Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/114

Rh 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 tjo 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, and it guided him to no small extent in the decipherment of the name of Cyrus in the inscription