Persian hero, Djemshid, (524) whose fabulous bècause mythic epoch he fixed at 3209 b. c.
To the same Iranian demigod are these edifices assigned by Sir W. Jones, estimating their
age at about 800 years before Christ.
Semitic historians without exception, as Sheridan neatly observed, “ draw upon memory
for their wit, and upon imagination for their facts:” wherefore slim clews to a reality
could be obtained through them. Like the libraries of Alexandria, of Jerusalem, of China
of Budhic Hindostan, and of Hebraical Christendom, those of ante-Mohammedan Persia
perished, from similar fanatical causes, in Saracenic flames with the dynasty of Chosroes
about a . d . 637. Such fitful traditions as survived the wreck of Persic literature became
invested (after Bédawee destructiveness had become altered into caliphate restorations)
with the hyperbolic extravagancies of Eastern poetry and romance.
One immortal epip, Firdoosee’s Shah Nameh, or “ Book of Kings,” composed in the
eleventh century, purports, indeed, to cover 3600 years of his country’s annals, from the
taurokephalic Kaiomurs down to the Arab invasion. Persepolis, under its local name of
IstaJchàr, is mentioned in twenty-eight passages, and its existence is referred to as coeval
with Kai-kobad ; whose apochryphal era, under Sir W. Jones’s hypothesis, falls about b. c.
610 : but, neithér from the “ History of the early kings of Persia” by Mirkavend, in the
fifteenth century, nor from the “ Dabistàn,” was archaeological acumen able to disentangle
a solitary thread indicative of the age, the builders, or the writings, of Persepolis.
As in Egypt the present fellàh, or peasant, ascribes the pyramids to “ Pharaòon” (525) j
or P h a r a o h s a name to him the synonyme for Satan -^rfso in Persia, the illiterate native is
content that an ancient edifice should be the work of Suleymàn''; at once the archimagus I
of Oriental necromancy and the sage monarch of Israel : for at Murghàb, Pasargadce, the
mausoléum whence we have drawn the portrait of that great man [suyra, p. 138, Fig. 43]
whose sculptured epitaph is simply “-I am Cyrus, the king, the Achsemenian,” is called j
Takhti Suleymàn; or “ Solomon’s throne.” Like Jephtha’s, who was buried “ in the cities I
of Gilead,” (526) Solomon’s tomb is shown at Shiràz and again on the road to Kashgàr! j
Nimrod is even still more ubiquitous.
Equally futile were attempts to rescue history applicable to Persia’s monuments from the I
Zend-Avesta of Zoroastric attribution, or from the later Bóundehesh-Pehlvi : sacred books I
containing the rituals and theoSOphy of the Guebres, or Persian expatriated ignicolists of I
Guzerat, now called Parsees. From Greek writers alone (Herodotus, Xenophon, -Otesias, I
&c.) were such elements of early Persian history derived as have stood the test of monu- 1
mental investigation : but the science of the hist century had ransacked all these sources H
without obtaining a glimmer of light as to the nature of Persepolitan wedge-shaped characters.
Like the once'-mysterious hieroglyphs of Egypt, as interpreted by Father Kircher,
the inscriptions of Persia were supposed to veil occult and awful things, black arts of
magic, or diabolic talismans. With naught to guide them but the more or less faithless
copies printed by De la Valle, Le Brun, Kaemfer, and other old travellers, how could the
opinion of a student be other than a conjecture more or less rational according to the
mental calibre of each critic ?
Thus, by Leibnitz and by Cuper, these inscriptions were reasonably conjectured to contain
the letters and elements of “ some very ancient writing.” Lacroze, the great Copto-
logist, conceived them to be hieroglyphical inscriptions similar to those of Egypt (at that
day undeciphered) and of China, which last are not “ sacred sculptured characters” at all.
(524) D jem shid is the Persic, as Samson is the Hebrew, Hercules. The fbrmer we opine to he DJoM, the
Egyptian Hercules, coupled with SftaDI, the strong : the latter is simply S7teMS-on, the Sun, with its Arabian
euphonizing suffix. Hercules is b u t HaRGoL, “ revolution of heat.” Compare L anci, Paralipomeni ; and Raoul*
R ochette, Archéologie Comparée|Pwith D u pu is in Anthon’s Class. Die., “ Hercules.”
