labour they bring on, are eminently destructive.’[134]

On August 17, 1821, he enjoyed the first view of the ruins from his resting place, a mile distant, and with unusual philosophy he repressed his curiosity and continued his march to Murgab. ‘I took,’ he writes, ‘a capricious kind of pleasure in not going to them, and forcing myself to be contented with this general survey.’ He passed the little nook of Naksh-i-Rejeb and the ruins of Istakhr, and at length encamped before the ‘Meshed i Mader i Suliman.’ It will be recollected that the learning of Ouseley had decisively negatived the sagacious intuition of the more brilliant Morier, and the subsequent discovery of the name of Cyrus on the inscriptions at Murgab was as yet far from being accepted as decisive of the matter. The true site of the tomb of Cyrus was therefore still in dispute, and Rich could only venture to write that he ‘began to think that this in reality must be the tomb.’[135] He hoped, however, to be able to contribute something to the settlement of the question, but when he left he confessed, after all, that he was still unconvinced.[136] He, however, made another copy of the now celebrated inscription. After a stay of only one day, Rich retraced his steps towards Persepolis, and pitched his tent on the top of the great staircase, beneath the shadow of the Entrance Porch.

His resolution to abstain from antiquarian labour entirely broke down in presence of the inscriptions. He employed workmen to clear away the rubbish which in some places concealed them, and he disclosed for the first time the inscription on the south stairs leading to the Palace of Darius,[137] and the one opposite on the façade of the stairs of the Palace of Ochus. ‘I was actually diligent enough,’ he writes, ‘to fall to work at copying the inscriptions; and during the six days we remained at Persepolis I copied all the inscriptions except one. I have found much to corroborate Grotefend’s system, and have admired his sagacity. The labour I have gone through will greatly assist him.’[138] Indeed the result of his industry, combined with that of his predecessors, was to leave little more to be done by the copyist at Persepolis. The inscriptions over the animals on the Porch, and the long inscription at Naksh-i-Rustam seem indeed to be the only ones that remained.

1. He copied the three tablets of inscriptions of Xerxes on the Anta of the Palace of Darius, which had been imperfectly done by Le Bruyn (Table 131).[139]

2. The three tablets of inscriptions of Xerxes on the Anta in his palace—now first taken.[140]

3. The three tables of inscriptions of Xerxes, consisting of four lines over the king’s head on the east portal of his palace.[141] This is the same inscription as Niebuhr had copied from the north portal (his E, F, G).

4. Fragmentary inscriptions of Xerxes found in his palace.[142]

5. The three inscriptions of Xerxes on the south stairs of the Palace of Darius[143]—now first taken.

6. The central inscription of Artaxerxes Ochus on stairs to Palace of Ochus[144]—now first taken.

7. His Seyid copied the three tablets of the inscription of Xerxes over the colossal animals on the east walls of the Porch.[145] Mr. Rich was unfortunately unable on account of giddiness to remain at a height; and on this account he deputed the task to his Seyid, who had some experience of the cuneiform letters found at Babylon. This inscription was now first taken, but the copy turned out to be practically useless; and the first adequate rendering was made by Westergaard.

Coming from Babylon, where all the inscriptions he had seen were unilingual, he was much struck by the repetition of each inscription at Persepolis in three distinct modes of writing. ‘Every inscription in Persepolis,’ he says, ‘even the bits on the robes of the king, are in the three kinds. When an inscription is round a door or window, the first species is on the top, the second on the left hand running up, the third on the right, running down. I speak as looking at the door.’ ‘If one under the other, the first (or Zend) is always in the upper tablet; if side by side over a figure, it is the one over the head of the king; if on his robes, it is on the front fold; if on the face of a platform, it is in the centre, with the figures on each side facing towards it.’ ‘The other two species always preserve their order: the third (or Babylonian) in the place of least consideration.’[146] He called special attention to the inscriptions upon the tomb at Naksh-i-Rustam. ‘They are,’ he said, ‘the longest of all the cuneiform inscriptions I have ever seen. In fact, there is a prodigious quantity of writing upon them, but so small and so high up and so much worn that I should think it impossible to copy them.’[147] He was neither surprised nor disappointed by his visit, but the impression left was not one of unmixed admiration. The general view presented by the ruins he declared to be grand; the colonnade to be fine, and the execution and finish very beautiful; but he thought the portals at the landing place were much too narrow, all the doors too narrow and the windows too small, yet ‘formed of blocks that would build a mole.’ There is no correspondence between the object and the means, which gives to many parts of these remains, at least as they now appear, rather a heavy, crowded and crushed effect, ‘proceeding from the disproportionate application of vast materials, which is, after all, a foolish ambition.’[148]

Shortly after leaving Persepolis, he was struck down by cholera, and his death at the early age of thirty-five removed a man exceptionally qualified to render important service to his country and to learning. It had been his intention to send his valuable copies of the inscriptions to Grotefend, who was probably less qualified than Rich imagined to make a satisfactory use of them. As it was, they were not published till 1839, when the progress of cuneiform studies had deprived them of much of their importance.

Soon after the publication of Rich’s book, in 1839, the Danish scholar Westergaard visited Persepolis, and completed the transcription of the whole of the inscriptions. He was, as we shall see, fully qualified for the task by his technical knowledge of the subject. Only two new inscriptions, however, remained for him to copy: the one on the Porch that Rich was unable to reach (Inscr. D), and the great inscription on the tomb at Naksh-i-Rustam, which proved it to have been the sepulchre of Darius (Inscr. NR).

Only one Persian inscription of first-rate importance now remained to reward the zeal of the copyist. This was the famous one engraved in an almost inaccessible position upon the rock of Behistun. It is situated on the road from Hamadan to Kermanshah, about twenty miles before reaching the latter place. The rock forms an abrupt termination to a long range of barren hills, and presents a most remarkable appearance, rising in perpendicular form to the height of 1,700 feet. As it lies on the direct route to Media by the Holwan Pass, it was well known from the earliest times. According to Greek legend the hill was dedicated to Zeus; and Semiramis, on the occasion of an expedition against the Medes, caused a portion of the face of the rock to be polished and her own effigy to be carved upon it, surrounded by a hundred of her guards. She added an inscription in Assyrian characters, commemorating her triumphant march.[149] Whether any inscription of the kind ever existed is doubtful, but if so, all traces of it have disappeared. The inscription that has been recovered appears to have been executed in the fifth or sixth year of the reign of Darius; and it gives a lengthy record of the suppression of the revolts with which his reign opened. It occupies a surface of about 150 feet in length by 100 feet in height.[150] The tablets rest upon a narrow ledge of the rock, 300 feet from the ground, and the engraver could only have executed his task from a scaffolding erected for the purpose. Major Rawlinson tells us that the mere preparation of the surface of the rock must have occupied months. Where a flaw occurred, a piece was inlaid by embedding it in molten lead, and this tedious work was so carefully executed that it can only be detected by close scrutiny. After the letters were engraved, the whole received a coat of silicious varnish, in order to impart clearness of outline and to protect the surface against the action of the weather. ‘The varnish,’ he says, ‘is of infinitely greater hardness than the limestone beneath it.’[151] Notwithstanding all this elaborate preparation, many fissures have been made in the rock by the percolation of water, and the writing is defaced in many places. The inscriptions are grouped round a central tablet decorated with sculpture. The principal figure is Darius the King. He has one foot placed on the prostrate form of a vanquished foe; behind him are two attendants, and in front stand nine captives chained together. The last of the series is evidently a later addition made after the original work was accomplished; and he is distinguished from the rest by the peculiarity of his pointed cap. Close to each figure is a short inscription, giving the name and a relation of the evil deeds of the individual; by which means they are identified with the leaders of the rebellion. The prostrate form is no less a personage than Gaumates, the Magian. Above is the winged figure which is now known to be a representation of Ormuzd himself.[152] Rawlinson considers the execution of the figures as inferior to that of the bas-reliefs at Persepolis. ‘The effigies of Darius and his attendants alone exhibit that grace of outline and studied finish of detail which may place them at all upon an equality with the Persepolitan sculptures.’ The figure of the King is six feet in height, but the others are of diminutive stature, designed no doubt to mark their inferiority of position.[153] The artist seems to have even taken the trouble to represent them as repulsive in appearance. This part of the work is covered by no less than thirty-three short inscriptions—eleven in Persian, twelve in Median or, as it is now called, Susian, and ten in Babylonian. To the left of the sculptured tablet, and upon the same level, in a position exceptionally difficult of access, are two large tablets in the Babylonian style. To the right are four tablets—two in Susian and two in Babylonian—which were added later, and refer to the events connected with the figure with the pointed cap. This portion is so much defaced that it is difficult to do more than conjecture its meaning. It seems, however, to relate to a revolt in Susiana which, according to M. Oppert, occurred before the twelfth year of the reign of Darius.[154] Its chief was captured and hanged upon a cross. The main body of the inscription lies below the sculptured tablet. Immediately beneath it are four columns in Persian, each twelve feet high, and containing ninety-six lines of cuneiform writing; and a fifth, half that length, relating to the events of the more recent rebellion. To the left, below the large Babylonian inscription, are three columns in Susian. It is calculated that the whole contains nearly a thousand lines of cuneiform writing, of which no less than 416 are in Persian. It is said to comprise ten times as many words as all the rest of the shorter texts put together.[155]

The French traveller Otter seems to have been the first to call attention to Behistun, about the year 1734, and it is also noticed in the travels of Olivier.[156] Kinneir passed it in 1810, and he describes ‘a group of figures in the form of a procession sufficiently perfect to show that they are of the same age and character as those of Persepolis.’[157] In 1818, Porter at length succeeded in getting sufficiently near to sketch the figures.[158] He confirms Kinneir’s conjecture as to their resemblance to those at Persepolis; and he recognises the winged figure as ‘the floating intelligence in his circle and car of sunbeams, so often remarked on the sculptures of Naksh-i-Rustam and Persepolis.’ He remarked that there was a cuneiform inscription above the head of each figure and below ‘eight deep and closely written columns in the same character.’ Notwithstanding the facility Porter had already acquired in copying inscriptions at Persepolis, he was at too great a distance from these to make the attempt. He calculated it would require a month to complete the task, and adds that ‘at no time can it ever be attempted without great personal risk.’

The extremely inaccessible position of the inscriptions long baffled the zeal of explorers. M. Flandin, as we shall see, though specially commissioned by the French Government to examine Persian antiquities, retreated in dismay from the perilous task, which was left as usual to the private enterprise of an Englishman to accomplish. So long indeed as the history of cuneiform decipherment is remembered, the name of Henry Creswicke Rawlinson will continue to be associated with Behistun. He was not only the first to surmount the very considerable physical difficulties of approaching the inscriptions, but he succeeded, while in a position that was highly inconvenient, if not positively dangerous, in making so accurate a copy that few errors or omissions of importance were afterwards detected. The first copy appears to have been made entirely with the pen—the process of taking paper casts being employed on a later occasion—and it was a task that called for the display of extraordinary patience and most scrupulous care. He had to transcribe, or more properly to draw, vast numbers of signs of multitudinous and fantastic shapes, without at that time having the smallest clue to their meaning—a knowledge that would have served to check the accuracy of his work as he went along. Soon afterwards indeed he became the most skilful of decipherers. He cannot indeed claim to have been the first to solve the difficulties of the Persian alphabet; but his translation of the Behistun inscription was by far the greatest contribution ever made to a knowledge of that language; and he rendered scarcely less remarkable service in unravelling the mysteries of the third, or Babylonian, column.

Rawlinson was born at Chadlington Park, Oxfordshire, in 1810.[159] His family was recognised for centuries among the principal country gentry of Lancashire; but his father sold his ancestral estate and settled in Oxfordshire. He enjoyed the supreme distinction of winning the Derby in 1841 with Coronation, an achievement that no doubt afforded him scarcely less pleasure than the triumphs of his two illustrious sons, Henry and George.

Henry was the seventh child of a family of eleven. He was educated at Ealing School, which at that time enjoyed a great reputation, and had recently numbered the two Newmans among its pupils. Here he acquired a sound knowledge of the classical languages, so that in after life he could master the contents of almost any Latin or Greek prose author with facility. Indeed when he left he was first in Greek and second in Latin of the whole school. He grew to be six feet high, broad-chested, strong limbed, with steady head and nerve. He was fond of field sports, a taste which he had every opportunity of indulging at Chadlington and which he retained throughout the whole of his busy life. At sixteen he obtained a nomination to the Indian Service, and after six months spent in the study of Oriental languages under a private tutor at Blackheath, he sailed for India, where he arrived in October 1827. He had the good fortune to go out in the same ship with Sir John Malcolm, who had just been appointed Governor of Bombay. He devoted himself to the acquisition of the native languages and Persian, and also to various studies, particularly that of history. On the voyage out he edited the paper that was started for the amusement of the passengers, and this early connection with the press he afterwards continued, so that at the age of nineteen we find him contributing articles and short poems to the Bombay newspapers. But he never forgot that he was a soldier, and that it was no less part of his duty to cultivate physical activity. He accordingly passed much time in hunting and shooting, and in various athletic games, and one of his great achievements was an extraordinary ride that might now incur the humanitarian censure of a less strenuous age. In 1833, when still a lieutenant, he was one of eight officers selected to proceed to Persia to assist in training the army of the Shah. They landed at Bushire, where they were delayed for some months by the heavy snow on the mountains between that port and Shiraz. Rawlinson’s interest in archæological subjects was already awakened, and he took the first opportunity of visiting Shapoor and Persepolis, and making numerous sketches of both places. He was stationed at Tabriz during the summer of 1834, and with characteristic energy he endeavoured to reach the top of Mount Ararat, but he was prevented by the great depth of snow. In the following spring (1835) he was nominated by the Shah to act as Military Adviser to the King’s brother, who was Governor of Kurdistan and resided at Kermanshah. On his way he visited Hamadan, and copied the cuneiform inscription at Mount Elvend (April 1835). At Kermanshah he was within twenty miles of Behistun, which, as his biographer observes, ‘has been in the Providence of God the great means by which the ancient Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian languages have been recovered, and a chapter of the world’s history that had been almost wholly lost once more made known to mankind.’ He passed his leisure time during 1835-37 in transcribing as much of the inscriptions as he could reach, and in the endeavour to fathom their meaning. Sometimes he ascended and descended the slippery rock three or four times a day ‘without the aid of rope or ladder or any assistance whatever.’ The difficulties are, he modestly says, ‘such as any person with ordinary nerves may successfully encounter.’[160] Towards the close of the year 1835, he paid a short visit to Bagdad, to place himself under the care of Dr. Ross; and he there became acquainted with Colonel Taylor, whom he was afterwards destined to succeed as British Resident. In the early spring, he led a native force of three thousand men through the mountains of Luristan, and took the opportunity of visiting Dizful, Suza, and Shuster. By that time his interest was fully aroused in cuneiform studies, and he no doubt heard from Colonel Taylor of the efforts that had been made in Europe to interpret the inscriptions. The vagueness of his information upon the subject is evident from the prominence he accords to the abortive speculations of St. Martin. We find him, in March 1836, lamenting over the destruction of the famous black stone of Susa, for he had hoped by its means to ‘verify or disprove the attempts which have been made by St. Martin and others to decipher the arrow-head characters.’[161] His mind was also occupied with geographical subjects, in which he afterwards attained to great distinction. He wrote to his brother for particulars of the expedition of Heraclius, and thought he had solved the mystery of the two rivers at Susa, which was probably the same as that afterwards announced by Mr. Loftus. He began to look forward to his three years’ leave of absence, which he hoped to spend in ‘a nice cheap lodging’ at Oxford or Cambridge ‘for the sake of consulting the classical and Oriental works which are there alone procurable.’ Meanwhile he had ordered out books from England, and for the present he found life tolerable enough. ‘I am,’ he says, ‘in a country abounding with game and antiquities, so that with my gun in hand I perambulate the vicinity of Shuster, and fill at the same time my bag with partridges and my pocket-book with memoranda.’ It was not till the autumn of that year (1836), during a short visit to Teheran, that he became acquainted with the alphabets of Grotefend and St. Martin, and learned the progress that had been made by them in Germany and France.

He returned to his post at Kermanshah for the winter of 1836-7, and once more directed his attention to the inscriptions at Behistun. During all this period he continued to be practically the governor of the extensive province of Kermanshah and the commander of a large portion of the army stationed in it. In the summer of 1837, he was relieved of these duties, and received a mark of the Shah’s favour by being appointed Custodian of the Arsenal of Teheran. He passed that winter (1837-8) in the capital, and when the British Envoy, Sir J. McNeill, accompanied the army of the Shah to Herat, he found himself left in ‘quasi political charge.’ Soon afterwards, the progress of political events led to the withdrawal of the Mission from Persia, and Rawlinson found himself at Bagdad towards the close of the year 1838, where he remained till October 1839.

While at Kermanshah (1835-7) he was able to make a nearly correct transcript of the entire first column of the Persian text, together with the opening paragraph of the second, ten paragraphs of the third column and four of the detached inscriptions, amounting altogether to two hundred lines, or one half of the whole inscription.[162]

The outbreak of the Afghan war, in 1839, summoned him to a very different sphere of activity. He was recalled to Bombay in October of that year, and in January 1840, he was ordered to Candahar, where he filled the important office of Political Agent throughout the whole of that trying period. It was due in a measure to his energy and prudence, acting in combination with the military talent of General Nott, that the town was saved, and a portion of the disaster at Kabul retrieved. The evacuation of Candahar took place in August 1842, and by the end of the year Rawlinson was back in India. He had been present at three battles and on each occasion was honourably mentioned in despatches; in addition to these services, he accompanied the General as aide-de-camp during the hard fighting on the march to Cabul and the Sutlej. An accidental meeting on board a steamer with Lord Ellenborough, who was then the Governor-General, ripened into friendship, and procured for the young officer an offer of the ‘Residency in Nepaul’ or of ‘the Central India Agency’; but these were declined. Rawlinson had set his heart on completing his cuneiform studies, which had now been suspended by three years of adventure; and although these appointments were of much greater dignity and emolument, he eagerly seized upon the opportunity of returning to Bagdad as ‘Political Agent in Turkish Arabia,’ in succession to Colonel Taylor. Here he arrived in December, 1843, to ‘work out the Babylonian puzzle’ and to spend ‘twelve weary years of his life doing penance in order to attain a great literary object.’[163]

As soon as he could spare time, in the early summer of 1844, he returned to Behistun, accompanied by Mr. Hester and Captain Jones, R. N.[164] It will be remembered that up to that time he had only secured two hundred lines of the Persian column, or about one half of the whole. A week of continuous work now enabled him to transcribe the whole of the Persian, the whole of the Susian, and the whole of the detached Babylonian epigraphs. The Babylonian version of the Great Inscription was still found to be inaccessible without more elaborate appliances, and it was abandoned for the present. He spent the year 1845 in completing a Memoir on the subject, which he had begun to prepare in 1839, before the outbreak of the war. The new materials he had just collected rendered it advisable to rewrite the whole work, though the translation he had attempted of the earlier portion remained substantially unaltered. This task involved transcribing four hundred lines of cuneiform, which was a work of no ordinary labour in that climate and among many other conflicting claims upon his time. He began as soon as possible to transmit instalments of his Memoir to England; and in May 1846 we learn by the Report of the Asiatic Society that ‘the extraordinary discoveries of Major Rawlinson are now passing through the press and will be shortly published.’

Meanwhile the great discoveries of Botha and Layard had transferred the interest of scholars from the Persian to the Babylonian column, for the latter was seen to bear a close analogy to the inscriptions coming to light with such startling rapidity on the banks of the Tigris. It was evident that the possession of the long inscription at Behistun would greatly increase the knowledge of this language; it covered no less than a hundred and ten lines, and the Persian version, which was by this time practically understood, would materially assist the translation. Accordingly, in September 1847, Rawlinson returned to Behistun with ladders, planks, ropes, and various other contrivances. But his chief dependence was upon a wild Kurdish boy, who squeezed himself up a cleft in the rock and drove in a wooden peg. To this he fastened a rope, and endeavoured to swing himself across the inscription to a cleft on the other side. This he failed to accomplish on account of the projection of the rock. ‘It then only remained for him to cross over to the cleft by hanging on with his toes and fingers to the slight inequalities on the bare face of the precipice; and in this he succeeded, passing over a distance of twenty feet of almost smooth perpendicular rock in a manner which to a looker-on appeared quite miraculous.’[165] He then drove a second peg, and the rope connecting the two enabled him to swing right across. To it he attached a ladder like a painter’s cradle, and then, under Rawlinson’s direction, he took paper casts of the whole Babylonian text. The work occupied ten days, but unfortunately the inscription was found to be sadly mutilated. ‘The left half, or perhaps a larger portion even, of the tablet is entirely destroyed, and we have thus the mere endings of the lines throughout the entire length of the whole inscription.’[166] On his return to Bagdad, he applied himself to the difficult task of deciphering and translating his new acquisition. In this investigation he could as yet derive no assistance from other scholars. Those who were beginning to study Assyrian in Europe, of whom Dr. Hincks and M. de Saulcy were the most notable, had not as yet made farther progress than himself. He devoted the whole of 1848 and part of 1849 to this laborious pursuit, and at the same time added Hebrew to the number of his accomplishments. His ‘Second Memoir’ was, however, completed in time to despatch to London in 1849, and he prepared to return himself in order to superintend its publication. The ‘Memoir on the Babylonian Translation of the Great Inscription at Behistun’ finally appeared in the fourteenth volume of the ‘Journal of the Asiatic Society,’ 1851.

Rawlinson had made the rock of Behistun his own; and although many complaints were heard of the delay that occurred before he could give the results to the world, no one attempted to undergo the dangers he had faced in order to dispute his title to possession. It is to him, therefore, that we owe the recovery of this Memorial of Darius. It afforded a few not very important additions to history, and it was valuable by confirming the veracity and accuracy of Herodotus, which some writers were still disposed to impeach. But its chief importance lay in the length of the text, which for the first time presented sufficient materials to enable the student to acquire a competent knowledge of the old Persian language. Once in possession of this key, he could apply it to the solution of the more difficult problems afforded by the other two columns, and in this manner three ancient and forgotten languages were restored to knowledge.

We have now come to the time when the enterprise of individual travellers was about to be superseded by commissioners sent by foreign Governments to collect information in an official capacity. We cannot say that the general reader has cause to be thankful. We now part company with the modest volume that could be purchased and handled with comparative ease. In its place we have massive folios, which an enterprising student may indeed find in the ‘large room’ of the British Museum, but which are beyond the power of a private library to acquire. No one untainted by African gold could contemplate their possession, and indeed it would be necessary to build an addition to an ordinary house to find them accommodation. They are not adapted for study, for they tax too severely the physical endurance of the reader. The writer who is employed to fill in the blanks between the magnificent illustrations, is probably sensible of this, and one of them, M. Flandin, afterwards republished his text in a more convenient form. These vast folios are designed, we should think, mainly for the glorification of the Government who has paid for them, and for the benefit of the various mechanical persons employed in their fabrication. Sumptuously bound in red morocco, with richly gilt edges, they serve only to be rolled into the room of a palace in order that the pretty pictures that adorn them may be idly scanned amid the chatter of a tea-table.

The first of these great compilations that comes under our notice was made by Charles Texier, who had already gained fame and experience by his ‘Description de l’Asie Mineure,’ published between 1838-48. He was a Government Inspector of Public Works, and he subsequently became Professor of Archæology at the Collège de France (1840). He obtained a grant of 160,000 francs to enable him to publish his book, a sum afterwards reduced to 100,000. He does not seem to have regarded this measure with as much satisfaction as the reader, for he was compelled upon this occasion to restrict his publication to only two folios; and he complains that he had to suppress a considerable portion of his vast collections. In 1839 he set out for Persia, and the account of his travels was published by instalments between the years 1842 and 1852. In 1849 very few of the plates referring to Persepolis had appeared, and no text,[167] but Fergusson was able to use a considerable part of the drawings, in 1850, for his ‘Nineveh and Persepolis.’

