view, but looked barren and desolate. Fine gardens, which afford a delightful resort for an afternoon in the suburbs, especially in the vicinity of the Armenian village of Sheverin, border the town. The domes of the shrines of the Imamzadahs, or Moslem saints, tell how the newer religion has supplanted the old religion of Zoroastrianism, and the minaret of the 'Friday Mosque,' Masjid-i Jum'ah, points to the fact that the older worship has given place to a newer. As I rode back through the busy streets, all astir with life and activity, and fully alert to the interests of the present, I could not help thinking that, despite its three thousand years, Hamadan is still youthful in spirit as in appearance, even though reft of the magnificence which once made the city the boasted pride of Media. 'Where's the wisdom-hoary sage CHAPTER XIII THE ROCK INSCRIPTIONS OF THE GREAT PERSIAN KINGS 'Sermons in stones.' - SHAKSPERE, As You Like It, 2. 1. 17. THE Bible refers to the book of chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia,' but those documents written on perishable parchment were not the only records which the Persian monarchs, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes caused to be made of their deeds and of memorable events in their reigns. I refer to the cuneiform records, covering a period of nearly two centuries (B.C. 541-340), which the Achæmenian kings inscribed upon the living rocks. These documents in stone have defied the ravages of time, in part at least, and preserved for the present and the future an account of events long past, many of which would otherwise have been buried in oblivion. By far the most important of these inscriptions is the great inscription of Darius, carved far up on the mountain side of the Behistan rock. Next in interest and value are those which the same monarch caused to be chiselled on the palace walls and platform at Persepolis, as well as around his tomb at Naksh-i Rustam. The portals and pillared halls of Xerxes and Artaxerxes at Persepolis, though in ruins, contain also short inscriptions left by these kings, and a sculptured monolith near the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadæ was inscribed with four words from the lips of the great king himself. Besides these, there are tablets of Darius and Xerxes on Mount Alvand near Hamadan, which I have already described, and additional inscriptions of the Achæmenians are found at Susa 1 Esther 10. 2, cf. 6. 1. in southwestern Persia, at Kerman in the southeast, at Van in Armenia, and even at Suez in Egypt.1 We owe to travellers our earliest direct knowledge of the Achæmenian inscriptions and of the places where they are found. The list begins with the Venetian envoy Josafa Barbaro in the fifteenth century and ends with the scholarly Niebuhr in the eighteenth, whose more accurate copies of some of the inscriptions at Persepolis gave a basis for students to work upon. But up to the year 1802 no Daniel had been found to interpret the mysterious handwriting on the wall, although scholars were generally agreed that the inscriptions owed their origin to the Achæmenian kings. It was the German schoolmaster and philologist Grotefend who first solved the mystery of the cuneiform writing, and to him belongs the honor of being the first to decipher the Old Persian inscriptions. Attracted to the subject by reason of his classical interests, he devoted himself to the cuneiform problem with the enthusiasm that marks a scholar, and the story of how he deciphered the characters, letter by letter, reads like a chapter in a novel. Placing side by side two of the shorter Persepolitan tablets, which he assumed to be Achæmenian records, he made the shrewd conjecture that one of the words which was most often repeated was the name for king and that the king's name preceded it. In this manner, by means of a number of careful comparisons and scholarly deductions, he was able to spell out the name of Darius, of his father Hystaspes, and of his son Xerxes. The results of these investigations he laid 1 With regard to the location of the inscriptions, the history of their decipherment, editions of texts and translations, see Rogers, History of Babylonia and Assyria, 1. 1-83, New York, 1901; Booth, Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Inscriptions, London, 1902; Weissbach, Die altpersischen Keilinschriften, in Grundr. iran. Philol. 2. 54-74; Weiss bach and Bang, Die altpers. Keilinschr., Leipzig, 1893; Spiegel, Die altpers. Keilinschr., 2d ed., Leipzig, 1881; Tolman, Old Persian Inscriptions, New York, 1893. 2 For a detailed account of the earlier travellers and investigators of the cuneiform inscriptions see the books by Rogers and by Booth referred to in the preceding note. |