(5 2 5 ) “ Yd Pharadon ebn Pharadon” is generally rendered “ Thou Pharaoh son of a Pharaoh” ! W h y not
“ T h o u crocodile son of a crocodile^? Conf. R osenmulleri Instit. Ling. Ardbicce; 1 8 1 8 ; p. 211.
(5 2 6 ) Text. Judges xii. 7 . The sacrifice of Jephtha’s daughter is beautifully told by E urip id es ; for Iphigenia,
in its Greek sense of lèiytvea, is only a “ daughter of Jephtha.”
Chardin opined them to be a “ veritable writing like our own;” and Le Brun happily describes
these ruins as covered with “ ancient Persian characters.”
In the face of sensible speculations on matters then entirely inexplicable, the intrepidity
of ignorance is exemplified from a quarter whence it would have been least expected ; viz.,
in Hyde’s History of the Religion of the Old Persians (Oxon. 1760). Not only does he deny
that these Persepolitan inscriptions are “ old Persian writings,” but the author backs assertion
with professions of faith “ I am of opinion that they are neither letters nor intended
for letters ; but a mere playful jeu d ’esprit of the chief architect; who, to adom the walls
of Persepolis, imagined a trial of how many divers forms a single elementary stroke (the
wedge) could be produced combined with itself” ! This is as pitiable for sueh a scholar, as
the unfortunate Seetzen’s mistake, when he took the sunken spaces between each Himyaritic
letter for the characters themselves. In the same manner; one of Hyde’s contemporaries
(the Abbé Tandeau, 1762) stoutly maintained that Egyptian “ hieroglyphics were mere arbitrary
signs, only employed to serve as ornaments to the edifices on which they were engraven,
and that they were never invented to picture ideas.”
These arrow-headed sculptures, like the still-unintelligible carvings on aboriginal monuments
of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, seemed, so enigmatical even to the great
explorer of Babylon in 1816, that J. Claudius Rich disconsolately embodies the sum total
of knowledge in these words : —
“ Their reM meaning, or that of the Persepolitan obeliscal character, and the still more
complicated hieroglyphics of Egypt, however partially deciphered by the labors of the
learned will now, perhaps, never be fathomed, to their full extent, by the utmost inge-
nuity of man.” °
By strange coincidence (serving to add another example of the simultaneousness of discovery,
at every age of human development), while Rich penned the above lament, Grote-
fend in Germany communicated to Heeren, 1815, those successful decipherings of Persepolitan
cuneiform inscriptions he had commenced in 1802; which is the identical year of the
arrival in England of that Rosetta Stone; whence, about 1816, Young’s deduction of the letter
Lin the ñame “ Ptolemy” originated those astounding revelations from Egyptian sculptures
which are now so familiar in the archaeological world as no longer to require notes
of admiration.
Egyptologists, by rough and ready processes, have so completely vanquished opposition,
that, at this day, disbelievers in Champollion confine their lugubrious chants to hearers
illiterate and inarticulate : but, to judge by the pertinacity with which one, who is no mean
scholar, (527) insists that Moses wrote— “ The Tigris,flows to the east 'ofAssyria ; ” (528)
and, therefore, that Botta and Layard have discovered Nineveh on the wrong side of the
river—the battles, of cuneiformists have only commenced ! Happily, the Louvre boasts of,
an Orientalist (529) who can always quote to M. Hoefer the Muslim poet’s mnemonic to St.
Louis : —
‘HO king of the Franks!) if thou preservest the hope of avenging thy defeat, if any
temerarious design should bring thee back to our country, forget not that the house of Ebn-
nokman, that served thee for a prison, is still ready to receive thee. Remember that the
chains which thou hast worn, and the eunuch Sabèeh who guarded thee, are ever there and
waiting for thee.” (530)
Such was the picture on the obverse page of Assyrian archseology in the year 1843. Before
contrasting which with its illuminated face in 1853, it is due to the memory of that
master, whose teaching of the methods for deciphering the meaning of all antique records
Las been the true cause as well of Champollion’s as of Grotefend’s successes—and hence
of the whole of our present Egyptian and Assyrian knowledge — to name S ilv e s tr e de
OACY.
(527) H o e f e r : La Chaldee, &c.; 1852; p. 146.
(528) Genesis; ii. 14.
J * LosorÀuoe: Antiçpdtés Assyriennes ; Bov. Archéol., 1850 ; pp. 429-432: who reads, most triumph-
Le Tigre coule en avant vers Assour.”
(530) Michaud: Hist, des Croisades; iv. p. 274.