Texier set out upon his enterprise, as Porter had done before, with a desire to aim at the most scrupulous accuracy; but his fatal passion for ‘restorations’ has made sad havoc of his moral aspirations.

He began the Persian portion of his work at Van, and travelled steadily round to Persepolis. Like Flandin, who followed closely on his track, he was prevented by the disturbed state of the country from visiting Susa. He devoted two days (January 12-14, 1840) to Murgab, and gives six drawings. He was fully convinced that the famous tomb was that of Cyrus, though the winged figure may be only ‘a prince or magus in the attitude of devotion.’[168] He confessed he could make nothing of the general disposition of ‘the Palace’; it consists, as he candidly admits, of ‘a certain number of pillars, of which the relations cannot be easily established; a large column and remains of walls.’ The second palace noticed by Porter seems to have escaped his observation. Persepolis occupied him for about ten days, and resulted in twenty-four drawings. His general views have nothing of the artistic merit afterwards displayed by Flandin, and they are probably in no degree more accurate. He observed from the débris at the bottom of the outside wall of the Terrace that it had been originally ornamented by a parapet; and he considered there were distinct traces of a triple wall of defence on the hill at the back, which may in some degree account for the description given by Diodorus. He thought that nearly all the buildings had been left incomplete, an opinion that has since gained ground. He maintained that the central group in the Columnar Edifice was intended to be enclosed by a wall and roofed; and he suggested that the design on the tombs, with a stage above, was a correct representation of the architecture of the palaces, a view afterwards supported by the authority of Sir James Fergusson. He was fully convinced that the bas-reliefs had been originally coloured; and one of the chief objects of his journey was to collect evidence on this point. It is singular to find that the writer completely ignores the results already achieved in decipherment, and that he still describes the Palaces of Darius and Xerxes as the Hareem and the Baths: an eccentricity into which M. Flandin also falls. Texier excels in measurements; they agree substantially with those of Flandin and Coste, and differ by about ten per cent. from those of Porter.[169] The work of Texier was from the first almost completely superseded by that of Flandin, who passed over the same ground only a few months later (October 1840) and who, as we have said, has wisely republished his narrative in a comparatively portable form.

When the English mission to which Rawlinson was attached withdrew from Persia, the Shah made overtures to Louis Philippe with a view to replace the English by military instructors from France.[170] The French king judged this a favourable opportunity to reopen diplomatic relations with Persia, and he accordingly despatched the Count de Sarcey on a mission to the Shah. The ambassador was accompanied by a numerous staff, each member being charged with the investigation of a particular subject. The embassy assumed the character of an exploring expedition quite as much as that of a political mission. One attaché was required to make a special study of the geology, another of the arts, a third of the industry, as if the country had been hitherto wholly unexplored by Europeans. The proposed adventure excited much interest, and the two Academies of Inscriptions and Beaux Arts solicited permission to send representatives. This was duly accorded, and MM. Flandin and Coste were elected by the suffrage of the members of the Academies: the one in the capacity of artist, the other in that of architect.

M. Coste was already familiar with the East, and was known by a work on the Arabian monuments of Cairo. M. Flandin was apparently unused to the inconveniences of Oriental travel, and his book presents us with a harrowing picture of the sufferings he endured. It is indeed wonderful that he survived his cook, whom he describes as a ‘véritable empoisonneur,’ or the numerous lacerations of soul he underwent as, one by one, his friends returned to the shade of the boulevards and left him behind a prey to the tortures of the Persian sun. Still more wonderful that he should have escaped alive from so many perils. At one time, he and his horse roll together into a trench from which there seemed no visible escape; at another, the enthusiastic artist is seen scrambling up the rock of Behistun with bleeding feet and hands to find his toil and peril fruitless, and to accomplish a descent backwards by a ‘véritable gymnastique de lézard’;[171] or again his excitable temper involves him in personal encounters with the natives, in which blows are freely exchanged on both sides, and on one occasion he received a stab with a poniard. These adventures, however amusing to himself and his readers, unfortunately involved his antagonists in shocking punishments by flogging, which the courtesy of the Persian officials thought it necessary to inflict, although Flandin is not always free from the blame of having been the first to give provocation.

The embassy left Toulon on October 30, 1839, but it was not till the following June that the two artists settled down before the rock of Behistun, where they found numerous traces of ruins in the plain on both sides of the river, which indicate the former existence of a very considerable town; but there was nothing that pointed to an earlier date than the Greek and Sassanian periods. The only exception is the cuneiform inscription on the rock itself. Three years before, Major Rawlinson had succeeded, as we have said, in obtaining paper casts of about two hundred lines of this inscription. M. Flandin does not seem to have been aware of this achievement, otherwise he would have been less willing to declare that it is impossible to approach. After having ‘done all that was possible,’ the two travellers went on to Kermanshah. M. Coste proceeded to Sar-i-Pul-i-Zohab, where he copied a bas-relief, which was afterwards found to be of Medic origin; and Flandin was left alone to accomplish the task of copying the Sassanian inscriptions at Takht-i-Bostan.[172] After eighteen days of solitude, he returned once more to Behistun in a more resolute frame of mind. Upon this occasion he brought ladders to assist him to scale the rock; but these turned out to be too short. He declared that without a scaffolding made expressly for the purpose, it would be impossible to accomplish his object, and even then he foresaw great difficulties in its erection. As it was, he was without rope, or wood, or workmen. He, however, made one last effort, and succeeded at some risk in scrambling up to the ledge at the base of the tablet. He found the inscriptions were even then beyond his reach, and it was impossible to recede a sufficient distance to obtain a tolerable view. He ascertained that they consisted of seven columns, each of ninety-nine lines, and that there were also tablets above the figures.[173] It must be admitted that the result was extremely unsatisfactory, considering the official position of the explorer. He abandoned the enterprise and left the honour to Major Rawlinson, who, as soon as political events permitted, revisited the scene and completed the task he had already begun. Flandin and Coste returned to Ispahan in August, and after a period of rest they proceeded, early in October, to Murgab. Here they remained for two days. M. Flandin hesitates to accept the identification of the ruins with those of Pasargadae, and prefers Fasa: an impression which, however, wears off later, when he had visited that place.[174] He describes the ruins of the principal palace at Murgab to consist of three pillars and a column. ‘There are,’ he adds, ‘no means of obtaining sufficient data to reconstruct the plan. Nothing is to be found except the foundations of columns and pillars, which lead to the belief that it was formerly the site of some important structure.’ Not more satisfactory is his notice of the Terrace, which, he says, is the remains of an edifice of which it is impossible to recognise the character. These descriptions scarcely prepare us for the very elaborate plans that appear in the plates, upon which the modern ideas of the place are chiefly based.[175] From Murgab they proceeded to Naksh-i-Rustam, where they again allowed themselves to be baffled by difficulties that they should certainly not have treated as insuperable. They observed the long inscription on one of the tombs, which they made no effort to copy, because it happened to be in a position which they considered inaccessible. They reconciled themselves to the omission the more easily on account of its mutilated condition, which they thought would defy the perseverance of the decipherer; otherwise indeed it might be found to record ‘the life of the illustrious dead intombed within.’[176] Less than two years after they had left, this very inscription was copied by the Dane Westergaard; and in 1843, or seven years before Flandin published his book, it had been deciphered by Lassen, who found that it declared the tomb on which it was inscribed to be that of Darius Hystaspes. From their quarters at Husseinabad they visited various objects of archæological interest, and made drawings and plans of them. They finally removed their camp to Persepolis on October 25, and remained there to December 8. During that period of forty-three days they made upwards of a hundred magnificent drawings of the place, which will always remain a striking proof of the industry no less than the talent of the two artists. The plates include highly-finished pictures of the Terrace and surrounding country taken from various points of view; admirable drawings of the different buildings, and of all the numerous bas-reliefs they contain; ground plans of the platform and of each of the principal edifices; besides copies of all the inscriptions. The work is farther enlivened by a few pictures of Persepolis before it fell into decay, restored according to the imagination of the ingenious artists. The scale upon which this work is executed may be judged from the number of plates devoted to the more important objects. The sculptured staircase fills no less than twenty-two; the Palace of Xerxes and the Hall of the Hundred Columns occupy twelve each; while sixteen plates are appropriated to inscriptions.

There can be no doubt of the high artistic merit of these drawings; but it must have been impossible within the time to complete them upon the spot; and they have no doubt suffered in accuracy by subsequent elaboration. Sir James Fergusson indeed goes so far as to declare that they cannot be relied upon to decide any matter requiring minute accuracy of detail, and he points out several ‘of their many mistakes.’[177] It may be doubted also how far their plans and measurements are absolutely trustworthy. There is certainly the most surprising and singular contrast between the doubt and hesitation expressed in the text and the confidence and minute execution displayed in the plates.[178] The surveys indeed may be due chiefly to M. Coste: and it is possible he may not have communicated all the results of his investigations to his volatile companion. While the latter despairs of detecting the plan of the edifice at Murgab, or those of the Palaces of Darius and Ochus at Persepolis, we find all three set down with the utmost precision upon the plans; and while the one traveller declares that all the tombs at Naksh-i-Rustam contain accommodation for an equal number of bodies,[179] M. Coste was quietly making the plans that refute this statement. It cannot be admitted that the combined work possesses any exceptional authority, or that it suffices to set at rest the many doubtful points that have arisen with reference to these ruins. So far from its having superseded the more careful labours of Porter, it is entirely deficient in the minute and accurate verbal description in which that writer excels.

The copies of the inscriptions made by the two explorers have received the praise of M. Burnouf, and they are certainly wonderful productions, especially when it is considered that neither appears to have had the smallest knowledge of the cuneiform writing. If they had been able to face the perils of Behistun or the difficulties of Naksh-i-Rustam, they might still have anticipated the work of Rawlinson and Westergaard. At Persepolis itself there was little that was now left for them to accomplish. They appear to have been the first in point of time to make a serviceable copy of the inscriptions over the Porch; Rich, it will be recollected, was forced to abandon them to his Seyid, who failed in the attempt. But this inscription was first published by Westergaard, although his copy was made two years after that of Flandin. Flandin seems, however, to have been the first to publish the inscription of Artaxerxes Ochus from the west stairs of the Palace of Darius; but the same inscription occurs also on the Palace of Ochus, and this was already well known through the copy made by Rich. MM. Flandin and Coste have not therefore made any contribution to our knowledge of the cuneiform inscriptions. They, however, carried on somewhat extensive excavations. They employed labourers to clear away the rubbish that had accumulated in the palaces and which obscured the lower portion of the bas-reliefs. By this means they brought to light a Sassanian relief at Naksh-i-Rustam which had hitherto been unobserved, and which they found to be covered with a Pehlevi inscription.[180] At Persepolis they claim to have discovered eight entirely new bas-reliefs, besides disclosing the lower portion of many others.[181] They dug up the statue of a bull near the east stairs of the Palace of Xerxes, the only monument en ronde which has been found among the ruins.[182] They disclosed the head of a bull among the débris of the Porch, and finally set at rest the long debated question as to the nature of the colossal animals. They completed the portraiture of the guards on the façade of the sculptured staircase, by raising the fallen masonry.[183] They were the first to clear away the rubbish that had collected in the Palace of Darius, and to disclose the bases of the columns that had supported the roof.[184] They settled the nature of the monster with which the king is seen to struggle, by unearthing its tail, which proved to be that of a scorpion.[185] They were the first also to show the correct position and number of the columns in the Portico of the Palace of Xerxes. They were also the first to show the former existence of columns in the South-Eastern Edifice.[186] Fragments of columns strewn on the ground within the Hall of the Hundred Columns had been remarked by Kaempfer and by Niebuhr; but they do not seem to have been observed by Flandin and Coste. It was due to their laborious excavations that it was ascertained, after six and a half feet of rubbish had been cleared away, that the edifice had originally contained ten rows of columns of ten in each in the centre, and two rows of eight in the Portico.[187]

In the beginning of the year 1841, they found themselves at Fasa, and speedily recognised that it could not compete with Murgab as the representative of Pasargadae. On their return to Shiraz, they ascertained that Baron de Bode, an attaché to the Russian embassy, had just left for Susa. When at Kermanshah, in the preceding summer, they abandoned an attempt to reach that place from the south through the defiles of Luristan. Such an enterprise would probably not have been very easy even to travellers much better suited to deal with the turbulent tribes; and it would most likely have proved fatal to one of M. Flandin’s excitable temperament. But now an opportunity offered to follow close upon the steps of a traveller protected by the authority of a diplomatic mission, and along a route that circumstances rendered at that time exceptionally secure.[188] M. Flandin finds some difficulty in excusing his neglect to perform a journey which his commission seemed to demand. He tells us that his purse had begun to feel the strain of eight months’ travel, although we find it was still sufficient to support the cost of another year in safer and pleasanter quarters.[189] Having abandoned this project, they returned for a few days to Persepolis, in order to obtain a few plaster casts of the more striking bas-reliefs. They reached Teheran on March 20, where they met Baron de Bode, who had just returned from Susa. The inspection of the antiquities he had collected ‘in that country, the object of our regrets,’ must have excited some mortifying reflections; though they gladly inferred from the drawings that the place ‘offered in reality little of interest.’[190] The excavations of Mr. Loftus, ten years later, dispelled this flattering illusion. After a month spent in the enjoyment of royal favour, they left Teheran (April 24), and proceeded by Tabriz and Urmia to Bagdad, which they reached in July. M. Flandin bade farewell to Persian territory after a free interchange of blows with the people of the frontier village.[191] From Bagdad he paid hurried visits to Hillah and Mosul; and left early in September for Aleppo and Beyrout, where he embarked for France on December 1, 1841.

He revisited the East in 1843, in order to sketch the monuments discovered by M. Botta at Khorsabad. In consequence of this employment, the publication of the results of the Persian journey was greatly delayed. The ‘Voyage en Perse’ was not even written till 1850, and it did not appear till the following year.[192] The folio edition with plates bears no date. A portion of the plates was used by Mr. Fergusson in 1850, for his book on the Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis, but they were not available the year before.[193] They brought home two hundred and fifty-four drawings and thirty-five copies of inscriptions, most of which they profess to have executed on the spot;[194] and the collection forms an extremely valuable addition to our knowledge of the antiquities of Persia. M. Flandin was strongly of opinion that no individual enterprise could hope to compete with the minuteness of research and the untiring industry of an official like himself, who was charged with a Government mission, and invested with the confidence of two academical bodies.[195] A Government can indeed afford to publish a book no one can afford to buy, but it seems unable to imbue its commissioners with the energy so frequently displayed by private individuals. The lamentable failure of Messrs. Flandin and Coste before the rock of Behistun and the tomb of Darius; besides the serenity with which they abandoned even an attempt to reach Susa, afford sufficient evidence of this. M. Coste is scarcely even mentioned in the ‘Voyage’; but we see enough of M. Flandin to recognise that he did not possess the qualities that make a successful explorer. His narrative is interrupted and disfigured by puerile details of personal adventure in which he evinces a complete absence of the coolness, the nerve and the tact requisite for his task. He magnifies to absurd proportions the risks to which he is exposed; he is constantly involved in humiliating personal encounters with the people of the country, in which he displays vastly more temper than courage. The reader might be tempted to regard these conflicts with some complacency, if it were not for the excruciating punishment with which the politeness of the Persian authorities thought fit to visit his assailants.[196]

Very little more now remained to be done to illustrate all that is necessary to know of these Persian ruins. The inscriptions had been successfully recovered and many times copied. The Persian text had been fully translated, and only a few obscure passages awaited farther elucidation. Still the most careful accounts were found to conflict on many points, and neither Porter nor his successors had removed the discrepancies and contradictions that had been so long remarked.

After the lapse of many years, it was determined to appeal to the new art of photography, in order to obtain a degree of accuracy that could not be achieved by the pencil. The first to make the attempt was a Mr. Ellis, but his negatives were entirely destroyed in the course of the rough journey to the sea. At length Herr Stolze made another and very successful effort.[197] He was attached to a German scientific expedition, sent out to the East in 1874, under the direction of Dr. Andreas, to observe the transit of Venus. Stolze spent some time travelling over Persia, and visited among other places Persepolis and Fasa in the winter of 1874; but his real work began in June 1878, a season of the year when the heat is excessive, and when the process of developing the negatives within a closed box involved actual suffering. Notwithstanding these disadvantages he took upwards of three hundred plates between the date of his arrival on June 16 and his departure on July 3. He found the vertical sun of summer better suited for photographing the inscriptions than the bas-reliefs, especially those situated in the deep shade of the doorways. One of his greatest achievements was the photogrammetric plan of Persepolis, which surpasses any previous attempt to arrive at an accurate survey. It is said that no fewer than three hundred and fifty plates were used in the construction of the three metrical plans at the end of his second volume.[198] After a few days spent at Murgab, he hastened back to cooler quarters. His negatives were so carefully packed that they all reached Europe in safety. Unfortunately, one case was opened at the London Custom House, and the plates were replaced so loosely by the bungling official that a few were cracked; but even these have been pieced together without retaining much trace of their ill usage. In the course of his travels he took no fewer than fourteen hundred negatives, and in the spring of 1879 he had the satisfaction to find himself at Berlin with his treasures. In September 1881, he submitted a few of the completed photographs to the Fifth Oriental Congress, and they sanctioned the publication of those relating to the Achaemenian and Sassanian periods. The result was the appearance, in 1882, of ‘Die Achaemenidischen Denkmäler von Persepolis,’ photographed by Stolze and edited by Noeldeke; and two more ponderous and magnificent folios were thus added to the growing mass of inaccessible lore. Persepolis alone occupies ninety-nine plates, and the scale on which the work is executed may be judged from the devotion of twenty-one views to the Palace of Darius, eighteen to the Palace of Xerxes, twelve to the Hall of the Hundred Columns, and twelve to the Hall of Xerxes. Nine plates (106-14) are devoted to Naksh-i-Rustam and eleven (127-37) to Murgab. It is doubtful how far the photographic process will assist the student of the inscriptions. Noeldeke fears it will be of little value as regards the Pehlevi; and certainly little can be made out of the cuneiform except by the constant and painful use of a powerful magnifying glass. They may, however, be occasionally useful to decide disputed points: as, for example, the photograph of the inscription on the Anta of the Palace of Darius proves that the transcription of Westergaard is correct, and that of Rich wrong (Plate XIII.). Another photograph shows that the error in one of Niebuhr’s copies is due to a defect in the original.[199] Elsewhere Niebuhr is shown to be even more careful than Westergaard.[200] The photographs of the monuments and bas-reliefs meet with a very varying measure of success. Some are so blurred and indistinct that it is fortunate that they are each labelled in German, French and English; otherwise we might doubt whether they are correctly described.[201] Comparative success is reached more frequently, and excellence occasionally. It is particularly unfortunate that the great sculptured staircase has not been taken on a sufficiently large scale to bring out the figures with distinctness (Pl. 77 ff.); Noeldeke is, however, of opinion that it is the best view of them taken since Ouseley, thus passing over both Porter and the two French artists, Texier and Flandin. Among the most valuable views from Murgab are the two plates showing the Tomb of Cyrus (Pl. 128-9). The series closes with what might pass for a snowy mountain in Switzerland, but which is explained to be fragments of a bas-relief at Pasargadae (Pl. 137). Noeldeke, like Texier, fully believes in the destruction of some of the buildings by fire, and he also considers that few of them were ever thoroughly completed; indeed he attributes to that cause the absence of all traces of walls round the Hall of Xerxes, or of a roof. He thinks there never were any more columns than can now be identified, and that some even of these were left unfinished. The same applies to the Entrance Porch; possibly the gates on the North and South sides (which are supposed to have been part of the general design) were never erected; nor the second pair of columns. At the instigation of Dr. Andreas, a trench was dug into the Central Mound, which had long been the object of so many conjectures, with the disappointing result that it was found to contain nothing but cuttings discarded by the masons.

Three years later, in 1881, these ruins were visited by M. Dieulafoy and his wife, Madame Dieulafoy, who notwithstanding the disabilities of her sex, has been appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and an Officer of the Academy. The journey has resulted in the production of two vast works: one an elaborate treatise on ‘L’Art antique de la Perse,’ in five volumes, petit in-folio, 1884, by Monsieur Dieulafoy; and a single volume of massive proportions descriptive of their travels by the valiant and industrious lady.[202] M. Dieulafoy is one of the best known writers in France on architecture, and his opinions, though at times as fanciful as those of M. Flandin, are always worthy of respect. Madame Dieulafoy displayed marvellous pluck in the course of her adventures, and extraordinary expansiveness in their relation. When the span of life is lengthened to that enjoyed by the patriarchs, there will be time to study her works at leisure. One other traveller should be named who has given an admirable account of Persepolis, and, if detached from its cumbrous surroundings, one more adapted to the pressure of modern times. Lord Curzon visited Persia in 1889-90 and he has devoted a chapter of his Travels (chap. xxi. vol. ii.) to the subject. It is by far the best description we know, and affords all the information that need be sought. He frequently calls attention to the extraordinary contradictions to be found in the various writings on the subject, which, from the days of Porter, it has been the constant aim of successive travellers to remove. In mere matters of opinion there is, of course, no prospect of reaching unanimity in this or in any other subject. Whether the great halls were walled and roofed, or protected only by falling curtains; whether the palaces were ever occupied as residences or reserved only for state ceremonial, and a host of other disputed questions, will remain points of controversy. Each successive traveller with pretensions to originality to establish will continue to put forward new theories, and he will illustrate the beauty of his imagination by elaborate drawings of his conjectural restorations. These are inevitable failings of humanity and must be treated with toleration; but it is different when mere questions of fact are involved. After three centuries of travellers to Persepolis, we have still to reiterate the desire of Fergusson that some one may yet be found ‘who will go there with his eyes open, which does not seem yet to have been the case.’[203] Although the sun itself has been summoned to share in the task, even still there is a conflict of evidence as to the number of windows in the Hall of the Hundred Columns, as to the number and position of the columns in the Palace of Darius, and many other points too tedious to mention. There may indeed be more important questions in the world awaiting solution than even the exact construction of a Persepolitan palace, but it is irritating to find, notwithstanding our painful quest, that Truth evades our grasp in this as in weightier matters.

Persepolis was fully known and its inscriptions translated before any attempt was made to explore the site of Susa. Major Rennell was among the first to identify it with Shus, about fifteen miles S.W. of Dizful.[204] The place was visited in 1810 by Captains Kinneir and Monteith, who were attached to the mission of Sir John Malcolm.[205] The former describes the ruins as lying about seven or eight miles to the west of Dizful and not unlike those of Babylon. He describes it as consisting of a succession of mounds covered with fragments of bricks and coloured tiles extending over nearly twelve miles. Two mounds attracted special attention. The first rises to a height of a hundred feet and is about a mile in circumference. At its base is the reputed Tomb of Daniel, a building that appears comparatively modern. The other mound is not quite so high, but it is nearly two miles in circumference. They are composed of a mixture of brick and clay, with irregular layers of brick and mortar five or six feet thick to serve as a prop. Large blocks of marble covered with hieroglyphics were reported to be occasionally discovered by the Arabs.[206] One of these—the famous ‘black stone’—was seen by Captain Monteith near the Tomb of Daniel, where it had recently been rolled down from the summit of the Citadel Hill. It was not more than twenty-two inches long and twelve broad, but it had a cuneiform inscription on one side, and various sacred emblems represented upon the other. He made a sketch of it and might then have purchased it at a moderate price; but, though not large, it was found impossible at that time to remove it. Shortly afterwards two other Englishmen—the unfortunate Grant and Fotheringham—offered seventy pounds for it, but their intention to take it with them on their return was frustrated by their murder.[207] The value set upon it by the foreigners raised it in the estimation of the natives to such a height that the subsequent effort of Mr. Gordon to get possession of it utterly failed (1812).[208] It was already invested with the mysterious virtue of a talisman, and its loss, it was thought, would involve the country in disaster. To secure its retention resort was had to the singular expedient of blowing it into a hundred fragments by gunpowder. The destruction, however, was not complete, and the fragments were afterwards carefully collected, and secretly built into a pillar in the Tomb of Daniel, where they now are. In 1836 Rawlinson was able to pass two days amid the ruins in the course of his march from Zohab to Shuster. His visit, he thought, had enabled him to ‘unravel the mystery of the two rivers Eulaeus and Choaspes.’ He heard that the ‘black stone’ had been blown to pieces, but he was evidently not informed that the fragments were collected and were then in the Tomb of Daniel. He was rewarded, however, by the discovery of a broken obelisk with ‘a very perfect inscription of thirty-three lines,’ which was afterwards found to be written in Old Susian.[209] Five years later, Mr. Layard penetrated into the tomb disguised in Arab dress, and was told by a dervish that the precious inscription was buried there. In the outer court he was shown one or two small capitals and other vestiges of columns that had fallen from the mound; and also the fragment of a slab with a few cuneiform characters almost obliterated. The mound appeared to him little inferior in size to the Mujelibi, and he found and copied an inscription from a marble slab nine feet long by two feet six inches broad.[210] It was during this visit to Persia that he went to Malamir, in the valley of the Upper Karun, south-east of Susa, where he copied two long inscriptions, in a dialect of the Susian, one of thirty-six lines and the other of twenty-four, and made drawings of the singular bas-reliefs which accompany them.[211]

The first information of importance concerning Susa comes, however, from Mr. Loftus. He was attached as geologist to Sir W. F. Williams’s mission for the delimitation of the Turkish and Persian frontier, between 1849 and 1852. His first visit to Susa was made in May 1850. The ruins, he says, cover an area of about 3½ miles in circumference, within which four separate mounds are distinctly marked. The loftiest he estimated at about 2,850 feet round the summit, and it had evidently been the citadel.[212] To the north is a larger mound at a lower elevation, and here it was that he was rewarded by the discovery of the ancient palace. To the east of these is another, which he calls the Great Platform; it covers sixty acres, and does not exceed seventy feet in height. Beyond it, still farther eastward, may be discerned some remains that indicate the place where the city itself stood (No. 4 on plan).

The excavations were begun in 1851 and at first without decisive result. Three trenches were ‘dug into the citadel mound to the depth of nineteen feet, but failed to discover anything except portions of a brick pavement, fragments of moulded composition-bricks stamped with cuneiform and covered with green glaze.’[213]

It was not till the following year that Mr. Loftus succeeded in excavating a building almost exactly similar to the Columnar Edifice at Persepolis. He determined the position of twenty-one bases of the central group; two bases in each row of the eastern colonnade, and three of the western. On the north he found three bases, all in the inner row, and it is still doubtful if there ever was a second row on this side.[214] He ascertained that the building consisted, as at Persepolis, of a central square of thirty-six columns, surrounded on three sides by a colonnade, and we are indebted to him for the measurements. His opinion is that the central group was roofed, but not enclosed by a wall, and the space between it and the colonnades was open.[215] He searched in vain for the traces of walls such as Fergusson suggested had existed at Persepolis; and was the more convinced that none had ever existed because he found distinct traces of foundations elsewhere. He brought to light a trilingual inscription, repeated four times on the bases of the columns, which were found to have been written by Artaxerxes Mnemon (Inscr. S). They are of more than usual interest, for the King traces his genealogy back to Hystaspes, and confirms thereby the statement of Herodotus. He states also that he built the hall, or, as he calls it, the Apadana, on the site of an earlier edifice erected by the great Darius, and afterwards destroyed by fire during the reign of Artaxerxes I. He likewise invokes Mithra and Anahita for the first time side by side with Ormuzd as tutelary deities. Another evidence of degeneracy is seen in the corruption of the language, which exhibits several grammatical solecisms. Another short trilingual legend of the same king was found round a column in a different part of the mound, and several detached bricks and vases with the names of Darius and Xerxes, but no other trilinguals of importance. On the other hand, the long inscription in thirty-three lines found by Rawlinson on the Citadel Hill, and the two inscriptions found by Layard at Malamir, gave rise to fresh difficulties. It was recognised that the writing was different from any yet known; and the perplexity was heightened when it was farther observed that they differed from one another. Here, then, were two new methods of writing, and possibly two new languages added to those already in hand; and there seemed to be no end to the task imposed on the cuneiform student. For some time little effort was made to grapple with these new problems. The script found on the Citadel Hill received the provisional name of ‘Old Susian,’ and many other specimens of it gradually accumulated. Subsequent investigations have shown that the writing and language found at Susa and Malamir are related to those in the second column of the trilingual inscriptions. It is now ascertained that the Old Susian is the most ancient form; and that the script and language of the second column descends from it, through the medium of the script and language found at Malamir. The Old Susian inscriptions were translated by Oppert in 1876, and those of Malamir by Professor Sayce in 1885. These documents were generally referred to kings contemporary with Sargon and Sennacherib, though others subsequently found were attributed to the fourteenth century B.C. Still later discoveries have proved that the Old Susian was in use at least as early as B.C. 3000. The origin of the ‘New Susian’ of the second column has thus been carried back to a great antiquity; and the existence of a very ancient population in Elam, speaking a Scythic language has been established. The relation between the Scythic of Elam and the Scythic of Southern Babylonia has not yet, we believe, been universally admitted. There are powerful interests at work to dwarf or deny the extension and influence of the Turanian races, both in Elam and in Babylonia, and till these have been surmounted, it will be difficult to estimate correctly the exact state of the evidence.

It was not till thirty-three years had elapsed from the date of Mr. Loftus’s discoveries that Susa was again visited. Upon this occasion (1885) the enterprising traveller was M. Dieulafoy, whom we have already mentioned, and it is to these two travellers that we owe nearly all we know of its Achaemenian remains. Mr. Loftus must always enjoy the honour of being the first to reconstruct the Columnar Hall, and it was he also through whom the two inscriptions of Artaxerxes Mnemon became first known. M. Dieulafoy, on the other hand, has largely increased our knowledge of Persian art by the discovery of the enamelled friezes. The service he has rendered towards the reconstruction of the buildings is more problematical, for a large portion of it depends upon the justness of the imaginative faculty, which is never a very sure guide in such matters. He found three or four bases in the central cluster of the Hall not previously excavated by Loftus; but they add nothing to our knowledge of its construction, which the earlier traveller had already fully determined. M. Dieulafoy’s most successful work was achieved on the occasion of his second visit to Susa, in 1885. At first it was difficult to collect workmen, but a few deserters from the army were attracted, when it became known that the pay offered was about equal to that of their colonel. Before the end of the month nearly three hundred men were collected, and excavations were energetically pursued upon each of the three hills. A double-headed bull, broken into convenient fragments, was found in the eastern colonnade of the great Hall, and the pavement of a terrace on the south was reached.[216] At length (March 21), large quantities of bricks and enamelled tiles were found which, when put together, formed various devices, men and animals of gigantic size, triangles of alternate blue, green and white, palm leaves and other decorative designs, evidently parts of a frieze.[217] The brilliant colours were marvellously preserved from having lain so long face downwards. Soon after, the base of a column, signed by Artaxerxes Mnemon, was found in the larger mound. Meanwhile Madame Dieulafoy supervised the collection of the enamels, and as they were pieced together the floor of her tent was gradually enlivened by the apparition of a magnificent lion set in blue turquoise.[218] Numerous repetitions of the same device were found, indicating a procession of these majestic animals. A few cuneiform letters were also met, tinted with blue. The enamels had clearly fallen from a great height, and had formed the decoration of the upper portion of a wall. It was evident also that the building they came from had been preceded by a still more ancient edifice to which some of the bricks had belonged.[219] Almost as interesting was the discovery close to their camp on the south side of the Apadana of the parapet of a staircase richly ornamented with yellow and blue lotus flowers, set in a rich green foundation.[220] The excavations conducted at two points of the Citadel Hill had as yet proved unproductive. They had occupied fifty men constantly for two months, and had only resulted in the discovery of a few bricks with Susian texts, and some fragments of cut stone. Not much more success had rewarded their attack upon the large mound to the east. Here little was found except immense walls of crude brick and the remains of a cemetery of Parthian times. Farther search had now, however, to be postponed on account of the approach of the hot weather. On April 28 work was suspended and the treasures packed. Fifty-five cases were despatched, containing the lion frieze and the decoration of the stairs. They were, however, seized at the Turkish frontier, and all the attempts of M. Dieulafoy to smuggle them on board a French steamer were frustrated. Fortunately, the head of the lion and many small objects were hidden away in the personal luggage and thus escaped detention. The travellers got back to France in July, and were then informed that the Shah had revoked the firman and would not permit them to return. It appears that the Mollahs at Dizful had discovered that the torrential rains and threatening clouds that had lately visited the country were due to the presence of the foreigners so near the holy Tomb of Daniel. The infidels had disturbed the resting-places of the faithful and removed the talismans buried by the prophets for the protection of Susiana. It was abundantly proved that their unholy presence was always accompanied by signs of divine wrath and followed by terrible plagues. After much negotiation, however, leave to return was obtained, on condition that the French Government would waive the claim to indemnity if, as seemed probable, their agents should perish in their forthcoming visit. This singular condition was subsequently modified, and while the Shah disclaimed all responsibility for the safety of the mission, he renewed the firman for a limited time.[221] It was perhaps partly in consequence of these negotiations, and partly to stimulate the Turkish Government to surrender the fifty-five cases still in their possession, that the travellers re-appeared in the Persian Gulf on board a French man-of-war, which had not been seen in those waters for three years. On their way they stopped at Muscat, and the officers were duly entertained at the Lawn Tennis Club by the ubiquitous English.[222]

M. Dieulafoy resumed operations at Susa on December 13, 1885. The firman was to expire on April 1, and their funds were now reduced to 15,000 francs.[223] They accordingly determined to abandon the hope of a thorough investigation and to content themselves with the humbler task of filling the Museum. They now concentrated all their efforts on the Palace Hill: by the end of the year they had come upon the foundation of the Palace of Darius, which had been buried beneath the ruins of the later Palace of Artaxerxes. At this depth they made their second great discovery of enamelled tiles, bearing the design of the archers, an ornament attached to an earlier structure. It was, however, found sixty metres from the Apadana and could not, therefore, have been a portion of the decoration of the palace.[224] At a little distance, in the plain, they came upon a small Achaemenian building which Dieulafoy declared to be a covered fire temple.[225] By the middle of February the exhausted state of their finances compelled them to dismiss a hundred of their workmen. The clearance of the palace, however, continued. Several more bases were found, and another double bull, which was shattered into portable form by a stroke from the powerful arm of the lady Chevalier.[226] A sketch was also completed of the fortification for two-thirds of its circumference, a work that produces a startling effect upon the reader who looks at Plate 2. Little now remained but the task of collecting their treasures. The process of packing and superintending the removal of such weighty objects occupied the rest of their time, and when they left, at the end of March, they brought away three hundred and twenty-seven cases and forty-five tons of baggage. When the difficult journey to the coast was successfully overcome, they found a man-of-war ready to transport them safely back to France. They had acquired inestimable archæological riches, which are now to be seen among the precious collections of the Louvre. These remains of Achaemenian palaces, as they say, were not torn from some splendid ruin, but called back to life from the hidden embrace of the grave; and they were acquired at the peril of their lives. The Susian mission waged an almost hopeless battle and came off victorious.[227] We fear, however, that a good deal of M. Dieulafoy’s industry was misdirected. If a third plate were to be prepared, marking only the ‘Restorations directes d’après les fouilles,’ and omitting the lines indicating the ‘Restorations calculées’ and the ‘Restitutions hypothétiques,’ the reader would be surprised to see how little of the ‘Acropole de Suse’ remained. The great staircase ascending to the Apadana or Columnar Edifice seems to be also entirely without authority, and his most ingenious speculations are to a great extent completely overthrown by the excavations of his successor.

Since the mission of M. Dieulafoy, a most advantageous concession has been made to France. In 1895 the Shah accorded to that favoured nation an exclusive right to carry on archæological excavations throughout the whole of his dominions. This concession was extended in August 1900, and was rendered perpetual, with the farther privilege of retaining all the artistic objects discovered.[228] M. de Morgan, who had already acquired a great reputation by his travels in Persia and his work in Egypt, was appointed in 1897 to carry on the explorations, and with the protection of a Persian garrison he began his operations in December of that year. They are still in progress, but he has been able to publish an account of his discoveries up to the spring of 1899. He has been described as the Prince of Excavators; and it is indeed a most fortunate circumstance that this work should have fallen into such unusually competent hands. He has ample time at his disposal, and sufficient means to employ no less than five hundred men at a time. He is satisfied to carry out his undertaking in a patient and painstaking manner. He has the merit of keeping his imaginative faculty under severe restraint, and we have little cause to apprehend an apparition of the airy fancies that so many of his predecessors have substituted for solid toil.

In his excavations on the site of the Apadana, he has been unable to verify the existence of the three bases belonging to the inner row of the northern colonnade. They were, however, among the first to be discovered by Mr. Loftus, and as he did not belong to the inventive group of travellers there can be no doubt they are to be found.[229] De Morgan is of opinion that the northern colonnade could never have contained more than a single row of columns, on account of the nature of the ground, which, he says, would not admit of more. His careful excavations between the central group and the lateral colonnades have proved the entire absence of any foundations upon which a solid structure could rest. It is clear, therefore, that the building could never have been enclosed by brick walls, adorned, as so commonly supposed, by enamelled designs. The theory supported by the Book of Esther that it was protected only by hanging curtains gains, therefore, probability, though we do not see that the supposition of its having been surrounded by wood is excluded. Below the foundations of Artaxerxes he found farther remains of the earlier edifice of Darius. Among these were the round base of a column and part of a bull-headed capital.[230] Elsewhere, lying at a still greater depth, he came upon a fluted column of a style entirely different from those in the more modern edifice. His investigations on the southern side have dispelled any hope of finding a sculptured staircase as at Persepolis.[231]

His discoveries have contributed largely to widen the range of information concerning the ancient civilisation of Susiana. He has found upwards of eight hundred bricks bearing the inscriptions of various Elamite kings and patesis written in the Old Susian language; some of these are said to go back to B.C. 3000, or earlier, and a few of them are written, according to M. de Morgan, in Sumerian and others in Semitic. Besides bricks, a bronze bas-relief, and a few archaic tablets and a stele with Susian inscriptions have also been discovered. Other objects not of Elamite origin have been met which it is reasonable to conclude were captured in the course of successful raids. They go back to the earliest days of Babylonian history. One is an obelisk of a King of Kish who lived, it is said, so far back as B.C. 3850.[232] Another is a bas-relief of the famous Naram Sin carried off from Sippara; a third is a brick of the same king, a possible indication that he was at one time the suzerain of the country, and contributed to the embellishment of its temples. In addition to these, many boundary stones have been found, all relating to land in Chaldæa belonging to the late Cossaean period, which prove how successful the Elamites continued to be in removing their neighbours’ landmarks.[233]

Perhaps of greater interest is the glimpse these excavations have afforded of a still more distant past. M. de Morgan found that the Citadel Hill has reached its present altitude of one hundred and twenty feet above the plain entirely by the accumulation of deposit left by successive generations of settlers.

He sank a series of mines of considerable length into the side of the hill, and at various depths, down to 24·90 metres below the surface. The Achaemenian remains reach no farther down than 4·50 metres, and this stratum represents a period extending over 2,500 years. If we assume a similar rate of deposit for the remainder we arrive at more than B.C. 12,000 for the date of the lowest stratum examined. It is very remarkable that it was precisely at this depth, representing in any case an extremely remote period, that he found the most finished pottery, adorned with the most perfect artistic designs; and these, he has no doubt, could not have been produced except in a high state of civilisation.[234] There is some resemblance between these objects and others recently found in Egypt and ascribed to B.C. 6000.[235] This early civilisation seems to have been swept away by the invasion of a people in a much less advanced condition, who occupied the country for a long period of time;[236] it is not till these had disappeared and we ascend to a level of 12·95 metres below the surface that we come to the beginning of the Elamite deposit. It has a thickness of from eight to nine metres, which, according to our estimate, would require about five thousand years to form. It was in this stratum, between 4·50 and 12·95 metres below the surface that he made his principal discoveries. Here he came upon the walls of Elamite palaces and temples, which have enabled him to show that the method of decoration by means of enamelled brick of exquisite colour and design was extensively practised. The quantity of carbonised material leads to the conclusion that wood was largely employed in the construction of these edifices; and the remains of columns prove that the Persians derived their idea of columnar architecture direct from their predecessors. The inscriptions so recently found are still in the hands of Father Scheil, who is now engaged in the work of decipherment. They show, he says, the influence of Semitic speech in Elam at an early period, and the advocates of the antiquity of Semitic civilisation begin to hope they may still have occasion to rejoice.

Very few other inscriptions remain for us to notice. Before the end of the eighteenth century a vase of Xerxes was discovered in Egypt containing a trilingual inscription translated into Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was described by Caylus (after whom it was named), and was long the object of much learned curiosity (Inscr. Qᵃ). Another inscription was found near Suez, in A.D. 1800, and published in the ‘Travels of Denon,’ in 1807. It contains a legend of Darius, and appears to have belonged to a larger monument, afterwards partly recovered, but which has since been entirely destroyed. It was engraved upon a stele and was also quadrilingual: having three cuneiform inscriptions on one side and the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the other. On the Persian side were two human figures with their hands resting upon three cartouches. To the right was the Persian, to the left the Susian, and below the Babylonian text, with the legend ‘Darius the great king, king of kings, king of lands, the king of the wide earth, son of Hystaspes the Achaemenian.’[237] Below, occupying the whole face of the stele, was the longer inscription in twelve lines with the Persian on the top and the others under. Nearly the whole of the Susian was lost, and only a few letters of the Babylonian remained.[238] It begins with the long introductory form, and Darius goes on to say that he has conquered Egypt; and commanded a canal to be dug from the Nile to the ‘sea which is in communication with Persia.’[239] It seems to say that the king ordered the half of the canal toward the sea to be destroyed.[240] It is supposed that this was done in accordance with the advice of the engineers who thought the Red Sea was above the level of the Mediterranean (Inscr. Sᶻ). Two other inscriptions have also been found in Egypt: one on a crystal cylinder now in the British Museum and first described by Grotefend in his ‘Neue Beiträge’ of 1840. It represents Darius in the act of killing a lion. The king is standing upright in a chariot with the tiara upon his head, and carrying a bent bow in his hand. Above him is the winged figure, and in the background a trilingual inscription with the legend ‘I [am] Darius the king.’ The other occurs upon a vase of grey marble, and like the one of Caylus, it is quadrilingual. It was first made known by Longpérier in the ‘Revue Archéologique’ (1844), through an imperfect copy taken by the Abbé Giacchetti, but a complete transcript was afterwards sent by Sir Gardner Wilkinson to Rawlinson. It reads simply: ‘Artaxerxes the great king.’ It is known as the Venice vase, and is preserved in the Museum of St. Mark’s (Inscr. Qᵇ). A few other vases were afterwards found at Susa and at Halicarnassus, but they all repeat the same legend as that found upon the Caylus vase. A short inscription of Darius, containing the long introductory form already described, is also mentioned by Gobineau as having been found near Kermanshah.[241] Two unilingual inscriptions, one of Arsaces and the other of Pharnuches, were also afterwards found on seal cylinders which, with the trilingual of Darius in the British Museum (Nᵃ) raise the number to three in all.[242]

CHAPTER III
DECIPHERMENT OF THE FIRST OR PERSIAN COLUMN—TYCHSEN TO LASSEN, A.D. 1798-1836.

We have already called attention to the important services rendered by Niebuhr to the study of the cuneiform inscriptions. The copies he made at Persepolis were by far the most accurate that had hitherto appeared, and the scholars who first applied themselves to the difficult task of decipherment worked chiefly upon them. He pointed out that the inscriptions generally occur in groups of three columns, and that in each the cuneiform signs are different. He pointed out also that the three different systems always recur in the same definite order: the signs characteristic of the first, second and third columns in one inscription always correspond to those of the first, second and third columns in the others. He observed also that the signs characteristic of the first column are evidently much simpler than those in the other two. After a careful comparison of the various places where they are found, he remarked that they were limited to forty-two in number; and these he collected and published together in his Plate 23, where they occupy a position that might at first sight lead the reader to suppose that they formed a part of the ornamentation of the sculptured staircase.[243] This is the first cuneiform alphabet ever published, and it was not the least important service rendered by Niebuhr to the study. Its formation was not so simple as might be supposed, and it would have been difficult to accomplish it except by a minute study of the monuments themselves. The inscriptions had hitherto been so imperfectly copied that no mere collation of them, however carefully made, could have succeeded in eliminating the whole of the faulty signs arising from the errors of the transcriber. The accidental addition or omission of a wedge, or an alteration in its direction, had the effect of magnifying the apparent number of the letters. It is a singular proof of the accuracy of Niebuhr’s judgment that he should have been so successful in this first attempt to distinguish between the genuine and the defective letters. In his list of forty-two signs, he has only introduced nine that are not true letters, including the sign that was afterwards found to be the mark of separation between the words.[244] On the other hand, amid all the conflicting signs found in the copyists, he passed over only two that are genuine: one (𐎦) is included by Grotefend in his list of defective signs; the other (𐎵) was first added to the alphabet by Rawlinson.[245] It proved of great advantage to concentrate the attention of scholars upon signs that were for the most part genuine, and to save them the dissipation of energy that would have resulted if they had been left to wander unguided among the inscriptions themselves. Niebuhr rendered a farther service by separating each group of wedges that formed a letter by a colon, an idea he copied from the Zend; and the eye thus soon becomes accustomed to recognise the complicated combinations that belong to each other. While he contributed so much to the correct apprehension of the alphabet, it is singular that he never remarked that the words themselves are regularly separated from each other by a diagonal wedge.

This fundamental fact also escaped the notice of Tychsen, who was the first to make a serious attempt at decipherment. Tychsen’s family was of Norwegian descent, but he was born in the small town of Tondern, in Schleswig Holstein, in 1734. Although of humble origin, he was sent to the University of Halle, where he early acquired a taste for Oriental languages. He was appointed a lecturer in the University of Bützow (1760) and subsequently transferred to the more important post of librarian and curator of the Museum at Rostock (1789). He attained a great reputation by his knowledge of Hebrew and Rabbinical archæology; and he was the first to lay the foundation of modern Biblical criticism. His Oriental studies embraced Arabic and Syriac; and he also wrote on the Cufic inscriptions preserved in Venice and London. His works include six volumes of archæological papers, which he calls ‘Pastimes of Bützow,’ ‘A History of the Rostock Library’ (1790), and two treatises on Arabic and Syriac (1791 and 1793). He is also mentioned as having written a treatise on Zoroaster. His opinions on cuneiform are contained in a curious tract entitled ‘De Cuneatis Inscriptionibus Persepolitanis Lucubratio’ (1798). He agreed with Niebuhr that the inscriptions are to be read from left to right, and that the three columns contain three different kinds of writing, which he thought concealed three different languages, probably the Parthian, Median and Bactrian.[246] He recognised that the characters in the first column are by far the simplest, and it is on them that he fastened his attention. By some means which he has failed adequately to explain,[247] he professes to be able to transliterate the cuneiform signs, and he has gratified the curiosity of the reader by presenting him with a table showing the values he has found for a great variety of signs, among which he admitted several that are defective. He saw that more than one sign may be used for the same sound; and he assigned four each to the letters l, r, s and x. Conversely, he thought that the same sign might express the most diverse sounds. E, n, t, are given as the different values of a single sign, No. 5 (𐎿). B, k, r, and b, x, y, are assigned respectively to two others, Nos. 27 (𐎹) and 31 (𐎴); while two different values for the same sign are quite common. Like many of his successors, he recognised a profusion of vowels, and he has allotted nine different signs to his three forms a, ä, ă. It is scarcely surprising that out of the nine, one turned out to be correct, No. 21 (𐎠); and of the four signs he allotted to s, one was correct, No. 38 (𐏁). He was also successful in detecting the signs for d and u: but as his system was based upon no intelligible principle, these results were purely accidental, and could not afford a guide to future inquirers.[248] Having succeeded to his satisfaction in finding known equivalents for the unknown signs, and being thereby enabled to transliterate the cuneiform text, the next step was to endeavour to make some sense of it. This he sought to do by comparing the singular words that resulted from his system with those of languages he thought must be the most nearly allied, such as Zend, Pehlevi, Chaldee, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian.[249] He failed to recognise fully the intention of the diagonal wedge, so that upon some occasions he rendered it by the conjunction ‘and.’ He had, however, the merit of pointing out that a particular group of seven cuneiform letters were continually recurring, often followed by the same group with three or four other letters added to the termination. These are enclosed by diagonal wedges, and we now know they are single words, the simplest form being the nominative singular of ‘King,’ and the two longer the same word with the addition of the genitive singular and the genitive plural terminations. But Tychsen had no suspicion, at this time at least, that the letters occurring between the diagonals must be treated as one word,[250] nor that the terminal variation was a grammatical inflexion. Accordingly he makes the simple form of seven letters represent two words, which he transliterates and translates Osch Aksak, ‘is Aksak’; and the two longer groups he treats as three words—Osch Aksak yka, ‘is Aksak divus,’ for the first; and Osch Aksak acha, ‘is Aksak perfectus,’ for the second.[251] The personage named Aksak, whom he had thus evolved, he took to be Arsaces, the founder of the Parthian dynasty; and he accordingly found himself compelled to attribute the inscriptions and monuments to that comparatively late date.[252] Tychsen’s efforts at translation were exhausted by his rendering of the B and G Inscriptions of Niebuhr both of which he found to belong to Aksak; but he has transliterated the Inscriptions A, H, I, and L, for the benefit of other scholars who may wish to read some meaning into them. The curious feature of his system is that some of his letters actually turned out to be correct, such as his a, u, s, or sch. But as these results are purely accidental he cannot be allowed to have made any real contribution to cuneiform decipherment.

Immediately after the appearance of his tract, it was assailed by Witte, a professor of his own university, who seized that occasion to revive the old view of Dr. Hyde that the cuneiform characters were simply designed as a fantastic ornamentation and had no other signification.[253] On the appearance of Grotefend’s system, Tychsen had the singular magnanimity to abandon his own and he became one of the principal exponents of the theories of the younger scholar.

In the same year (1798) that Tychsen published his ‘Lucubratio,’ a paper on the same subject was read before the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, by Dr. Münter. Münter’s father, who was a clergyman and a poet, was born at Lübeck and died at Copenhagen, where he was pastor of the German church. His son Frederick was born at Gotha, in 1761, but his youth was passed at Copenhagen, and many of his works were written in Danish and subsequently translated into German. Like his father, he entered the Church, and became a Professor of Theology at Copenhagen, and eventually rose to be the Bishop of Seeland (1808). He was a very prolific writer, especially upon theological subjects. His works include a ‘History of Dogma’ (1801), a ‘History of the Danish Reformation’ (1802), and the last, which is considered to be the most important, was on the ‘Symbols and Works of Art of the Early Christians,’ published in Altona, 1824. He also acquired considerable reputation as a philologist and Orientalist. His paper on the Cuneiform Inscriptions was published in Danish in 1800, and translated into German in 1802. It was not till then that it became accessible to the general reading public, and very soon afterwards M. de Sacy noticed it in the ‘Magasin Encyclopédique.’[254] Münter had long been in correspondence with Tychsen on the subject of their common studies; but the two scholars arrived at widely different results. While the latter invented a system of interpretation that enabled him to transliterate the inscriptions with comparative facility, the former could not admit that the solution of the difficulty rested upon any satisfactory basis. His own contribution, if much more modest, is not on that account less valuable.

Münter, in the first place, rendered important service to his successor, Grotefend, by sweeping away the foolish conjecture that the inscriptions belonged to the Parthian age, and with it the misleading inference that the name of Arsaces was to be sought for among them. In a few masterly pages, remarkable alike for wide knowledge and accurate judgment, he showed that Persepolis could only be referred to the Achaemenian kings, an opinion that had already gained the support of Heeren, in opposition to the authority of Herder, who ascribed it to the mythological age of Jamshid.[255] It might be thought that the claims of Darius or Jamshid to be the founder of Persepolis would not give rise to heated discussion; yet in the beginning of last century the tranquillity of Göttingen was convulsed by the fierce controversy that raged between the two learned advocates of the rival theories.[256]

Münter did not profess to be able to transliterate and still less to translate the inscriptions. His pretensions were limited to a very tentative endeavour to assign values to thirteen characters; and of these, four were not derived from Niebuhr’s list, and they turned out to be merely errors of the copyist. Having fixed the date of Persepolis and presumably therefore of the inscriptions, he inferred that the language must be closely allied to the Zend or the Pehlevi. He made a minute investigation of all the cuneiform inscriptions that were known in his day in Europe, and studied Kaempfer and Le Bruyn with the same attention as he studied Niebuhr. He accepted Niebuhr’s division of the Persepolitan inscriptions into three different kinds of writing; and he conjectured that the first was alphabetical, the second syllabic, and the third ideographic. The latter he thought bore some resemblance to Chinese. He saw that the language of the first column admitted of too many vowels to be closely related to the Pehlevi. He was, on the whole, disposed to think that the three columns contained translations of the same text into different languages, which might probably be Zend, Pehlevi and Parsi.[257] On this point, however, he did not consider the evidence sufficient to exclude all doubt. Indeed, he said the three columns might turn out to be in the same language, expressed in different characters.[258] He studied carefully the inscriptions that occur on vases, cylinders and bricks from Babylon, a few of which were then beginning to find their way to the European museums and the private collections of Sir W. Ouseley and Mr. Townley. The most important of these was upon the vase described by Caylus, which, in addition to the cuneiform inscription, was also inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics.[259] Tychsen pronounced the latter to be Phoenician, and he believed that the urn itself had formerly contained the ashes of his friend Aksak.[260] Münter made the more important remark that the characters on the Babylonian relics were nearly identical with that of the third Persepolitan column.

Meanwhile, he devoted his attention exclusively to the simplest form of writing, which is found in the first column; and he speedily recognised that the diagonal wedge which occurs so frequently was evidently intended to separate one word from the other. He compared it to the cypress tree that divides the groups in the procession on the sculptured staircase seen at Persepolis; and adds that in one of the old Hindu alphabets the words are similarly separated by a small oval.[261] This discovery, now announced for the first time, had till then escaped the observation of Tychsen, who, it will be remembered, fancied he found three different words enclosed within the same diagonals. In order to find values for the cuneiform letters, he had recourse to a twofold method. He sought out the signs that recurred the most frequently and that were the most uniformly repeated in the same word, for he concluded that these would naturally turn out to be vowels. He soon identified three in particular (𐎠, 𐎹, 𐏂) that were constantly recurring: the first in almost every word, and occasionally several times in the same word.[262] In the inscriptions analysed, he found that the first was repeated 183 times, the second 146, and the third 107 times.[263] He then proceeded to compare the forms of these letters with those of the vowels in other kindred languages; and he thought he discerned a strong resemblance between the first and third in the Zend character for a and in the Armenian for o.[264] He could not find a letter anywhere that resembled the second. However, he observed another cuneiform sign that also recurred with great frequency (𐎶), and which might easily bear comparison with the Zend letter for a long.[265] A likeness between a defective cuneiform sign (

) and the Zend letter for i gave him a fourth vowel. Similar considerations led him to assign the values of ou w ii y to another sign (𐏁), a conjecture that turned out to be less happy than that of Tychsen, who accidentally hit upon its correct value, s. Münter had now pointed out six signs he thought expressed vowels (viz. 𐎠 e or a, 𐎹?, 𐎡 o, 𐎶 a,

i, 𐏁 ou, &c.). The second he dropped out of his alphabet, for after careful search he could find no letter in any other alphabet to give him a clue to its value. The fifth was not a genuine letter; and of the four that remained two were, as he surmised, vowels (Nos. 1 and 3). The other two were both consonants. Only one of the former—the first, a—was found to be correct; but it had already been recognised by Tychsen. The other—the o—was afterwards found to be i. He also identified seven other signs with the consonants p, kh (two), r, r strong, s and b, which he obtained by the simple process of comparing them with other letters found in Zend, Armenian and Georgian, to which they had ‘no small similarity.’[266] Three of the signs he selected were not genuine; and of the four others the only one that was correct was b (𐎲). His efforts in this direction were thus limited to finding correct values for two signs (a and b).[267]

Like Tychsen, he was attracted by the frequent repetition of the word of seven letters. In one short inscription it may be found five times, and it is repeated at least twenty-eight times in the inscriptions copied by Niebuhr. He also observed that the same seven letters occur frequently with a terminal addition of three or four other letters, and this word is immediately preceded by the simpler form in seven letters. He concluded that the additional letters must be an inflexion: not, as Tychsen thought, an independent word, such as ‘pius’ or ‘perfectus.’ Münter confessed his inability to read the word, but he regarded it as the key of the whole alphabet.[268] His first impression corresponded with that of Tychsen, in so far as he supposed it to be a proper name.[269] But its recurrence so frequently seemed to discredit this supposition, particularly as no name of any king of the Achaemenian dynasty appeared to fit into seven letters.[270] Then he assumed it must be a title, possibly ‘king of kings,’ and in that case he clearly saw that the preceding word must be the name of the king. Here he had got on the right track, for the word does in fact signify ‘king,’ and the one that precedes it, at the beginning of the inscriptions, was afterwards found to be the royal name; but he ultimately rejected this explanation, because in Niebuhr’s Table A it followed a word of two letters, which could not possibly express the name of any of the Achaemenian kings. The passage he refers to happens to be erroneously copied, for a diagonal wedge has been introduced where there should be a letter, and Münter was misled by this unfortunate mistake. He thus abandoned an hypothesis that, if persevered in, might have led to some result. He may also have thought that the word of seven letters was too long to be simply ‘king,’ and consequently he made the unfortunate guess that it signified ‘king of kings.’ This assumption stood greatly in the way of his arriving at the correct meaning. The truth is that the two words already referred to as occurring together are required to make up the signification of ‘king of kings,’ the second being merely a repetition of the first with the addition of the genitive termination, corresponding to ‘rex’ and ‘regum.’ Münter could derive no assistance from a Zend grammar, for at that time none had been written.[271] What information he collected by his own study afforded him no help in the present matter. According to his transliteration, he knew three out of the four letters with which the longer word terminates: these were e; an unknown sign, possibly a j, followed by ea; but Zend could not guide him to the signification of the inflexion ‘ejea.’ The transliteration was at fault, for the four letters are really ‘anam,’ which corresponds exactly to the Zend genitive plural. To be thus baffled when so near the truth is a curious illustration of how completely even an exceptionally keen inquirer may fail to recognise what might seem self-evident. With the very phrase ‘king of kings’ constantly present to his mind, it never struck him that two words occurring one after the other, and differing in only what he recognised to be an inflexion, were precisely the ‘king of kings’ he was in search of.[272]

In this dilemma De Sacy suggested that the word or words were probably a religious formula, such as an invocation of God or the Ferhouer, and this opinion gained confirmation by its occurrence on cylinders and bricks which Münter had no doubt were inscribed with magical incantations. He was thus led far away from the true solution.[273]

Münter made a careful study of the words that showed a change of termination, and he drew up a list of seven of the most common inflexions.[274] The two last in this list are the ones added so often to the enigmatical word he vainly sought to read, and which are, as we now know, the signs of the genitive singular and plural.

His inquiries did not pretend to go beyond the first or simplest species of writing, but he took occasion to point out the signs in the second and third columns that correspond to the word of seven letters. Their identification, he argued, is indisputable, for when the word occurs twice in succession in the first column the corresponding signs are similarly repeated in the second and third; and their restricted form clearly indicates that they must be syllabic or ideographic.[275]

The Persepolitan inscriptions were now tolerably well known to persons interested in such matters, by the plates of Le Bruyn and more especially by those of Niebuhr. But the inscriptions from Babylon had only just begun to attract notice. So far back indeed as the beginning of the seventeenth century Della Valle, as we have seen, had sent a few inscribed bricks to Rome, but they had received little attention.[276] Later travellers do not appear to have mentioned the existence of these curious relics till the end of the eighteenth century, when Père Emanuel, a Carmelite, who resided at Bagdad, gave a description of them in a manuscript referred to by D’Anville in the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions.[277] Soon afterwards the Abbé Beauchamp, in his account of Hillah, says he found ‘large and thick bricks imprinted with unknown characters, specimens of which I have presented to the Abbé Barthélemy.’[278] His account excited some interest, and it was translated into English in 1792, and also into German by Witte of Rostock. Several of the bricks were deposited in the National Library at Paris, and plaster casts of them were sent to Herder and Münter. Shortly afterwards the same collection was enriched by the Egyptian vase already mentioned, which Count Caylus had discovered, and which he described in his ‘Recueil d’Antiquités.’[279] About the same time also various cylinders and bricks found their way to different European museums and private collections. Drawings of a few of these were also to be found in Caylus; and in 1800 Münter published two others from Babylonian bricks that had not seen the light before.[280]

Meanwhile the directors of the East India Company gave instructions to the Resident at Bussorah to secure ten or a dozen specimens for their museum (1797). They said they had heard that near Hillah ‘there exist the remains of a very large and magnificent city, supposed to be Babylon, and that the bricks contain an indented scroll or label in letters totally different from any now made use of in the East.’[281] The bricks reached London in 1801, and the task of copying and describing them was entrusted to Joseph Hager. Hager was a curious specimen of the wandering scholar, and he enjoyed a reputation that appears to have been quite out of proportion to his acquirements. He was of Austrian descent, but he was born at Milan in 1757, and died at Pavia in 1819. He early took to the study of Oriental languages, and especially Chinese. He roamed about Europe, visiting all the libraries from Constantinople to Madrid, and from Leyden and Oxford to the south of Italy. He wrote both in Italian and German, and apparently also in English and French. One of his first works was in German on a Literary Imposture (1799), and he became known in England as a contributor to Ouseley’s Oriental Collections, and by a book on the ‘Elementary Characters of the Chinese’ (1801). It was in this year that his Memoir on the Babylonian Inscriptions was written, and shortly afterwards he settled in Paris, and was commissioned by Napoleon to compile a Dictionary of Chinese in Latin and French (1802). For this he was to receive 6,000 francs a year; but after some time a suspicion arose as to his qualifications and industry. The result of an inquiry was that he was removed from his post, and he left France in 1806. We afterwards find him a teacher of German at Oxford, and in 1809 he retired to Pavia to fill the chair of Oriental Languages. He wrote several books on Chinese, including a Grammar, a Prospectus of a Dictionary, a ‘Panthéon Chinois,’ and the like; but they were severely handled by the most competent critics. He, however, accomplished his work on the Inscriptions with a fair degree of merit. He began by publishing one of them in the ‘Monthly Magazine’ (August 1801) without note or commentary. It fell into the hands of a M. Lichtenstein, and gave rise to a very foolish essay, to which reference will shortly be made. Next year Hager published the others, accompanied by a learned Dissertation on the subject.[282] He pointed out, as indeed had been already done by Münter, that the characters on the bricks are ‘formed of nearly the same elements and nail-headed strokes’ as at Persepolis; but he showed for the first time that the system of writing must have originated among the Chaldæans, who ‘were a celebrated people when the name of the Persians was scarcely known.’[283] He considered that many ancient alphabets were derived from the cuneiform, even including Devanagari, the oldest Sanscrit character, which was popularly ascribed to Divine revelation.[284] He finds many of the Babylonian characters the prototypes of Samaritan or Cuthean, and the similar Phoenician letters. Finally he shows with striking effect the wedge-like and angular origin of our own alphabetical system.[285] He called attention to the ancient custom of cutting inscriptions upon pillars and columns, and he considers it natural on that account to find that ‘the writing of the ancients was perpendicular rather than horizontal, columns and pillars being much fitter for the former manner of writing than for the latter.’[286] Such at least was the direction of the Egyptian, Ethiopian and Chinese. On account of the absence of stone in Babylon, it was necessary to substitute bricks, and we learn from Clement of Alexandria that Democritus took his treatise on Morals from an inscription written on a brick column.[287] The columnar origin of writing is perhaps the reason that the inscription on the Babylonian bricks is, as Hager asserts, ‘perpendicular rather than horizontal,’ an opinion he thinks he can prove by the gems he has studied. Various conjectures as to the subject of the legend on the bricks had been put forward. Münter and Grotefend thought it was a talisman;[288] others that it recorded some historical event or an astronomical observation; but Hager suggested that the subject was probably the same as that on the Roman bricks: that is to say, that it recorded the name and the place of the maker—a suggestion that turned out to be very nearly correct. He had no doubt that the writing was the same as that discussed by Democritus in his lost treatise, and which is referred to by many of the classical writers.[289] He considers that it is ideographic, ‘for we find single groups composed of abundance of nails, like the various strokes in the Chinese characters, all different from each other and different from the Persepolitan.’ Nor does he consider that they were developed from hieroglyphics, but deliberately ‘formed and combined by an arbitrary institution, and designed to express, not letters nor syllables, but either whole sentences or whole words.’[290] Finally he suggests that the Persepolitan mode of writing was directly derived from the Babylonian by simply laying the perpendicular inscription upon its side; by that means the heads of the wedges that were originally at the top are now all turned to the left, and the inscription that was originally read from top to bottom becomes by its changed position always read from left to right. ‘If we turn our perpendicular characters in such a manner as to make them lie in a horizontal direction, the effect will be exactly what takes place in the Persian writing.’[291] This is a remarkable anticipation of a much later discovery.

Hager’s book was still going through the press when another important inscription was added to the Paris Library (1802). It is on a stone found by M. Michaux at Tak Kasra below Bagdad. The Vase of Caylus and the Caillou Michaux continued for a time to be the two most celebrated samples of the Persepolitan and Babylonian styles in Europe. Later on, the Persepolitan collection was enriched by the discovery of the ‘Suez Stone,’ published in the ‘Travels of Denon,’ in 1807. But all these were entirely eclipsed by the long inscription found at Babylon and sent by Sir Harford Jones to the India House. It was long known simply as the India House Inscription, till later knowledge proved it to be the Standard Inscription of Nebuchadnezzar. Shortly afterwards (1808) the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, received an inscription from Sir John Malcolm of which we hear little till a much later period.

We have said that an inscription published by Hager without commentary in 1801 fell into the hands of Lichtenstein, who made it the subject of a Memoir published in the ‘Brunswick Magazine.’[292] This eccentric writer put forward the theory that the bricks concerning which so much noise was being made were in fact not older than the seventh or eighth century A.D., and that the characters bore a ‘striking resemblance’ to Cufic.[293] Nothing more was necessary than to remove the arbitrary additions of unnecessary wedges, in order to detect the Cufic symbols they concealed. Unlike most other scholars, he chiefly studied the Babylonian bricks and the most complicated of the Persepolitan systems; and he regarded an entire group of characters as only one letter. Having reduced it to the necessary simplicity by simply dropping out all the inconvenient wedges till he could discover something that suggested the appearance of a Cufic letter, he was enabled to draw up an alphabet by which he read all the cuneiform inscriptions with the greatest ease.[294] He then discovered that the language was an ancient form of Arabic and should be read from right to left. He was quite surprised that Hager should have been so deluded by wild dreams of Belus and Semiramis that he failed to see that his bricks ‘contained only a few miserable sentences in Arabic.’ What the Arabic words really were he did not consider it necessary to disclose to the public, but he communicated a few of them to De Sacy, who pronounced that they were not Arabic at all. Lichtenstein was good enough to translate Hager’s brick, and found that it was a prayer; from thence he passed on to Niebuhr’s inscriptions, and selected the difficult specimens (C, E, and L, Pl. 24). From C he obtained the most astonishing result. The words ran as follows: ‘The King, the Sovereign, Prince of all Princes, the Lord Saleh, Jinghis, son of Armerib, governor-general for the Emperor of China, Orkhan Saheb.’[295] Encouraged by this striking success, he next took in hand the long inscription on the Caillou Michaux. It was written, he says, in Armenian, and contains an exhortation addressed by a priest of the ‘Temple of the God of the Dead’ to certain women mourning their departed friends.[296] De Sacy, from whom our information is taken, gives more than a page of this pious effusion, which he says is not more than a sixth part of the translation. It is needless to say that the whole is a pure invention. Indeed it does not clearly appear whether the Memoir was intended by Lichtenstein as a jeu d’esprit, or whether it was simply an impudent imposture. It is certainly curious that he succeeded in getting himself treated seriously. Besides the solemn review and confutation by De Sacy from which we quote, we find so late as 1820 that Grotefend still thought it necessary to combat his theories, and De Sacy even at that period classified together ‘the conjectures of Lichtenstein and the labours of Grotefend’ as equally open to suspicion.[297]

We now come to the scholar to whose ingenuity we owe the first real success that was achieved in deciphering the cuneiform letters.

George Frederick Grotefend was born at Münden, Hanover, in 1775. He was sent to the University of Göttingen in 1795, where two years later he obtained a tutorship. He applied himself to the study of philology under Heyne, and in 1803 he became Pro-Rector. Soon afterwards he was transferred to the Gymnasium of Frankfort on the Maine; and in 1821 he became Rector of the Lyceum at Hanover, where he died in 1853. He was always an industrious student, but he failed in after life to follow up his first great success; and if it had not been for it, his name would probably never have been known. In 1817 he published a Latin Grammar, which was translated into English under the supervision of Dr. Arnold; and subsequently he did some useful service by his inquiries into the early Italian languages. In 1835 he published a book on the Rudiments of the Umbrian, and, in 1837, another on the Oscan, and these were followed in 1840 by a Geography and History of Ancient Italy. The paper on the Cuneiform Inscriptions that first brought him into notice was read before the Göttingen Academy on September 4, 1802; and, curiously enough, at the same sitting Heyne first called attention to the Greek inscription on the Rosetta Stone, from which the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphics takes its departure.[298]

Grotefend himself informs us that he had no special knowledge of Oriental languages,[299] and many of his critics, who were probably quite as ignorant as himself, took care that the fact should not be forgotten. Although he had no special qualification in this respect for the task he undertook, yet he early displayed a remarkable aptitude for the solution of riddles: a peculiar talent which he shared in common with Dr. Hincks, who also acquired great distinction as a cuneiform scholar. In consequence of this peculiarity a friend induced him to turn his attention to Niebuhr’s enigmatical inscriptions, which were then exciting very general curiosity;[300] and he now disclosed the result to the Academy. He communicated the substance of it to the ‘Göttingen Literary Gazette’ (Sept. 18, 1802); and in the following year Silvestre de Sacy, the well-known Arabic scholar, gave a full account of it in the ‘Magasin Encyclopédique’ of Millin.[301] It was subsequently reported in the well-known Vienna periodical, the ‘Fundgruben des Orients’;[302] and in 1815 Grotefend had the opportunity of explaining the matter in his own words in an appendix to Heeren’s ‘Historical Researches.’[303]

The careful investigations of Münter were found of great service by his more successful follower. Münter had already pointed out that the inscriptions belonged without doubt to the period of the Achaemenian dynasty; that the words were separated from each other by a diagonal wedge, and that the writing ran from left to right. He had directed special attention to the word of seven letters, and to the fact that it preceded in many cases another identical to it but terminating with some unknown grammatical inflexion. He had suggested that the former probably signified some such title as ‘king of kings’ and that the royal name must be looked for in the word that precedes it, an opinion he only abandoned in view of the difficulties already explained.

Such was the state of the inquiry when Grotefend entered upon it. The Memoirs on the Antiquities of Persia, published by M. de Sacy in 1793, afforded a sort of text-book to the decipherer. De Sacy had succeeded in reading some inscriptions at Naksh-i-Rustam, written in Pehlevi. Like those at Persepolis, they were engraved above the sculptured representations of kings, and they were found to contain the royal name and title. Grotefend inferred that the cuneiform inscriptions had very probably served as models for these later legends. The simplest of these and, from its brevity, the one that afforded the most striking resemblance to the B and G of Niebuhr ran: ‘N N rex magnus rex regum [rex-um] Filius ... [regis] stirps Achaemenis[?]’[304] The first step Grotefend made in advance of his predecessor was to perceive that it required two words to make up the phrase ‘king of kings,’ and that these two words no doubt corresponded to the two in the cuneiform: the one with seven letters and the longer form of the same word that followed it. This apparently obvious necessity had, as we have seen, wholly escaped Münter. When it was once recognised that the word of seven letters was clearly ‘king,’ it became obvious that, according to the analogy of the Pehlevi model, the first word of the inscription was the name of the sovereign, the third a qualifying title corresponding to ‘magnus’ and the two following, where he found the word of seven letters again repeated, and on this occasion followed by the longer form, evidently corresponded to ‘rex’ and ‘rex-um’ (‘regum’).

Comparing the two inscriptions (B and G), he found they began with different words, which he now inferred were the names of two different kings; but he observed that the name in B, which was presumably in the nominative case, also occurred in the third line of G with a case-ending, followed by the word for ‘king.’ also with a case-ending. The termination differed from that already observed in the phrase ‘king of kings,’ and it marked, no doubt, the genitive singular, as the other denoted the genitive plural. Referring to his Pehlevi model, he inferred that the passage indicated the relationship of the two monarchs, and that the king of the second inscription (G) here declared himself to be the son of the king of the first inscription (B). This little bit of ingenuity solved the whole mystery. In the corresponding place in B he found another word in the genitive case, which was no doubt the name of the father of the king of that inscription; and he remarked that this name was not followed by the royal title. He had thus discovered the cuneiform signs that, with little doubt, expressed the names of three Achaemenian princes, and he had recognised that these personages stood to each other in the relation of father, son and grandson, and that the first was probably not of royal rank. That is to say, from ‘G’ he found that ‘King Z’ was son of ‘King Y’; and from ‘B’ he found that ‘King Y’ was son of ‘X’ without the addition of ‘King.’ It only remained to determine who these three princes were most likely to be: and as the Achaemenian dynasty was a short one and their names already known from history, the task was not a difficult one. The two kings at the head of the inscriptions could not be Cyrus and Cambyses, because their names did not begin with the same cuneiform letter; they could not be Cyrus and Artaxerxes, because there is no such discrepancy in the length of the cuneiform words. There thus only remained Darius and Xerxes for the names occurring first in the two inscriptions; and this result was confirmed by the absence of the royal title from the name of the father of the king in one of the inscriptions, for he recollected that Hystaspes is not called king by the Greek writers. He assumed, therefore, that the first word in B was Darius (and it must have been satisfactory to notice that the second letter, a, was precisely the a of Münter) and the other Hystaspes; while the first word in G he assumed was Xerxes.

From these three known words he now set himself to get at least the approximate values for the letters they contained. According to De Sacy, Grotefend first transliterated Darius and then Xerxes, from which two names he obtained the word for ‘king,’ and finally he transliterated Hystaspes. But according to Grotefend’s own account of the matter, he fastened in the first instance on the word that should read ‘Hystaspes.’ It consists of ten cuneiform signs, including the inflexion. He learned from Anquetil’s Zend-Avesta that the Zend form of the name was Goshtasp, Gustasp, Kistasp. Placing a letter of the name under each cuneiform sign, he arrived at the following result:

Here, then, were seven letters of the cuneiform alphabet for which values were provisionally assigned and three left over for the genitive termination. The word for Darius also consisted of seven letters, which he at first read thus:

The process so far was confirmed by the repetition of the same letters a and sh in both words in the position in which they were to be expected. There was more difficulty with Xerxes. The cuneiform word consisted of seven letters:

of which he already knew, or guessed, five, and these known values occurred in the order he expected; the first and third letters remained to be determined. It happens that Herodotus mentions that the name of Xerxes corresponded in sound to that of the Persian for ‘warrior’ or ‘king’; and Grotefend noted that the first two letters in the words for ‘Xerxes’ and ‘king’ were the same in the inscriptions. He ascertained that the Greek letter ξ transliterates the Zend ‘kshe’; but he could find nothing in the Zend vocabulary under ‘kshe.’ There were, however, several forms under ‘kh,’ ‘sh,’ which left no doubt that the first letter required should be read ‘kh.’ This assumption also enabled him to read the word for ‘king’ which had so long attracted attention. Of the seven letters that composed it he now knew four, which occurred in the order

The Zend word for ‘king,’ ‘khsheio,’ corresponds almost exactly to the form thus reached,[306] and it enabled him to add i conjecturally to his alphabet (𐎰). No explanation of the third letter in ‘Xerxes’ had yet presented itself; but it nearly resembled the fourth and seventh in the word for ‘king,’ and the fourth in the signs for ‘Darius’; and Grotefend presumed—erroneously, as it turned out—that they were the same. He observed that in Zend the aspirate is sometimes left out, and he thought the Zend kh sh e i o might very well be supposed occasionally to take an h. He accordingly conjectured that this was the value of the unknown letter, and he read kh sh e h i o h for ‘king,’ kh sh h e r sh e for ‘Xerxes,’ and D a r h e u sh for ‘Darius.’ It was not, therefore, till this point had been reached that he completed ‘Darius’ by the addition of h. He was led to decide for e as the value of the fifth letter, 𐎺, by the pronunciation of the name of Darius in Hebrew.[307] The form for Xerxes must have seemed at first sight rather disconcerting; but by the time the Appendix was republished, in 1824, Grotefend was able to announce that his conjecture was fully confirmed by Champollion, who spelt out the hieroglyphics for Xerxes on the Vase of Caylus to read Kh sh h a r sh a.

The result of his labours on the three proper names was that he arrived at the values of thirteen cuneiform signs: G o sh t a s p from Goshtasp or Hystaspes; D r e u from Darius, and kh and h from Xerxes. Of these thirteen letters, nine turned out ultimately to be correct; but the a had been previously recognised by Tychsen and by Münter: so that Grotefend now added eight correct values to the cuneiform alphabet, viz. sh t s p—d r u—kh.

He did not, however, rest satisfied with this achievement. He sought to transliterate and translate the remainder of the two inscriptions, but in this his fortune failed him. He does not explain in his own Memoir the method he pursued, but de Sacy has given us an insight into the process which no doubt rests on good authority.[308] We may suppose that he kept the Pehlevi inscription before him and continued to be guided by its analogy. He accordingly expected to find that the word after ‘king’ would express some honorary epithet corresponding to ‘magnus’ in the example before him. It was in fact composed of four letters of which he already knew the first and third, e — r —. The nearest word in Zend to suit his purpose was e gh r e, ‘strong.’ He therefore considered himself entitled to add a gh and another e to his list—both wrong.

So also in the position in the cuneiform where he should expect to find a word corresponding to the one translated ‘stirps,’ in the Pehlevi he observed a word of three letters of which he knew the first two, p, u —. He hit upon a word in Pehlevi—bun—that had precisely the signification of ‘stirps.’[309] So he gave his p the alternate value of b, and added n to his list. These also were both wrong. His attention was next turned to the two different inflexions which had been remarked at the end of ‘king.’ In the one consisting of three signs, he already knew the two last, — h a, and, for some reason we have not found explained, he assumed the first (𐏃) was a second sign for a. In this addition to his alphabet he was nearly right, for the letter has the value of h before a, i, u. In the second inflexion of four letters the first and third signs are the same, his e or a; and he learned from Anquetil that the Zend has a genitive ending e tsch a o. This was sufficient to add tsch and another o to his alphabet—both wrong. Here, then, are six more letters, gh, e, n, a, tsch and o, to be added to the thirteen already found, making nineteen in all. There are twenty-five letters in the two inscriptions given by De Sacy in 1803; and there is no doubt that before that time Grotefend had, with two exceptions, completed his alphabet, as it is found in the Appendix to Heeren in 1815.[310] According to it we see that he had already attempted to assign values to thirty-seven cuneiform signs, three of which are not to be found in Niebuhr’s list and are due to defective copying. Two others occur in Niebuhr’s list, but are also defective (e,

, and r, letter No. 8), so that there remain thirty-two genuine signs for which he has now found values. Several signs are, however, allotted to express the same sound. Thus he gives three signs for e (Nos. 3 [defective], 4 and 10) besides the sign for e or a which he generally transliterates e. He also gives three signs for o (Nos. 12, 16 and 23). It was afterwards found that these signs, which he took to be synonymous, are very far from being so: for example, not one of his three signs for o has that value, being respectively i, ch(a), and m(a). Indeed, among all the additions we are now considering he only succeeded in arriving at two correct values, 𐎳, f (No. 39) and 𐏃, a (No. 41), if indeed the second may be allowed to pass. Its true value is the aspirate h. But, as we shall afterwards see, it takes an inherent a, and it is very commonly used to express the sound ‘Ha,’ the vowel a being altogether omitted. In an inquiry of this kind it is necessary to admit approximate values as correct; and in the present case the value allotted to this sign by Grotefend ultimately led to the important identification of the word ‘Achaemenian.’ Here the first syllable, ‘Ach,’ is represented by the two signs for h and kh; and before it was known that the first letter had the sound of ‘Ha’ it was a comparatively slight error to drop the aspirate and set it down as a. We have therefore added this letter to the number of Grotefend’s correct discoveries. He also observed that the word for ‘king’ is often represented by an ideogram (𐏋) which, like the word, is subject to inflexions. This discovery he, however, generously attributes to Tychsen;[311] but we have not found it in the ‘Lucubratio.’ De Sacy was not aware of the origin attributed to it, and he has given the credit entirely to Grotefend himself.[312]

Soon after the completion of the alphabet, but still before the appearance of the Appendix in 1815, he was induced to change the value of two of the signs.[313] One of these he now fixed correctly, k (25), and the other approximately sr (40).

It will be recollected that Sir William Ouseley visited Murgab in 1811 and made a copy of the inscription that is found repeated there several times. His book did not appear till 1821; but Grotefend had the advantage of seeing a copy of the inscription in time to include it in his Memoir. According to the alphabet as it then stood, the transliteration would render z u sch u d sh;[314] but if we follow his own account, he saw reasons, which he does not explain, to change the first letter from z to k and the third from sch to sr; with the result that he produced k u sr u e sch, which he read ‘Kurus.’ He does not mention the change of the d into e, but a more correct copy of the same inscription showed that that sign did not exist in the original, which consists of five signs only. After he had arrived at this result, he tells us, he came across the French translation of Morier’s first Memoir, published in 1813, where, it will be recollected, that acute traveller suggested that Murgab was Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus.[315] This confirmation of his own studies was certainly satisfactory, though the sequence of events as he describes them is remarkable. Grotefend had now contributed eight correct values from the inscriptions B and G, two from the Murgab inscriptions, and two from other sources—that is, twelve in all (if we admit the sr, really r before u, and the a which is h before a, i, u). In addition to these the a and b of Münter were known, though Grotefend erroneously changed the b into v; and hence in 1815 fourteen correct values had been reached.

Grotefend was now able to transliterate after his own fashion all the inscriptions in the first style of writing. It was quite a different matter to translate the mass of strange words that began to pour in upon him. He had to seek for analogous words in Zend or Pehlevi, or in other languages he considered akin; and he was assured by many candid friends that this was an undertaking for which he was incompetent. In the excitement of the first discovery he was much more reckless in this matter than he afterwards became, when he had more experience of the difficulties of the task. We find that he contributed the following translation of the B and G inscriptions to the ‘Göttingen Literary Gazette,’ August 1802. B: ‘Darius, the valiant King, the King of Kings, the Son of Hystaspes, the Successor of the Ruler of the World, in the constellation of Moro.’ This figures in De Sacy in 1803 as follows: ‘Darius, rex fortis, rex regum, rex populorum, Hystaspis stirps, mundi rectoris in constellatione mascula Moro τοῦ Ized.’ For G we have: ‘Xerxes, the valiant King, the King of Kings, the Son of Darius the King, the successor of the ruler of the world.’[316]

His next attempt at translation appeared in the ‘Göttingen Literary Gazette’ of August 1803. In the interval he had made a study of Niebuhr’s inscriptions A, H and I, and compared the A with Le Bruyn’s inscription No. 131, which it nearly resembles.[317] The translation of the second paragraph of A he gives thus: ‘Xerxes the Monarch, the valiant King, the King of Kings, the King of all pure nations, the King of the pure, the pious, the most potent assembly, the Son of Darius the King, the descendant of the Lord of the Universe, Jemsheed.’[318] The H of Darius ran to much the same effect and also culminated in Jamshid. Subsequently he attempted the inscription on the windows of the Palace of Darius that remained for so long a stumbling-block to his successors, and also the one on the royal robe in the Palace of Xerxes given by Le Bruyn (No. 133). He likewise allowed the complete translation of the Le Bruyn No. 131 to appear in the Appendix to Heeren in 1815.[319] Many of these attempts excited well-deserved ridicule, and even in 1815 we find him much less eager to gratify public curiosity, and perhaps less confident in his own ability to do so adequately. He willingly furnished Heeren with the transliteration of the texts, but it was only by special request that he added some of his translations. ‘If I have,’ he says, ‘as a decipherer established the value of the signs, it belongs to the Orientalist to complete the interpretation of the writing now for the first time made intelligible.’[320] He, however, still thought he could answer for the general sense of his rendering, though not for its verbal accuracy, and subject to that limitation the window inscription and the Le Bruyn plate No. 131 appeared in 1815. In the later edition of 1824 they are, however, suppressed.

We have now given an account of this once famous discovery and the results that were first attained. We have credited Grotefend with having found correct, or at least nearly correct, values for twelve characters; and the achievement may be allowed to merit the fame it still confers upon its ingenious author. Each step in the process now appears simple enough, and it is not easy for us to estimate the full magnitude of the difficulties he surmounted. They can indeed only be realised by remembering how completely a man like Münter had failed. Yet it is exceedingly curious to consider how so ingenious a person was baffled when he might seem to be on the point of farther success. Grotefend was harassed by the continued recurrence of the two words he transliterated ‘Bun Akeotscheschoh.’ There was, of course, no punctuation to guide the translator, and he constantly connected these two words together. His translation usually ran: ‘Darii regis [filius] stirps mundi rectoris.’[321] He was quite satisfied from the beginning that ‘bun’ signified ‘stirps,’ and in the Pehlevi inscription, which was his constant model, he had before him the very appropriate reading ‘stirps Achaemenis.’ No phrase, he well knew, was more likely to appear in these inscriptions than this very one. He had already arrived at the first three letters of this word, a, k, e or a, and it is strange the suspicion never entered his mind that the rest of his transliteration should be modified in accordance with the apparently inevitable conclusion that the mysterious word was in fact ‘Achaemenian.’ This is all the more remarkable from another consideration. De Sacy had expressly exhorted him to keep a look out for ‘Ormuzd,’ which was certain to occur frequently in the cuneiform, as it did in the Sassanian inscriptions. In the Le Bruyn No. 131 he found a word which, according to his alphabet read ‘euroghde’; and in this with singular acuteness he fancied he detected some trace of Ormuzd.[322] But he identified the first portion of the word with the Zend of Anquetil ‘éhoré,’ and read for the whole ‘Oromasdis cultor.’[323] Yet, according to his own transliteration the word gave him a u r . . d a,

He knew that a vowel may be omitted; and it is certainly strange that he never suspected that the two intervening letters might express ‘muz,’ and the whole give him ‘Aurmuzda.’ In deference to the Murgab inscription he had already changed his original z into a k, and his sch into sr; and we should think he might have seen sufficient ground in what has been said to justify his abandoning the o gh. His singular attachment to o gh prevented him from observing that the fourth letter in this word is the same as the letter that follows ‘aka’ in the other; and it is curious he did not see that an m in one case would help him on with ‘Ormuzd,’ just as an m in the other would lead up to ‘Akam[enian].’ There was an additional reason indeed for his changing his o into m, for he knew that (according to Anquetil) m was the sign of the accusative—a form from which he was forced to depart when he made o an accusative termination.[324] If he had advanced to ‘akam,’ we can scarcely suppose that he would have failed to recognise ‘Achaemenian,’ and would have modified his transliteration in accordance with this new discovery. It was the identification of m and n long afterwards by Rask that to a great extent facilitated the way for farther progress towards completing the alphabet, an opportunity that Grotefend unfortunately allowed to escape him.

One of the chief services rendered by Grotefend to the alphabet was to draw up a long list of the various signs he found in the inscriptions which were evidently due to errors on the part of the copyist. These he ascertained by a careful collation of the inscriptions as they appeared in the works of Le Bruyn, Niebuhr, and others.[325] Even Niebuhr had admitted eight of these into his corrected list of forty-two letters, but they existed in great numbers in the inscriptions, and till cleared out of the way, they presented a serious obstacle to the decipherer. Some of his detractors, like St. Martin, have accused him of wilfully excluding these signs, or of changing them arbitrarily to suit the exigencies of his own system; but the charge is entirely without foundation, as De Sacy recognised from the first.

Grotefend was of opinion that the cuneiform system was intended only for engraving, and that some other writing must have been in use for ordinary purposes.[326] He divided the various specimens that had come under his notice into three classes. The first included the Persepolitan inscriptions; the second was to be seen upon the stone recently published by Millin, which he says partly resembles the third Persepolitan and partly the Babylonian bricks;[327] and the third the Babylonian inscriptions, the most important being that published by the East India Company. ‘These are the most complicated,’ and are to be ‘distinguished by the number of the strokes of union and by the eight-rayed star.’ The first class—namely, the Persepolitan—he again subdivided into three kinds, according to the relative complexity of the writing. He considers they represent different languages: the first or simplest is the ‘Zend, which is apparently the Median language’; the second the Parsi, or language of the true Persians; the third ‘perhaps a Persian dialect, perhaps Pehlevi; but in consequence of the absence of prefixes it cannot belong to the Aramean family,’ a reason also that excluded the two others from the same classification. He thought the first system of writing was the Old Assyrian; the second differs from it by having a greater number of oblique and fewer angular wedges; while it differs from the third system by avoiding, like the first, wedges placed diagonally, and by having more wedges that cross each other.[328] He held that all the three systems of Persepolitan are alphabetical and not merely syllabic or ideographic; in the first system he finds words composed of eleven characters, in the second of nine, and in the other of seven. On account of the number of signs required in the second system to compose a word, he concludes that it employs separate letters for long and short vowels; and also to express the combination of a consonant and vowel. He thought the number of letters in its alphabet was about forty, and he observed that the monogram for ‘king’ is always used; neither here nor in the third system is the royal title ever written alphabetically. In the Plate (No. 2, 1815) he gives three short inscriptions: the Xerxes (G, Niebuhr), the Cyrus (Murgab) and the Xerxes on the Vase of Caylus, arranged word for word to show the signs in the three systems that correspond to each other; and he found that the second system corresponds word for word to the first, but that the third differs considerably. In the third system he remarked also that a word could be formed with so few signs that he thought it avoided the use of vowel signs as far as possible, and employed a single character to express the threefold combination of consonant, vowel and consonant; and to that extent he concedes that it may be called syllabic.[329]

It is a very singular circumstance that Grotefend seems to have spent the whole of his ingenuity upon his first efforts; from that time he was unable to make any farther contribution of importance, and the work of decipherment was carried on entirely by other scholars. Yet he never withdrew his attention from the subject, and when he died, in 1853, all the difficulties of the Persian column had been overcome with but little farther assistance from him, and sufficient was already known of the Babylonian to disclose a wonderland of new and unexpected knowledge. Grotefend made a careful study of all the available inscriptions as they came to light, and from first to last his interest in them never flagged.

We have already seen how carefully he analysed the three Persepolitan columns, seeking out in each the signs that might be supposed to correspond to each other. The classification of the Babylonian inscriptions as they now began rapidly to accumulate afforded him fresh material for the exercise of his ingenuity. It seems to have been some time before he would admit the practical identity of the writing of the third Persepolitan column with that of the simplest of the Babylonian styles. According to his earliest classification the three Persepolitan systems were kept entirely apart from the two that had been remarked at Babylon. But it was not long before the similarity of the most complicated of the Persepolitan with the simplest of the Babylonian became apparent. This was fully recognised by Rich, in 1811, and we cannot suppose that Grotefend was far behind.[330] Rich was the first to announce that Grotefend had come to the important conclusion that the two or three different forms which had been observed at Babylon were mere varieties of one and the same method of writing, analogous to our Roman and Gothic character. Grotefend’s attention was now chiefly directed to the Babylonian inscriptions, mainly in consequence of the articles contributed by Rich to the ‘Fundgruben des Orients,’ and afterwards by the constant correspondence he maintained with Bellino, the German secretary Rich had brought out with him to Bagdad.[331] Grotefend now abandoned the idea that the third column was written in Pehlevi. He described the language as Median Persian, and he called it the ‘Babylonian column.’ He showed also that the many differences in the writing of the simple Babylonian were due no doubt to the idiosyncrasies of the engravers; but they added greatly to the difficulty of the decipherment.[332] He noted also the frequent occurrence of different ideograms for the same word, such, for example, as for ‘son.’ He sharply contrasted it with such writing as is found in the India House Inscription which he called ‘the complex’ (zusammengesetzt). Mr. Rich had lately obtained several specimens of cylinders; two of these were found on the site of Nineveh and a few others at Borsippa. The account he gave of them in the ‘Fundgruben’ speedily attracted attention, and the facsimile of one in red jasper from Nineveh was published by Dorow in 1820. Grotefend called attention to the well-marked differences in the cuneiform writing that characterise these specimens, and which remove the third Persepolitan still farther from them than even from the most complicated Babylonian.[333] These opinions he expressed in his letter to Dorow, and in a tract on the ‘Elucidation of certain Babylonian Cylinders’ included in the same publication (1820).[334]

After his promotion, in the following year, to the rectorship of the Lyceum at Hanover (1821) other studies began to engage his time. He wrote a History of his Academy (1833); he edited the fragments of Sanchoniathon (1836); and he dabbled somewhat deeply in such matters as the Oscan and Umbrian languages (1835-1838). He had not, however, entirely forgotten his old subject, and in 1832 he attempted a translation of the I inscription, which he sent to the ‘Göttingen Gazette.’ He recognised that it contained a list of geographical names, which, however, he was unable to render correctly; but he had the merit of attracting the attention of other scholars to their existence, and it was from them that Lassen was afterwards enabled to make such remarkable progress.[335] In 1837 he began to contribute a succession of papers to the Scientific Society of Göttingen on his old subject, many of which were afterwards republished in separate form. He was now sixty-two years of age, and his mind was, no doubt, less able to grapple with the series of discoveries that were just on the point of being made. In the previous year (1836) Burnouf and Lassen had simultaneously published their Memoirs on the cuneiform decipherment that soon carried the subject far beyond the point at which Grotefend had left it some thirty years before. Grotefend accepts the general results, but without much evidence of enthusiasm.[336] The reading of ‘Auromazda’ is now satisfactorily established; but he clings to his ogh with unabated affection.[337] On the other hand, he suggests the surrender of the sr in ‘Kurus,’ and reads r or rh. As regards ‘Achaemenian,’ the utmost he will concede is that the Greeks probably derived it from ‘Akhâosô-schôh,’[338] and to do this he reluctantly softens his tsch to a soft c to give the s; but he will on no account admit the true reading, n.[339] He still contends that the languages of the three Persepolitan columns are related to each other, but he sees that the first, though resembling Zend, is not identical with it. He entirely rejects the idea already broached that the third is Semitic, and he adheres to his conviction that none of the three can be called syllabic or ideographic in the strict sense of those terms.[340]

Notwithstanding the tenacity with which he adhered to some of his old errors, his later contributions were not entirely without result. He devoted great attention to the comparison of the language of the first with those of the other two columns, and in this task he exhibited a considerable amount of penetration.[341] For example the word ‘adam,’ which is constantly recurring in the Old Persian, continued to be translated, even by Lassen in 1836, as ‘posui.’[342] It was Grotefend who first observed that it was rendered in the other two columns by words that were certainly elsewhere used for the pronoun, ‘mân, manâ,’ and the suggestion led to the recognition of ‘adam’ as the first person singular, ‘ego.’[343] The writings of Burnouf and Lassen revived an interest in cuneiform studies, and Grotefend was enabled for the first time to publish inscriptions which he had received twenty or even thirty years before from Bellino, and which had lain till now unseen in his desk. He was still regarded as the chief authority upon the subject, and newly discovered inscriptions were invariably forwarded to him. Among these he received one that had recently found its way to the British Museum, and in which he was able to read the name of Artaxerxes, a king not previously met with in the inscriptions (1837). But his chief triumph in this respect was the publication, in 1848, of an inscription of Sennacherib. The original cylinder was said to have come from Kouyunjik,[344] but Bellino had long ago made a copy of the inscription and the cylinder is now called after him. When the inscription was at length translated by Mr. Fox Talbot in 1856, it was found to relate the first two years of the Annals of the King. Grotefend caused an admirable engraving of it to be made on copper, and this, said the translator, not without a tinge of irony, ‘was, I think, the greatest service that painstaking savant rendered to the science of archæology.’[345]

Grotefend continued to write upon these subjects down to his death in 1853. He endeavoured to keep abreast of the new discoveries in Assyria. He was familiar with the writings of Botta and Layard. He studied the disquisitions of Westergaard, Hincks, and Rawlinson. He contributed articles on the builder of the Khorsabad Palace; on the age of the Nimrud Obelisk; on the foundation and destruction of the buildings of Nimrud; and on inscriptions found at Babylon and Nimrud. When M. Mohl, the well-known secretary to the French Asiatic Society, visited him shortly before his death, he found his table littered with inscriptions, chiefly those received from Bellino in the early years of the century.[346] He professed to have given up his Persepolitan studies in favour of the new Assyrian inscriptions; and he saw no reason why he should not succeed in unravelling their mystery. It is somewhat pathetic to observe the old man of seventy-eight, still animated by the recollection of a success he had achieved fifty years before, but had never been able to repeat, vainly hoping that at the last moment he might be rewarded by another fortunate guess that would redeem the long failure of so many years. The new discoveries were coming upon him with extraordinary rapidity and magnitude, and he could not but feel crushed and helpless beneath such an accumulation of fresh materials. The solution of the difficulties they involved had passed into younger and abler hands than his, and he had to comfort himself as best he might with the recognition so freely accorded to him, that he had laid the foundation upon which others were now building; and with the assurance that the recollection of his services would not wholly pass away from the remembrance of men.[347]

Grotefend’s method of decipherment, when it first appeared, met with a varying degree of success in different quarters. In Germany, as we have seen, it was at once adopted by Tychsen, who became one of its chief exponents; and it also secured the favour of Heeren, who allowed it to share in the wide popularity accorded to his own writings. But even in Germany it was some time before it gained general recognition. The theory of Lichtenstein, absurd as it may now appear, continued to command attention, and even in 1820 Grotefend still thought it necessary to defend his own opinions against those of his rival.[348] His views, however, gradually gained the ascendant, and in 1824 he felt he could now allow the controversy to drop; and in the new edition of Heeren he left out a large portion of the criticism he published in 1815. Since then his merits have been fully acknowledged by his own countrymen, who are rarely disposed to underrate any of the achievements of their kindred. In England his system never had to contend with the rivalry of Lichtenstein. It was received at once with general approval by all who were best qualified to form a judgment. The learned Ouseley, the more brilliant Morier, Sir R. K. Porter and Mr. Rich never doubted for a moment that Grotefend had deciphered the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes. Very different was its reception in France. De Sacy, who was really the first to introduce it to the notice of Europe, could never feel any real conviction that it rested upon solid grounds. He was quite uninfluenced by the jealousies that blind the judgment of smaller men, and he would gladly have given it his approval if he could have brought himself to accept the evidence. But this he was entirely unable to do; and it was certainly not because he failed to apprehend the process by which it was reached. The explanation he has given of it greatly excels in lucidity and in logical precision the account of Grotefend himself—so much so, indeed, that we are inclined to think that Grotefend never thoroughly understood his own system till it was explained to him by De Sacy. The French scholar was fully acquainted with the subject, for he had himself made frequent attempts at decipherment, always, he frankly acknowledges, with a ‘total absence of success.’ The only point he considers tolerably certain is that the word with seven signs is the title of King.[349] He doubts altogether that the names of the kings had been correctly ascertained, and he points out the difficulty of accepting an alphabet that contains three or four signs for e, three for o, and so on. The opinion he formed in 1803 he repeats in 1820. In his letter to M. Dorow, he confesses that he is still unable to find the names of the Persian kings or of the god Ormuzd in the cuneiform inscriptions; and he declares he does not believe that anything hitherto published on the subject is worthy of confidence.[350]

While the cuneiform inscriptions were thus engaging the attention of European scholars, English travellers had begun the investigation of the sites of Babylon and Nineveh that were so soon to yield such surprising results. In 1808, Kinneir visited Hillah, accompanied by Captain Frederick, of the Royal Navy; and two years later they extended their explorations to the mounds near Mosul. Kinneir’s ‘Geographical Memoir,’ published in 1813, contains an excellent account of both these historic ruins. Soon after his visit, Mr. Rich went to Hillah and began his investigations (1811). He found the surface of the ground covered with ‘broken pans and bricks, some of which have writing on them.’[351] He was able to make a small collection of antiquities, including a curious basaltic stone covered with cuneiform characters, and these specimens eventually found their way to the British Museum.[352] The Memoir he published on the subject made its first appearance in the ‘Fundgruben des Orients,’ but was, republished in England by Sir James Mackintosh. A second Memoir, written in 1817 and printed soon afterwards, was enriched by three plates containing several cuneiform inscriptions that now appeared for the first time.[353] Rich considered there were three different kinds of writing to be found at Babylon, which he divided ‘according to the order of their complication.’[354] The first, he observed, corresponds to the third Persepolitan; and in Plate 8 he gives three specimens of it, all found upon stones resembling the ‘Caillou Michaux’ described by Millin. The second occurs rarely, and Mr. Rich says he was the first to publish an example, although Grotefend had already seen a copy of a similar kind. It is on a piece of baked clay in shape like a barrel, about 4¾ in. long and 1½ in. in diameter (Plate 9, No. 4). The third species is that generally found on bricks and cylinders, of which he gives four examples.[355] While he wrote, he learned that the three different kinds of Babylonian writing had been submitted to Grotefend, and that ‘learned and ingenious person’ had come to the conclusion that they ‘are only varieties of different modes of writing the same character, and that there is in fact but one real kind of Babylonian writing.’[356] Although Rich found a vast number of bricks at Babylon, he observed that the inscriptions were nearly all alike: in fact only four different legends had up to that time been noticed on the Babylonian bricks. The most common consists of seven lines. The others are in six, four and three lines; of these Grotefend had seen copies of the inscriptions in seven and three lines. The other two are comparatively rare. The inscribed bricks are generally about 13 in. square by 3 in. thick, and are of different colours, red, white and black.[357] They were usually found with the inscriptions downwards, and when they occur in a different position there is a strong presumption that they have been moved from their original place. The cylinders found by Mr. Rich varied from 1 to 3 in. in length and were of different materials—some of stone, others of paste or composition.[358] They are perforated to admit of the passage of a cord, and were carried about to be used for seals. Rich was among the earliest to recognise that this was their purpose; and he thus accounted for the writing being from right to left, contrary to the invariable custom. He also made the useful suggestion that, as the language of the first Persepolitan was no doubt that of the court of Darius, the languages of the other two columns were in all probability those of Susa and Babylon.[359] Rich exercised considerable influence in Germany by his contributions to periodical literature, and his cordial assent to the opinions of Grotefend was of importance at that time. We have seen that his first Memoir was published in Vienna before it appeared in London; and he continued to write to the ‘Fundgruben des Orients’ to describe the inscriptions he had procured from Babylon and Nineveh. The cylinder from Nineveh is said to have been the earliest specimen brought to light, and it was the first to attract the attention of Grotefend to the Babylonian system of writing.[360] It was published by Dorow in 1820, when inscriptions of that kind were almost unknown. Rich’s secretary, Bellino, was also in constant correspondence with Grotefend down to the period of his early death.[361] He sent him a copy of the first column of one of the inscriptions at Hamadan, which Grotefend presented to the University Library of Tübingen, where Bellino had been educated.[362] He also sent him copies of inscriptions on forty bricks in Mr. Rich’s collection, many of them of service by illustrating slight differences in the writing of words and characters.[363]

We have said that De Sacy remained unconvinced that the names of Darius and Xerxes were to be found in the Persepolitan inscriptions. Two years after he had solemnly repeated this confession, a M. St. Martin announced that he had made the same discovery as Grotefend, which he professed to have reached by an entirely different and far more scientific method: a circumstance which, if true, would have afforded a strong confirmation of the reality of the original discovery. St. Martin was born in 1791, and died of cholera in 1832, at the early age of forty-one. He rose from a comparatively humble sphere of life, and the aristocratic prefix to his name seems to have been merely assumed. He was for a time a traveller to his father, who was a tailor, but his talent for languages soon transferred him from the mercantile to the learned world, and, combined with his strong Monarchical opinions, enabled him to secure a fair amount of success. He was especially devoted to Oriental studies, and he learned Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Armenian; but his attainments seem to have struck his contemporaries as more pretentious than profound. He was appointed, when only nineteen, to be secretary to the Society of Antiquaries (1810), and at thirty-one he became Curator of the Library of the Arsenal (1824) and afterwards an Inspector of the Royal Printing House, a position that enabled him to introduce the Zend and cuneiform type. He was a very precocious scholar, for one of the writings on which his fame rests was published at the age of twenty—‘Egypt under the Pharaohs’ (1811). Seven years later his most important work appeared: ‘An Historical and Geographical Memoir on Armenia’ (1818). He is remembered also as one of the founders of ‘L’Universel’ (1829), a strong organ of the Legitimist party.

His paper on the cuneiform inscriptions was read before the Académie des Inscriptions, of which he was a member, in 1822, and it was afterwards published in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ (February 1823). A more detailed account of his discoveries was promised, but it never seems to have appeared; and the only other authoritative expression of his opinion occurs in Klaproth’s ‘Aperçu de l’Origine des diverses Ecritures’ (1832), where we are favoured with the latest development of his cuneiform alphabet. His treatment of this subject is not calculated to raise his reputation as a scholar; and it certainly exposes him to the charge of want of candour.

He is good enough to begin the account of his original discoveries by a reference to the previous labours of Grotefend, of which he had a very poor opinion. He has seen the analysis of Grotefend’s system given by Tychsen in the ‘Göttingen Gazette’ of September 1802, and the Essay of De Sacy, written in the following year. These publications, he says, produced little impression at the time, and they were farther discredited by Grotefend’s own contribution to Heeren, in 1805.[364] None of the papers since contributed by Grotefend to periodical literature have shown any improvement upon his earliest writings, and St. Martin lays it down that the contents of the inscriptions are rightly regarded as still wholly unknown. But in addition to this unfavourable opinion, which was shared also by De Sacy, he brings charges of his own against Grotefend’s system that are wholly without foundation. He accuses him of frequently varying the values he assigned to the characters, whereas it was in consequence of the extreme tenacity with which he clung to the values he originally assigned that his progress was in great measure arrested. St. Martin says Grotefend attributed five or six entirely different values to the same character, and that he considered that each character is susceptible of assuming a variety of different forms, both statements being equally without foundation.[365] He affects to regard the corrections introduced into the texts by Grotefend—which is one of his most valuable services—as purely arbitrary, and he professes to believe that interpretations based upon these emendations can inspire no confidence, and can only be regarded as an exercise of the imagination. He was surprised to find that his own interpretations, which he reached by ‘proceeding in an entirely different way,’ should have conducted, so far as they went, to precisely the same result: and he will not dispute that Grotefend is entitled to the priority of merit in detecting the royal names.[366] It does not appear that St. Martin got any farther himself, and we may be permitted to doubt whether he would have accomplished even this but for the labours of the predecessor he is so careful to disparage. When we come to inquire into ‘the entirely different way’ followed by St. Martin we find that in fact it is precisely the same as that with which we are already familiar. He worked on the same two inscriptions, the B and G of Niebuhr; he treats us over again to the analogy of the Sassanian inscriptions: the well-known phrase ‘king of kings’; the genitive suffix; the position of the royal names; the evident relationship of father and son, and so on. Our original investigator continues to carry us over all the old ground. He is struck by the similarity of the wedges in the word for ‘king’ and in one of the royal names; he is guided by the Zend khsheio to the cuneiform words for ‘king’ and ‘Xerxes,’ and he tells us how dexterously he proceeded from this to the decipherment of the names of Darius and Hystaspes. In one name only he differed from his predecessor. It will be remembered that Grotefend deciphered ‘Cyrus’ in the Murgab inscription. St. Martin preferred to transliterate ‘Houschousch’ and to read ‘Ochus’;[367] but in this single attempt at originality he turned out to be wrong and Grotefend right. He has spared us all the reasons that led him to these important results, as well as many grammatical and literary considerations which he promised to publish in a more extended Memoir. One success he may indeed claim. In reading the name of Hystaspes he compared it to a Zend form ‘Vyschtaspo,’ which gave a more correct result than the ‘Goshtasp’ of Grotefend.[368] This happy accident enabled him to assign the correct value of v instead of g to one cuneiform sign; and in the second letter of the same word he substituted y for Grotefend’s o, and thereby approached nearer the correct value, which is i. These are the sole contributions he made to the work of decipherment.

It must not, however, be supposed that his treatment of the alphabet was wanting in originality. It will be recollected that Grotefend was in possession of thirteen correct values; but of these St. Martin rejected five.[369] The eight that remained added to the two he determined himself (v and y or i) gave him an alphabet of ten correct values, as opposed to the thirteen in the possession of Grotefend. He altered the values Grotefend had incorrectly assigned to nine other characters, without making any improvement upon them.[370] He confessed with admirable modesty that there were twelve characters of which he could make nothing; and this struck Lassen as being the most satisfactory portion of his work.[371] Among them Grotefend had already condemned four as defective; one he had determined correctly as f, and he had nearly approximated to two others, th for t before u (22) and dj for j before i (32). St. Martin’s alphabet in its complete form consists of twenty-five letters, represented by twenty-seven cuneiform signs.[372] But of these letters he has three different modifications of the sound of e, which alone monopolise six cuneiform signs. Three signs are allotted to h, two to a, two to ou, two to ch, and two to r. In its latest form ten of the letters of our alphabet are left without equivalents in cuneiform—b, f, g, i, l, q, u, w, x, z. He was not, however, always without a b.[373] It was probably not till after 1826 that he saw reason to substitute an m. Rask had recently suggested that the word which Grotefend transliterated ‘Akeotchoschoh’ should be ‘Aqamnosoh,’ and signified ‘Achaemenian.’ St. Martin had no suspicion of this when he first wrote his paper, and he translated the phrase ‘race illustrious and very excellent.’[374] But when Klaproth appeared, in 1832, the transliteration and translation were made to run as follows: ‘Poun Oukhaamychye,’ ‘race d’Achémènes,’ which differs from the first only by the substitution of an m where b occurred before.[375] This is a farther instance of unacknowledged borrowing. St. Martin accommodates himself to the view taken by Rask; but, as ill luck would have it, he changed the wrong letter: the sign he altered into m is in fact the n in the word ‘Achaemenian.’[376] With this our notice of St. Martin’s Memoir may fitly close. It is indeed a singular production for a scholar of repute. He begins by assuring his readers that the contents of the Persepolitan inscriptions were still entirely unknown; he censures the method adopted by Grotefend that had yielded him the names of three of the Achaemenian kings; for himself, he leads us to suppose that he is about to announce an entirely different and more scientific method. He then proceeds, without a word of warning and in simple confidence in our ignorance, to follow precisely the method he has just denounced, and he affects astonishment that it should lead him to precisely the same result. He can make no progress beyond the three names already known. In the case of the Murgab inscription he ventures to take a step upon his own account and immediately blunders into error. His alphabet is remarkable for its inferiority to the one he desires to supersede. It has at most ten correct values to Grotefend’s thirteen or fourteen.[377] Eight cuneiform letters are abandoned altogether in simulated despair. Nine are changed without being improved, and ten of the most important sounds in human language are left without expression. We do not condemn him for being inferior to his master: many pupils suffer from that disability; but we censure him for denying his obligation and for affecting an originality he did not possess. One service indeed he rendered. If he made no new discoveries in cuneiform, he at least has the merit of discovering Grotefend’s discovery to France. Many of his countrymen were willing to take upon his authority what they would not accept from the German writer, and it gradually came to be believed (though even yet by no means universally) that the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes were to be read in the Persepolitan inscriptions.[378]

The first advance in cuneiform decipherment after Grotefend was made by Rask, a distinguished Danish scholar. He was born in 1782, and at first he devoted himself entirely to Icelandic. He spent two years in the island, and on his return, in 1817, he published an edition of the Edda. Subsequently he added Oriental languages to the range of his acquirements. For a time his serious attention was devoted to Sanscrit, Persian and Arabic, while his leisure moments were diverted by the acquisition of Russian and Finnish. He then went to India for three months, to perfect himself in such trifling matters as Sanscrit, Hindustani, Zend and Pehlevi. A short visit to Ceylon was devoted to Cingalese, Pali and Elu. On his return to Copenhagen he filled two professorial chairs—those of Oriental Languages and Icelandic. He is regarded as one of the earliest founders of Comparative Philology, and the number of his writings is very large. Among them are Grammars of Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Cingalese, Acra, Lapp, Danish and Italian. But it is to the little volume ‘Ueber das Alter der Zend-Sprache’ that we have now to refer.[379] Some writers contended that Zend is merely a dialect of Sanscrit, restricted in its use to sacred literature, and never employed as a spoken language. It was also asserted that the Zend-Avesta was of comparatively recent date, possibly not earlier than the third century A.D.[380] One of the many arguments adduced by Rask to confute these theories was the similarity between the Zend and the language of the first Persepolitan column. He pointed out that, so far as it had been deciphered by Grotefend, it bore a strong resemblance to that of ‘Father Zoroaster’; and he argued that where they differed to a marked degree in their case-endings, the probability was that the divergence is due to an error in the values assigned to the letters by Grotefend. Thus, the genitive plural as given by Grotefend ends in e or a, ch (tsch), a, o, which bears no resemblance to anything to be found in Zend; and he casually threw out the suggestion that it should read a-n-a-m, which is a usual Zend form.[381] He farther showed, in support of this view, that the change of an o into m would go a long way to solve the difficulty of the word that follows ‘stirps’; and he hazarded the improved transliteration ‘aqamnosoh,’ from which ‘Achaemenian’ might be derived. The change of tsch into n, and o into m, which was at once accepted and ultimately proved to be correct, was of great importance; and both Burnouf and Lassen admit the extent of their obligations. Rask’s own studies lay in an entirely different direction, and he made no attempt to follow up his success in decipherment; but he took occasion to point out that there must be some radical error in an alphabet that assigns two different sounds—e and a—to the same sign, and two signs to the same sound, a; and he lays down the rule ‘that one letter should have only a single sound, and two or more letters can never denote one and the same sound.’ The last maxim was not, however, verified, for it is found that some letters are represented by two and even three signs, according to the vowel they precede. He added the useful warning that the language of the inscription is probably Old Persian, and not, therefore, identical with the language of Zoroaster. Hence, while they are similar, and may be usefully compared, it by no means follows that the grammatical forms and the vocabulary are always identical.[382]

We now come to the two great scholars, Burnouf and Lassen, to whom, after Grotefend, the decipherment of the cuneiform is chiefly to be ascribed.

Eugène Burnouf was the son of a distinguished father, who was a Professor at the Collège de France. Eugène was born in 1801, and died in 1852. At the age of twenty-five he acquired a great reputation for Oriental scholarship by the publication of his essay ‘Sur le Pali,’ which he wrote in collaboration with Lassen.[383] But his fame rests principally upon his Zend studies, the first of which, the Vendidad, appeared in 1830. More than a hundred years had elapsed since the first copy of the original text was brought to Europe by George Bouchier, an Englishman (1718), who had obtained it from the Parsees at Surat. Bouchier presented it to the University of Oxford, where it might be seen long afterwards chained to a wall in the Bodleian. No one, however, could read a word of it. At length a young Frenchman, Anquetil de Perron, determined if possible to overcome the difficulty. He went to Surat in 1758, and put himself under the tutorship of the learned Parsees. He was, however, surprised to find that, although they knew the value of the characters, they were completely ignorant of the language itself. Yet their sacred books were written in it, and they daily recited the meaningless sounds in their ritual. It was sufficient, they said, that God should understand the prayers they were enjoined to repeat. By an ingenious comparison with the Pehlevi and Persian vocabularies Anquetil at length arrived at a probable translation; and after his return to Paris he published a French version of the Zend-Avesta (1771).[384] His work was very unduly depreciated by Sir W. Jones, the leading English Orientalist, but it attracted a larger degree of esteem on the Continent, and a German edition by Kleuker appeared at Riga, in 1777, which enjoyed a fair amount of popularity.[385] Both the language and the subject-matter of the Zend-Avesta began to receive the attention of scholars, and those especially who were interested in cuneiform recognised their importance. Tychsen, for example, wrote on the religion of Zoroaster,[386] and Rask on the relation of the language to Sanscrit;[387] and the same conjunction of studies was preserved in later times by Burnouf, Westergaard, Oppert and Spiegel. Down to the time of Burnouf, however, the knowledge of Zend continued to be very imperfect, and Grotefend was constantly impeded in his attempt to elucidate the language of the cuneiform inscriptions by reference to the very defective work of Anquetil. Burnouf was appointed to the chair of Sanscrit in the Collège de France in 1832, and the idea occurred to him to connect his Sanscrit and Zend Studies. He found that a translation of the Yaçna into Sanscrit had been made by two Persian scholars some four hundred years before, while the recollection of Zend was still preserved; and it is entirely due to his labours upon this text that such remarkable progress was made in the study. His ‘Commentaire sur le Yaçna’ appeared in 1834; and in addition to its other merits it was at once recognised that it afforded the most valuable assistance to the cuneiform student. Indeed, Sir Henry Rawlinson admitted that it was to a great extent in consequence of the knowledge he derived from it that he was enabled to overcome the difficulties of the Behistun inscription. Burnouf’s ‘Mémoire sur deux Inscriptions cunéiformes’ appeared in 1836. It was submitted to the Académie des Inscriptions in March, and finally given to the world on June 1. He considered that the Inscriptions B and G of Niebuhr had been sufficiently worked upon; and if additional results were to be obtained they should be sought from fresh materials.[388] Although Schulz’s papers were not yet published, Burnouf obtained access to them; and found they included two trilingual inscriptions from Elvend near Hamadan, copied by Mr. Stewart, and a trilingual from Van.[389] The two Hamadan inscriptions reproduce precisely the same text, except that the name of Darius occurs in one in the place of Xerxes in the other. Comparing these with the trilingual of Xerxes at Van, he found that the first two paragraphs are the same in both; but the last paragraph of the Van inscription is not found at Hamadan. At Persepolis the whole of the Hamadan inscription is repeated on the Anta of the Porch to the Palace of Darius; and considerably more besides. But the additional portion does not correspond to that found in the last paragraph at Van. The whole of it was copied long before by Le Bruyn (No. 131). Burnouf next observed that the inscription on the sculptured stairs—the A of Niebuhr—bears a strong resemblance to those just mentioned; but the beginning is clearly imperfect. Ouseley, however, had published a five-lined inscription from Persepolis, which corresponds exactly to the Darius at Hamadan; and Grotefend pointed out that it was probably the beginning of the A inscription.[390] With this addition the A runs for a time parallel to the Hamadan, while at its close it corresponds to the Le Bruyn. Burnouf had thus a considerable number of copies of the same text, and by careful collation he sought to eliminate the errors due to the engraver or the transcriber. By these means he obtained a correct recension of the Hamadan inscription upon which his work was chiefly founded. But there was another to which he made frequent reference, especially towards the close of his Memoir. This is the I inscription of Niebuhr, which is copied from the outside wall, on the southern side of the great platform of Persepolis.[391]

It will be recollected that Grotefend had called attention to this inscription in 1832, and had pointed out that it evidently contained a long list of proper names.[392] Whether this suggestion ever reached Burnouf it is impossible to say, but it is certain he made it an early object of study; and from it he derived the cuneiform sign ‘B,’ with which he signed his letters to Lassen.

The method he pursued to determine the value of an unknown sign was to collect all the words in which it occurred, and endeavour to assign to it a letter, from among those not already rigorously determined, that would produce a word for which some meaning might be found by comparing it with Zend. For example, the word with which the Darius at Hamadan begins consists of only two letters, which, according to Grotefend, would yield vu. But Burnouf could make no sense out of this, and he accordingly substituted a b for the first letter (𐎲). The result was that he could not only extract a sense out of bu—which he compared with the Sanscrit bhû and bû ‘to be,’ but two or three other words were also rendered intelligible by the same change.[393] The consideration, however, that finally settled the matter was the discovery of a name in the I inscription, which, upon the supposition that the letter in question was a b would yield ‘Bakhtroch,’ and this he had no difficulty in identifying with Bactria. Hence he altered the v of Grotefend into a b without apparently recognising that he merely restored the value originally given to that sign by Münter.[394]

Unfortunately, his method did not lead to very important results, for it only enabled him to add two additional values correctly. Both of these were suggested to him by the second word in this same Hamadan Inscription.[395] The word occurs also in the B and G inscriptions, where it was transliterated by Grotefend e gh r e. Burnouf accepted the change of the initial e (𐎺) into i, which was made by St. Martin, without approaching nearer to the correct value, which is in fact a v. The emendation of the second letter lay ready at hand, and could not well be longer overlooked. Since Rask had identified the sign for m, this particular sign (𐏀) was the only one that required alteration in order to read Aur m z da,[396] and it was therefore inevitable that Grotefend’s gh should at length be surrendered for a z; the only wonder is that this change should have been so long delayed.[397] The emendation of the last letter of the word (𐎣) displays an entirely different order of ingenuity. The letter occurs in only seven different words in all the inscriptions of Niebuhr, Le Bruyn, and Schulz but in one instance it is the initial sign in a word of which the others are t p d h u k. It was certainly no common feat of imagination that led Burnouf to see that if a k were to precede this remarkable agglomeration, the province of Kappadocia would turn up. By these means, however, he got rid of another of Grotefend’s e’s, and altered it into a k, which proved to be correct. Having thus changed e gh r e into i z r k, the next step was to find some similar word in Zend that might suggest its meaning. This, however, was not easy; the nearest he could think of was ‘yazata,’ which might bear to be translated ‘divine.’[398]

Such was the method that enabled Burnouf to restore one correct value, b, that had been recently neglected, and to add two others, z and k, to the alphabet. He was on the point of increasing the number of correct values by two or three others, but unfortunately he hesitated to yield to his first intuition. In the twelfth line of the I inscription he found a word which, according to his alphabet he transliterated ‘Arion.’[399] It occurred in a position in the geographical list that would naturally suggest that it indicated ‘Armenia,’ and to obtain this result it was only necessary to change the sign (𐎷) which he read i into m. There was a farther reason that appeared to justify this alteration. In the Hamadan inscription the same sign occurs in bu i om, which he translated ‘excellent’; but if it were permitted to alter the i into m we should obtain bumom, ‘earth.’ The meaning of the sentence would then be: ‘He has given [or created] this earth; he has given [or created] this heaven,’ which would be an evident improvement in the sense.[400] He would not, however, allow that the alphabet could include more than one m, and he was not prepared to sacrifice the m (𐎶) discovered by Rask in the genitive termination anam. Thus he narrowly missed adding the m (𐎷) before i to the number of his correct values. So also in line 11 there occurs a word he reads ayura, but by the change of the y into th he would arrive at ‘Athura,’ the ancient ‘Aturia.’[401] This change was farther sanctioned by another name, which his system transliterated pryi; but by the hypothesis under consideration, it would become prthi, a manifest form for ‘Parthia.’ Moreover, the same alteration would introduce an important improvement in the word for ‘king,’ which would then read khchâhthôh (from the Zend khchathrô) in place of khchâhyôh.[402] Notwithstanding all these probabilities, he finally rejected the alteration and lost the addition of another correct value. It is interesting also to observe how nearly he approached the correct value of Grotefend’s h (𐎹, No. 27). He perceived that if it were changed into a y, it would yield yuna in the twelfth line, which there could be no doubt would indicate ‘Ionia.’ As it is, however, he retained the incorrect value; and he could find no satisfactory explanation of huna; for he, of course, rejected ‘Huns’ as an evident anachronism.[403] It would be tedious and unnecessary to go through the other signs to which he gave new values, for they unfortunately all turned out to be wrong. Indeed, if his services to decipherment were to be estimated by this test alone, they would not rank higher than those of St. Martin or Rask; for although he lays claim to have ascertained the value of twelve characters, eight of these are erroneous, one (the b) fairly belongs to Münter, another (the a) to Grotefend, and only two remain to be placed to his own credit: precisely the same number as were contributed by St. Martin and Rask. His alphabet gives definite values to thirty cuneiform signs and an uncertain value to three others.[404] Following the analogy of Zend, he allots a separate sign to the long and short values of each of the vowels a, i, u, and in this he considers he has reached ‘a result that should satisfy criticism.’ With respect to the consonants, however, he agrees with the maxim of Rask, and strives as far as possible to avoid according more than one sign to each. He has, however, found it difficult to avoid giving two signs to l and h, and no less than four to gh. As regards l or h, he introduces the second signs apologetically, followed by a mark of interrogation, indicating that they may be variants or defective signs. We now know there is no well-authenticated l in the language, and his first sign turned out to be d before i (𐎮) and the other r before u (𐎽). He was equally unfortunate with regard to h, neither of his signs for that letter being correct. He felt that the four signs for gh required explanation. He places only one among the thirty definite values in his alphabet. The others he labels as uncertain. (These are 𐎦, 𐎪, 𐎸.) He thought that a comparison of these would convince the student that they are composed of exactly the same elements, so that they seem to differ from each other only by the caprice of the engraver, who has arranged the wedges according to his fancy, while he has neither altered their form nor increased nor diminished their number.[405] He recognised, however, the objection that all cuneiform writing consists of the same elements, and that the sole difference of one sign from another consists in the arrangement of the wedges. He was forced to fall back upon the impossibility of assigning different values to these signs and at the same time preserving any sense in the words where they occur. The second gh (𐎦) he considered justified by its occurrence in the word he thought must be ‘çughd,’[406] the third (𐎪) because it would enable him to read ‘baghem,’ ‘destiny,’ and the fourth (𐎸) by its completing the sense of ‘ghudraha,’ which he thought denoted the Gordyans.[407] In this latter case the correct transliteration is ‘m’udray’; but it is not likely, even if he had read the word correctly, he would have detected in this form the name of Egypt. As a matter of fact, the first gh, which he has put in his alphabet (𐎯, 34) as the usual form, is d before u; the second (𐎦) is g before u; the third (𐎪, 32) is j before i; the fourth (𐎸, 33) is m before u.

Grotefend thought he found four and St. Martin six signs for e, but Burnouf correctly excluded that letter altogether from his alphabet. He, however, incorrectly admits one sign for ô long. He considers the absence of th, a form that occurs frequently in Zend, is probably due to the scarcity of documents. The want of the palatals, tch and dj, may perhaps be assigned to the same cause; though more probably it arises from the nature of the alphabet itself, for these letters are only developments of the consonants k and g.[408]

Burnouf acknowledges his obligation to Grotefend for twelve letters; but these should properly be raised to fifteen.[409] The twelve he admits include eight correct values and four incorrect. The three he leaves unacknowledged are t (24), u (36), and a (41), all of which are correct, and they raise the number of correct values accepted from this source to eleven. Burnouf attributes three of his letters to St. Martin, namely t, u and i: the first two are already accounted for from Grotefend; the i is indeed due to St. Martin, but it is wrong. Burnouf rejected the only absolutely correct value found by St. Martin, viz. v. Two letters, the m and n, he refers to Rask, from whom also he must have derived the q (25) which he erroneously substitutes for Grotefend’s k.

The twelve values which Burnouf credits to his own account include the a of Grotefend and the b of Münter.[410] There remain the two values which he was the first to fix correctly, viz. k (4) and z (18); the others are all incorrect. We have thus accounted for twenty-nine signs out of the thirty of his alphabet;[411] the other, the ng (28) of Grotefend, he treated as uncertain, but suggested h, the true value being j(a)[412] Besides the thirty just mentioned he gives three other signs, to which he hesitates to assign any value, though he thought they might all represent the sound of gh. These are, as we have already explained, the dj (32) and the ‘k?’ (33) of Grotefend, now ascertained to be j before i, and m before u. The other does not appear in Niebuhr’s list, and Lassen is the first to assign it a value, g, which turned out correct (g before u).

Burnouf dropped one letter entirely out of his alphabet (𐏂, No 13): the n that completed the bun or ‘stirps’ of Grotefend. Since Rask had found the true sign for n, a second n might well seem to be redundant;[413] and this supposition was confirmed by finding the sign written at Hamadan with three horizontal wedges instead of with two: a difference that transformed it into a p. Burnouf accordingly thought the other form was an error of the copyist, and he read pup, upon which he confesses neither Zend nor Sanscrit could throw any light; though from the context it evidently means ‘son,’ and may therefore possibly be a monogram for the Zend puthra.[414] He trusted, however, that future research would re-establish the ejected sign; in which case he proposed to give it the value of th, and to read puth. It was, in fact, afterwards found to be a genuine sign entirely distinct from p, and it has received the value of tr or thr, which has completed the transformation of bun or pun into puthra.

To sum up: of the thirty-three different cuneiform signs in Niebuhr’s list for which values have been ultimately found, Burnouf knew only sixteen correctly (two from Münter, a and b; ten from Grotefend; two from Rask and two from himself), or not quite one half.[415] Yet with such imperfect materials to work with he was able to render important service in the matter of translation. It is obvious that, according as the letters became known, and the words of the new language began to be made out, the task of finding their meaning would depend upon the knowledge of the languages most nearly akin, and upon the acumen with which the interpreter could apply the resources at his disposal. In other words, the task would pass from the decipherer to the translator; and it is in this department that Burnouf has earned the greatest distinction. Although he could command only a limited number of correct values, and consequently his transliteration was still extremely imperfect, yet his knowledge of Zend, which was greater than that of any other scholar then living, enabled him to make sense of many of these crude forms and for the first time to approach to a correct translation of the words that were not simply proper names. When he began his labours, there were apparently only two words, ‘king’ and ‘son,’ that were correctly read, in addition to a few proper names, such as Achaemenian, Hystaspes, Darius, Xerxes, Cyrus and Persia;[416] but to these both Grotefend and St. Martin had accumulated a vast number of worthless and misleading meanings, from ‘the constellation of Moro’ down to ‘Jamshid.’ Burnouf added several correct words to the vocabulary, and he was always able to avoid falling into extravagant error. He showed, for example, that the word Grotefend had taken for the conjunction ‘and’ was in reality a form of the verb ‘to give or create.’[417] He overcame the chief difficulty in the word he read ‘aqunuch’ = ‘generator,’ really ‘ak’unaush,’ ‘to make,’ and read by Grotefend ‘florentem.’[418] The word Grotefend translated ‘Dominus’ he rendered ‘this is,’ and suggested the possibility of its being ‘I am,’ which turned out to be its correct meaning. Besides these contributions, he recognised the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ (aim for avam, ‘ce’); and he added the words ‘heaven,’ ‘man,’ ‘master,’ ‘province,’ ‘world,’ and some others.[419] The great improvement in translation that resulted will be best appreciated by a comparison. The text of the first paragraph in the Hamadan inscription, translated by Burnouf, is word for word the same as that of the Le Bruyn (No. 131) translated by Grotefend, except that ‘Darius’ in the former is ‘Xerxes’ in the latter. We have placed the translation of Burnouf opposite that of Grotefend.

Paragraph I

Paragraph II

A comparison of the two translations with the final version will show at a glance how vastly superior Burnouf’s rendering was to that of his predecessor. Not the least important of his contributions to the work of translation was the identification of the names of some of the provinces of Darius, which are contained in the I inscription. We have already observed that Grotefend had attempted a translation of this inscription in 1832;[425] and in 1836 he again drew attention to the circumstance that it contained a series of geographical names. The list included no less than twenty-four proper names, some of which were entirely beyond Burnouf’s power to decipher; but he made an attempt to read sixteen, and out of these eight were correct. He thus added Persia, Media, Babylon, Arabia, Cappadocia, Sarangia, Bactria and Sogdiana to the names deciphered from the cuneiform;[426] and we have seen how nearly he arrived at four more—Athura (or Assyria), Armenia, Ionia[427] and Parthia.

Among his contributions to a knowledge of the grammar, he pointed out that the change of Grotefend’s o into m brought the accusative singular into line with the Zend and Sanscrit; the genitive aha is also found in Zend, and both languages alike use it as a dative. A nominative ending in oh has also its counterpart in the Zend termination in o. He indicated the apparent barbarism that treats the nominative case as inherent in the word itself; so that the case-ending is appended to it without modification, as if we wrote ‘dominus-um’ for ‘dominum,’ or ‘dominus-i’ for ‘domini.’[428]

He inferred from the two words ‘Aurmzda’ and ‘izrk’ that cases occur in which both the vowels and the aspirate are suppressed; and he concluded that the system of cuneiform writing could not have been originally applied to express a Sanscrit or Zend language, in both of which the vowel is rigorously represented. He conjectured also that the cuneiform signs for the vowels might include an aspirate that rendered its separate expression unnecessary.[429] ‘There is therefore an evident disagreement between the language of the inscriptions and the characters in which they are written’; and this he ascribed ‘to the influence of a system of transcription of Semitic origin.’[430] The discovery that there was a marked discrepancy between the mode of writing and the characteristics of an Indo-European language, now announced for the first time, was soon to receive very ample confirmation, though it was no small surprise to most scholars when the origin of the writing was traced, not to Semitic, but to Turanian sources. In opposition to the opinion of Grotefend, Burnouf thought that the greater simplicity of the mode of writing in the first Persepolitan column indicated its later development, and he showed that the language was not identical with Zend, as Grotefend at first imagined, but a dialect less pure than Zend, and in actual process of developing into a later form.[431] Indeed it already exhibited by its interchange of letters some of the peculiarities noticed in modern Persian. He has no doubt that it was the living language of the court of Darius; and it is peculiarly interesting, inasmuch as its existence fully establishes the greater antiquity of Zend, and removes for ever all the doubts that had arisen as to the authenticity of that sacred language.[432]

We have already said that Burnouf was connected by ties of friendship with Lassen from an early age. Lassen was a Norwegian, born at Bergen in 1800, and consequently a year older than his friend. He was educated at Christiania, and at the age of twenty-two he left Norway to continue his studies at Heidelberg. He obtained a travelling studentship from the Prussian Government, and visited London and Paris in the years 1824-6. During his stay in the latter capital he made the acquaintance of Burnouf, and collaborated with him in the production of the ‘Essai sur le Pali’ (1826). On his return to Germany he settled at Bonn, whither he was attracted by the presence of Schlegel and Bopp. Like them, he was devoted to the study of Sanscrit and the literature of India; and in conjunction with Schlegel he became the founder of Sanscrit philology in Germany. In 1829, he assisted him in the publication of the Râmâyana, and subsequently edited other ancient texts. In 1830, he received a Professorship at the University with the munificent stipend of three hundred thalers, or about forty-five pounds, a year; and ten years later, when he had attained a wide celebrity, a chair of Indian Languages and Literature was created for him with a salary of seven hundred thalers. Here he spent his life, writing and lecturing on his favourite studies, which also included modern Persian and English literature. His chief works were the ‘Prakrit Grammatik’ (1837), the Vendidad (1852), and notably the ‘Indische Alterthumskunde,’ begun in 1847 and continued down to 1867.

Lassen was troubled during the greater portion of his life by a weakness of sight, which from 1840 became a serious impediment to his studies. His last lectures were delivered in the session 1868-9, but he lived on to 1876, when he died in the city which partly from his own labours had acquired the name of ‘the second Benares, on the shore of a second Ganges.’

When he left Paris in 1826 he continued to correspond with Burnouf, and received letters from him subscribed with the cuneiform sign for B (𐎲). Burnouf had in fact long devoted himself to cuneiform studies, as is apparent from his edition of the Yaçna in 1833; but it is not stated when Lassen first directed his attention to the same subject. Both scholars published their essays upon it in 1836. When Burnouf communicated his Memoir to the Academy of Inscriptions, in March 1836, Lassen confesses that he was entirely taken by surprise.[433] His own Memoir on the subject was already in the press, and his preface is dated in May. Both essays were published about the same time, though we cannot say which had the actual priority of appearance. It is perfectly certain that neither scholar was dependent upon the published work of the other, and if they had not been personal friends, the question of the complete independence of their discoveries could never have arisen. As it is, however, we know that in the summer preceding the publication of the Memoirs, Burnouf visited Bonn, and had much conversation with Lassen on the subject of their common pursuits.[434] He told him that he had ‘deciphered the names of all the old Persian provinces,’ which sufficiently indicated the direction of his studies; and it is quite possible that he told him also of his identification of the letters k and z as well as b. At all events, his Memoir preceded by a clear month (April) the writing of Lassen’s preface, and he is entitled to claim these two letters. Whatever confidences Burnouf may have imparted, Lassen was evidently more reticent, for although the discoveries of the Bonn professor embraced the re-discovered b of Münter and the k and z of Burnouf, they include also several other correct values of which Burnouf had no knowledge.

Lassen was not without enemies, and among them the bitterest was Holtzmann, whom we shall afterwards meet as a contributor to cuneiform studies. It appears that Lassen, writing to a friend in November 1835, expressed great surprise to find that Burnouf had deciphered the names of the Persian provinces. Holtzmann took this to mean that Lassen had till then known nothing of either the I inscription or the Persian provinces, and that he had borrowed the whole idea of his book and part of its substance from his friend. There is, however, nothing inconsistent with the far more probable assumption that he had been at work upon it long before the summer visit of Burnouf, and was possibly annoyed as well as surprised to find that his friend had gone so far upon the same track. Much has been said of this matter, and it has even been attempted to raise it to the dignity of a grave literary scandal; but it seems to have originated in a misunderstanding of Holtzmann, prompted possibly by personal antipathy, and to have been fostered by those unamiable persons who love to sow discord, and whose delight it is to sever friendships that are the chief joy of life. Happily, in this case their efforts were unsuccessful. It is certain at least that the friendly relations between the two scholars were never interrupted, and M. Jacquet, who knew both, said that they had worked simultaneously and without communication with each other.[435] It is quite possible also that Grotefend’s previous mention of the inscription had escaped Lassen’s notice. However this may be, we give his own account of the discovery. He tells us he was attracted to the I inscription by recollecting the statement of Herodotus that Darius set up a column on the banks of the Bosphorus with an inscription in Assyrian and Greek, recording the names of the nations that had followed his banner. He considered that the sculptured staircase at Persepolis undoubtedly portrayed the representatives of various nations bearing tribute to the great King, and he thought that there must be a record of their names somewhere among the ruins. Accordingly, with such assistance as he could obtain from Grotefend’s alphabet, he examined the various inscriptions in Niebuhr and Le Bruyn, till at length he discovered what he sought in the I inscription of the former.[436] It was natural to suppose that the nations would be arranged in geographical order and follow somewhat the same succession as in Herodotus. The names given by the Greek historian, some of which are also found in the Zend-Avesta, would afford a clue to their pronunciation in the cuneiform language, and he might hope with this assistance to carry on the work so successfully begun by Grotefend. It was in consequence of the discovery of the names of the three kings in the B and G inscriptions that Grotefend had been able to fix the values of some of the signs; and it was natural to suppose that the list now brought to light, which contained twenty-four proper names, would yield results of proportionately greater importance. Indeed Lassen believed that he had by this means found the values of almost all the signs that still remained doubtful or unknown. Many other scholars had already indulged the same delusion. St. Martin boasted that his system was ‘à l’abri de la critique.’[437] Burnouf felt convinced that after his own labours ‘there could be no further doubt except with reference to the letters that rarely occur.’[438] Lassen was certainly more successful than any of his predecessors, Grotefend alone excepted. He can lay an indisputable claim to having correctly deciphered six additional signs; and this number may be raised to eight if, as is not improbable, he independently discovered the k and z of Burnouf; and to ten, if we allow two other letters to pass, the w (𐎺, No. 10) and the t (𐏂, No. 13), which he brought very close to their true values of v and tr—or ti as Spiegel writes it.[439]

At the time we have now reached, the forty-two signs collected by Niebuhr had been reduced to thirty-three by the elimination of the diagonal and of eight others found to be defective. Lassen accounted for all the thirty-three that remained, and he added three others he found elsewhere. Of these one (𐎦) is treated by Grotefend as a defective sign for n; but it turned out to be a genuine letter.[440] Burnouf was the first to recognise its claim, and it figures as one of his three conjectural signs for gh. Lassen gives it the definite value of g, which was correct, for it was eventually determined as g before u. The two other signs he added, (

) t and (

) v, were both ascertained to be defective, and he subsequently dropped them from his alphabet. At this period, therefore, he admitted thirty-four genuine signs and two defective. His alphabet contained twenty-three correct values as opposed to the thirteen of Grotefend and the sixteen of Burnouf. It was made up of the

twenty-three in all. There were also two added by himself nearly correct—w (10), t (13), which, as approximate values, may be allowed to pass, especially in consideration of the German pronunciation of w. Nine were incorrect—i (16), k (19), o (25), z (26), h (27), n (28), g (32), g (33), s (40).

But it contained a peculiarity of its own into which Lassen was betrayed by a desire to press the grammatical forms of Zend upon the cuneiform language. In the first place he insisted with not less force than Burnouf, in distinguishing the long and short vowels. Each of the vowels a, i, u are accordingly allotted two distinct signs, and one of his defective signs is pressed into the service in order to secure a û. But in addition to this his a (𐏃), when it occurs in the middle of a word, takes the value of ang; and in a similar position his î and û may become y and v. Still more remarkable is his treatment of diphthongs. He observed three instances in which two signs are seen frequently to follow each other. Of one of these accidental combinations he made a long ê,[442] of the second an ô[443] and of the third a q.[444] He forfeited much of the advantage of his greater command of correct values by falling into these errors. He, however, boldly recognised that some consonants are represented by more than one cuneiform sign, among which he includes t with four signs; s, v, n and m with two each. He was not uniformly correct in the signs he allotted nor in their number; but if he gave too many to t, which has only two, he did not give enough to m, which has three.

Lassen gave full credit to Grotefend for his ingenious discovery, and he admitted that the values established upon the authority of the three proper names were in all probability correct. But, so far as was known, Grotefend had never published any account of the method he followed to determine the other signs, a method that resulted in the production of words that had no resemblance to any human language, and that could not in fact be pronounced by any human tongue. Lassen did not put himself forward as an opponent of Grotefend, but as a continuator of his work from the point where he considered his predecessor had left it.[445] He would not even accept his reading of ‘Cyrus’ in the Murgab inscription, and in this his scepticism landed him in serious error. Lassen’s method was much the same as that of Burnouf. The signs not explained in the three proper names he regarded as doubtful or unknown, and he sought for them elsewhere especially in the proper names in the I inscription, where it might be possible to determine their sound by their occurrence in a word identified as that of some well-known country or province. The result of his special study of this text was that he made out correctly no less than nineteen of the twenty-four names it contains, which compares favourably with the eight of Burnouf. But in addition to these he added three that are not to be found in the original, by fancying he saw proper names in what are in fact merely common words. His nineteen names, however, provided him with abundant material to continue the work of decipherment.

One result of his study became immediately apparent to him. The constant agglomeration of consonants without the intervention of a vowel proved that in some cases the vowel must be inherent in the consonant. He arrived at this conclusion from the word ‘Çprd,’ which he found as the name of a country in his inscription, and which he concluded was Çapardia, or the Sapeires of Herodotus.[446]. We have seen that Burnouf was led to the same inference from the appearance of such forms as ‘izrk’ and ‘Aurmzda.’[447] Lassen also observed instances, such as the word ‘imam,’ where the word is sometimes written with and sometimes without the a (𐎠).[448] He at length laid down the rule that an a is only distinctly expressed at the beginning of a word, and in the middle before h or another vowel. On all other occasions, he says, it is inherent in all the consonants, unless distinctly excluded by the occurrence of another vowel.[449] This rule he afterwards applied more distinctly to the short a (𐏃), and adds that it is expressed when it follows the long â (𐎠), never after i or u.[450] In his transliterations he assumes the truth of this rule, and he invariably separates two consonants by the interposition of an a.

We have said that he may indisputably claim to have added six new values correctly to the alphabet, i, t, m, d, g (25), g (44).[451] The sign for i is the second letter in ‘Hystaspes,’ and it had been variously given the value of o by Grotefend and y by St. Martin, according as they followed the form ‘Goshtasp’ or ‘Vyschtaspo.’ But Lassen pointed out that the correct Zend form is ‘Vistaçpa,’ and he consequently, preferred i, a rendering confirmed by the word ‘imam,’ ‘this,’ which corresponds exactly to the Zend and Sanscrit word.[452] This alteration got rid of Burnouf’s (h)ôma (‘excellent’), which went to join the goodly company of Jamshid and the constellation of Moro.

The name ‘Katpatuk’ for Cappadocia, which Burnouf had already cited with good effect, was turned to farther account by Lassen. He not only used it to confirm the sign for k (𐎣) with which it begins and ends; but it enabled him to find a true sign for t, by comparison with other words in which it occurs.[453]

We have already said that Burnouf suspected that m was the true value of the sign Grotefend made an h, and that he only rejected it because he could not reconcile himself to the existence of two signs for the same sound. Lassen was less influenced by such considerations, and when he came to a word that transliterated ‘A r—i n,’ he had no scruple in completing it by writing an m for the unknown letter. Indeed the word occurred exactly where, from geographical considerations he would be led to expect ‘Armenia,’ and the conclusion would have been irresistible even if it had not been confirmed by the name ‘Chorasmia’ which he observed a little farther down in his list.[454] He made the useful remark that the sign was always preceded by i, the full signification of which was not then apparent. We now know that it is precisely the m before i.

The discovery of the sign for d was a happy intuition, and rested on slight evidence. He found in the eighteenth line a name of which he knew four letters, a i—u s, and he divined that the unknown letter was d, which enabled him to read ‘Aidus’ = India.[455] This guess was confirmed by one other instance only, where the same sign will make ‘daquista,’ which he thought was Zend for ‘the wisest.’ The word is really ‘duvaishtam’ and has quite another signification.

We have not noticed how he arrived at the value g for Grotefend’s u, or for the sign which Grotefend thought was a defective n. We find them without explanation in the place where they appear to be mentioned for the first time.[456] The first is g before a; the other g before u.

In addition to the six correct values just enumerated, Lassen was also very nearly successful in two others—w (𐎺, 10) and t (𐏂, 13), really v before a and tr before a. The latter he correctly acknowledged in a later work.

The first is the e of Grotefend in his ‘Darheusch.’ Lassen had the Hebrew form of the name ‘Darjavesch’ in his mind, and no doubt he suspected the presence of the sound of v in the Old Persian word. The discovery of the w was certainly ingenious, though scarcely convincing, if it had not been supported from other sources.[457] At the end of the B inscription there is a word in the nominative, ‘Akunush,’ which is found elsewhere with the accusative termination m, but, instead of the u, the sign now under discussion is substituted—that is, instead of ‘nus,’ we have n 𐎺 m. Now, he argued, it is impossible either in Zend or Sanscrit for a word whose theme ends with u to lose it in the accusative; and therefore the unknown sign must either be a u or the corresponding half-vocal v.[458] But in Darius, the letter that follows is a u, and therefore it must be the half-vocal—the only question being whether it is the Zend v or w. He eventually erroneously decided for the w, and pointed to two other words wᵃsna and wᵃzᵃrk, where as a w it would make excellent sense.[459]

With regard to the t, it will be recollected that Grotefend gave the value of n to a sign that completed the word ‘bun,’ to which he gave the meaning ‘stirps.’ This word had long been a stumbling-block to Zend scholars, and Lassen determined to get rid of it. He showed in the first place that the b or p at the beginning could not be interchangeable, and the word must at all events be treated as ‘pun’; but he proposed to alter it still further by reading ‘put.’ By this means he came nearer to its obvious meaning, ‘son’—that is, to the Zend ‘putra.’ He found this innovation supported by another word, k s t m, to which he thought he could attach a Zend meaning.[460]

The nine incorrect values he admitted into his alphabet[461] show little or no improvement on those suggested by Grotefend or Burnouf; and unfortunately the decipherer himself can rarely distinguish the incorrect values from the correct. A glance over a page of Lassen’s transliteration will show the havoc these nine incorrect letters have made in his work. But, as we have said, he introduced errors peculiar to himself that were even more fatal than his failure to identify all the signs correctly. For example, he remarked that the sign he took for a short a (𐏃) seemed composed of the sign for n (𐎴) and an angular wedge which might be an abbreviation of the sign itself. He was led to this hypothesis by comparison with the Zend, where ă is clearly a combination of a and n.[462] He goes farther and gives the short a and n the guttural sound of ang, when it is found before the letter he thought was h (𐎹, 27; really y), and he cites several instances which he thinks will justify this opinion. He recognises, however, that the rule even thus limited is not always applicable.[463]

Another error, due also to the deference he professed for Zend analogies, arose from the supposition that the two letters which he took for u and w had together the value of q. He compared them to the sound of q which is produced in Zend by the two letters sv or hv, the latter being modified into uv in the Old Persian.[464] Equally disastrous was his introduction of the two diphthongs hi for ê, and au for ô. He observed that these two letters are occasionally found together, and he concluded they must correspond to the Sanscrit diphthong ai = ê and au = ô. The occurrence of an h for an a in one of them was a matter of small difficulty. Indeed he had actually found the ai = ê in Aidus = India; and suggests that hi may be the form it assumes as a medial.[465] The most eccentric peculiarities of his transliteration may be traced to these unfortunate errors. His transformation of a into ng appears in his ‘Aurᵃngha Mᵃzdanga’ for ‘Aurahya Mazdaha.’ The diphthong uv with the sound of q seemed at first to yield a better result. By it he was able to read ‘Quarᵃzmiᵃh’ and ‘Arᵃqᵃtis,’ which are more suggestive of the true words Chorasmia and Arachosia than the correct forms ‘Uvarazamiya’ and ‘Harauvatish.’[466] But, on the other hand, it led him to read ‘qan’ or ‘qwan’ (Chaonia) for ‘Uvaja’ (Susa), ‘Aqᵃ’ for ‘Hauv,’ Patᵃqᵃ for ‘patuv,’ ‘Dᵃqistᵃn’ for ‘duvaishtam,’ and so forth. The diphthong hi (really yi) for the long ê produced ‘tesam’ in the place of ‘tyᵃisham.’ The diphthong au (really ku) for the long ô was still more disastrous. Burnouf, when he wrote ‘aqunuch,’ had nearly reached the correct transliteration of ‘akunaush,’ but it becomes scarcely recognisable in the ‘aônus’ of Lassen. The first sign of this diphthong had been long since correctly determined by Grotefend as a k. But its identification depended in great measure on the belief that Murgab, where it is the first letter in the inscription, represents the ancient Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus. Lassen would by no means accept this as sufficient proof, for even upon that hypothesis the inscription might not necessarily belong to Cyrus. St. Martin read it ‘Houschousch,’ and conjectured that this name referred to ‘Ochus.’ Lassen accepted this view, and saw in the first two signs, which he took for au, the strongest confirmation that they had the value of the ô long in Ochus. In 1845, when the result of his farther studies were published, we find that his original alphabet has undergone considerable improvement. He has suppressed the second signs for each of the vowels a, i and u, and the two diphthongs for the long ê and ô, that caused so much trouble, have disappeared. We hear no more of the double letters for q, nor of the second value ng which he ascribed to his initial a, now found to be more correctly h. He has also struck out the two defective signs he admitted for t and û. For the rest, the improvement consists chiefly in sweeping away the errors into which his love of Zend analogies had at first hurried him. The only addition he made to the number of his correct values was thr, suggested by Grotefend, to which, as we have said, he had previously nearly approached. The remaining signs now correctly represented are due to M. Beer and M. Jacquet, who wrote in the interval that separated the two Memoirs by Lassen.

Lassen’s translations are naturally much affected by the nine incorrect values he still retained, and by the errors he introduced himself. Yet if we compare the transliteration and translation of the Le Bruyn No. 131, as given by Burnouf and Lassen, we cannot fail to recognise the superiority of the latter. For the ‘Bu izrk’ of the one we have ‘Baga wazark’ of the other, which closely anticipates the ‘Baga vazraka’ of the correct version. The ‘Omam buiom,’ the ‘Homa excellent,’ is replaced by ‘imam buvam,’ ‘this earth;’ and many similar improvements may be noted throughout. Both writers succeeded fairly well in rendering the simple phrases, but great diversity still existed as to the meaning of the obscurer passages. Both alike declare that Auramazda is the creator of heaven and of man; and that he has established Darius or Xerxes as King. But when we proceed to the second paragraph of the inscription our translators go far astray. The passage beginning ‘king of countries’ is thus variously rendered:[467]

Lassen finishes thus: ‘Xerxes, rex magnus: ex voluntate Auramazdis (palatium) domitor Darius rex constituit. Is meus pater. Memet tuere, Auramazdes, heic felicitate: tum hoc ibi palatium, tum hoc patris Darii regis palatium, excelse Auramazdes, tuere heic felicitate’—a passage rendered by Menant: ‘Xerxès, le grand roi, déclare: Par la volonté d’Ormuzd, Darius mon père a construit cette demeure. Qu’Ormuzd me protège avec les autres Dieux, qu’Ormuzd avec les autres Dieux protègent mon œuvre et l’œuvre de mon père le roi Darius.’ The I inscription, from which Lassen derived so much assistance, fared badly at his hands when he attempted to translate its concluding lines. Even in the list of proper names he committed what must now appear to be the stupendous blunder of mistaking three common words for the names of three provinces of the Empire. The words so honoured are: ‘ushkahyâ,’ ‘darayahyâ,’ ‘parauvaiy,’ which figure as ‘Uscangha’ (the Uxii), ‘Drangha’ (the Drangii) and ‘Parutah’ (the Aparyten).[468]

His transliteration of the others is naturally frequently defective, but nevertheless he identified twenty correctly. The four he failed in are Susa, Arabia, Egypt and Ionia. It would have been difficult for him to recognise either Susa or Egypt, even if his transliteration had been more perfect. The first is represented in the cuneiform by three signs—u v j—and reads ‘uvaja,’ which certainly does not suggest Susa. But Lassen turned the uv into q; as the last letter in his opinion was n (𐎩, 28) he evolved q’n, from whence Chaona. The word for Egypt, as correctly transliterated ‘M’udray,’ would perhaps have been even more embarrassing than his own ‘Gudraha,’ in which he agreed with Burnouf in recognising ‘Gordyene.’ The word he read ‘Arbela’ was correctly translated ‘Arabia’ by Burnouf; and a somewhat too pedantic learning reconciled him to ‘Huns,’ which Burnouf had rightly rejected.[469]

CHAPTER IV
BEER AND JACQUET TO RAWLINSON—A.D. 1838-1846

The simultaneous publication of the two essays by Burnouf and Lassen roused considerable interest among those devoted to the obscure problems of cuneiform decipherment. Grotefend, whose attention for the previous twenty years had been chiefly diverted to other pursuits, returned once more to the subject in which he had previously achieved such great success, and in the year following he published ‘Neue Beiträge zur Erläuterung der Persepolitanischen Keilschrift.’ We have already seen that his mind had by that time lost much of its elasticity, and he displayed more tenacity in defending his old errors than aptitude in recognising the truth of the new discoveries. To some of these, however, he is forced to give a qualified assent.[470] He may indeed claim the merit of having now for the first time fixed the true value of one more character. It may be recollected that the two signs 38 (𐏁) and 40 (𐎽) had been long considered to express the same sound. Grotefend first attributed to both the value of sch; but in consequence of the Murgab inscription he afterwards considered that the last (40) must denote sr. This opinion was not, however, generally accepted. St. Martin preferred ch for both, and Lassen s. Burnouf, however, suggested ch for the first and l for the other. But Grotefend was now disposed to drop the s from the last letter (𐎽) and to read r, or some slight modification of that sound, corresponding to the pronunciation adopted on the other side of the Tigris for the letter which is rendered an l on this side. Accordingly in his translation of the Murgab inscription he writes simply Kurusch and elsewhere Kurhush. In his revised alphabet it appears as rh.[471] Grotefend has also the merit in this tract of being the first to indicate that (𐏂), the t of Lassen, might sometimes have the sound of thr, as in ‘puthra,’ and possibly in ‘Artakhshathra.’ In his alphabet, however, he drops the sound of r and makes the value th.[472]

In the following year a more important contribution was made by the appearance of two essays, one by E. F. F. Beer in Germany, the other by Eugène Jacquet in France. The former was published in the ‘Hallische Allgemeine Zeitung,’ the other in four papers inserted in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ (1838).[473] Beer was a native of Bötzen, where he was born in 1805 and received his early education. He went to Leipzig in 1824 and thenceforth he chiefly devoted himself to the study of Semitic Palaeography. He died in 1841, at the age of thirty-six. Both he and Jacquet showed that Lassen was entirely mistaken in supposing that there were different cuneiform signs to indicate the long and short signs of the vowels a, i, u.[474] They simultaneously discovered the correct values of the two letters 27 (𐎹) and 41 (𐏃). The first, the h of Grotefend and Lassen, is ascertained to be y; the other, the a of Grotefend and the ‘a long’ and ng of Lassen, was found to be the aspirate h.[475] The remaining corrections are due to the ingenuity of Jacquet alone. Jacquet was born at Brussels, but the whole of his short life was spent at Paris, where he died in 1838 at the age of only twenty-seven. His extraordinary precocity and the wonderful range of his acquirements place him among the most remarkable men of his generation. He was distinguished at school by the critical accuracy of his classical knowledge, and by the zeal with which he applied himself to the geography, history and literature of ancient times. He had scarcely ceased to be a school-boy when we find him studying Oriental languages under the most distinguished masters. He was the pupil of De Chézy in Sanscrit, of Silvestre de Sacy in Arabic and Persian, of Jaubert in Turkish, and Abel Rémusat in Chinese.[476] His studies travelled far beyond the ordinary course of even these learned professors, and embraced the various languages of India, the Malay Archipelago, Java, and even Ethiopia. At the same time he became familiar with most European languages, including Danish and Portuguese. At the age of eighteen, he began to contribute regularly to the ‘Journal Asiatique.’ It was in its pages that he published his ‘Considerations on the Alphabets of the Philippines,’ which appeared in 1831, when he had just reached the age of twenty. It at once attracted the attention of M. G. von Humboldt, who wrote to compliment the young author, and who farther showed his appreciation by adopting in his own work most of Jacquet’s conjectures.[477] This was followed by Memoirs on the languages and literature of Polynesia, including the cabalistic writings of Madagascar. From these subjects Jacquet passed to those affecting India. At the age of twenty-four we find him in correspondence with Mr. James Prinsep, the Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, and well known as the first decipherer of the Pali alphabet.[478] He has already planned the execution of a ‘Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum,’ and is busily occupied collecting materials from every available source. He is associated with Raoul Rochette in the study of Bactrian and Indo-Scythian medals, and his extraordinary capacity as a numismatist is fully recognised. In the midst of these various occupations he found time to devote himself to cuneiform inscriptions, which his knowledge of Zend and Pehlevi qualified him to investigate. From 1835 he was in constant correspondence with Lassen upon this and kindred subjects; and his singular ability enabled him to overcome many difficulties that had baffled previous inquirers. He not only earned distinction in the somewhat arid fields of philology and ethnology, but he was equally alive to the historical and literary aspects of the subjects he investigated. He was particularly interested in tracing the intellectual relations of the people of China, India, and Upper Asia, and he devoted some interesting papers to the connection between the East and West in ancient and mediaeval times. These were mostly written at the age of nineteen to twenty. At nineteen we also find him translating from the Danish and reviewing a tract by Rask on a Pali and Cingalese manuscript. He amused his leisure moments by translating from Chinese and from Sanscrit, in following the march of Alexander through Bactria, and in studying the history and literature of Buddhism. Jacquet’s life was inspired by two passions, devoted attachment to his widowed mother and a boundless love of knowledge. To the one he was ready to forego his hopes of fame: to the other he sacrificed his health. There can be no doubt that his incessant and feverish labours induced the fatal disease that first showed itself in the autumn of 1835, when he was but twenty-four. The last three years of his life were ennobled by an heroic struggle against increasing weakness. In the face of much suffering, he continued his labours to the end; and he died as a scholar might wish to die, seated at his desk, pen in hand, alone among his books and manuscripts, his mind filled to the last moment of consciousness with the work that had occupied his life. Thus passed away one of the most promising scholars of the age. It is possible that the multitude of his acquirements was incompatible with profound knowledge in each of the many subjects he treated. M. Julien contested the accuracy of his Chinese translations; and De Sacy seemed to doubt some other of his qualifications; but he received the enthusiastic applause of many other scholars—of the two Humboldts, of Ritter, Lassen, Burnouf, and Prinsep, each in their several departments.[479]

His essay on Cuneiform Decipherment was among the works he left incomplete. It was in the form of a review of Lassen’s recent Memoir, and three papers on the subject appeared during his lifetime in the ‘Journal Asiatique,’ and a fourth was published shortly after his death.[480] It can scarcely be said that he has gone beyond the introduction. The first essays are occupied chiefly with an account of what had been already accomplished in the field of cuneiform research, and with a review of the ethnological points raised by Lassen’s treatment of the provinces of Darius. It is only incidentally that he touches upon the language of the inscriptions, and he reserves the discussion of the alphabet to a future paper. Unfortunately, his premature death prevented him from accomplishing his task, and strange to say not a single note could be found among his papers that might be used for the purpose. This is the more remarkable from the frequent references he makes to that portion of his work in which he proposes to explain the points of difference with Lassen, and to the various passages from the inscriptions that he intended to bring forward in support of his views.[481] On other subjects he was in the habit of making the most elaborate notes, and it is scarcely possible to suppose that in a matter of this kind he charged his memory with an accumulation of detached words and phrases collected from the numerous inscriptions then available.

The essays indicate some of the corrections he proposed, but for the reason mentioned we are left very much to conjecture the foundation upon which they were based.

We see, however, that his correction of 27 (𐎹) from h into y was suggested by the words read by Lassen ‘Arbah’ and ‘Huna,’ which he recognised should be more properly read ‘Arabaya’ and ‘Yuna’ (Ionians).[482] Similar etymological considerations led him to the correction of the 𐏃 a into h. This letter occurs at the beginning of the words Lassen reads ‘aryᵃwᵃ,’ ‘arᵃqᵃtis,’ and ‘Aidhus,’ where Jacquet points out that the corresponding Zend forms require an aspirate.[483] In these essays we have only found two other corrections suggested. The first is 10 (𐎺), the e of Grotefend, which Lassen nearly approached in w, but to which Jacquet rightly gives the value of v.[484] The other is 26 (𐎰), the i of Grotefend and z of Lassen, which Jacquet changes into th in consideration of its occurrence in Assyria (Athuria) and Sattagydes—which he reads ‘Thrataghadus’ and also (as Lassen adds) in Mithra.[485]

If Jacquet’s contributions to the study of cuneiform had been limited to the essays in the ‘Journal Asiatique,’ they would have been comparatively unimportant. But he was also in correspondence with Lassen on the subject, and he not only communicated to him the result of his investigations, but also the reasons upon which they were based.[486] In 1837, Lassen took part in the foundation of a journal devoted to Oriental subjects—the ‘Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes.’[487] Grotefend became a contributor from the commencement,[488] and Lassen reported the progress of cuneiform research as occasion required. His first essay on the subject appeared in 1839,[489] and contained a criticism of the recent writings of Beer and Jacquet; with, as regards the latter writer, some important information derived from his correspondence. From this source we learn that Jacquet recognised the correctness of the value of r, already assigned to 𐎽 by Grotefend; and completed it by determining it to be the r before u.[490] He was led to this conclusion not only by the occurrence of the letter in ‘Kurus,’ but also in ‘paru,’ which compares with the Zend for ‘many’—‘the king of many lands.’ He showed also that 16 (𐎨), the o of Grotefend and i of Lassen, is really ch;[491] and finally 28 (𐎩), the ng of Grotefend and n of Lassen, he finds to be z: which, if not correct, is a considerable improvement. He was led to this conclusion by an ingenious conjecture. The letter is found in the province Lassen transliterated u w n, and which, from his theory of the diphthong, he read q’n and supposed to denote Chaona. The word occurs first in the list, and Jacquet inferred that it must refer to the capital province, Susa. He did not altogether reject Lassen’s q, but by changing the n into z, he got near to what he sought, either in ‘uwᵃzᵃ’ or ‘qᵃzᵃ’ for Susa.[492] To sum up: Beer and Jacquet both independently found the correct values for 27 (𐎹) y and 41 (𐏃) h; Jacquet added the correct value of 10 (𐎺) v, of 16 (𐎨) ch or c of 26 (𐎰) th; and he completed the value of 40 (𐎽) r before u.

Beer may thus be credited with having contributed two letters (27 and 41), Jacquet with six (10, 16, 26, 27, 40 and 41). He also suggested that the name of the first province in the I inscription referred to Susa and not to Chaonia, and that Babirus—not Babisus—was the correct reading for Babylon.[493]