Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/48

Rh 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 Chaldaean, 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 (Δ), so that in nothing doe they differ from one another but in their placing and situation.' He notes that the three-fold 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 giantlv 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 1620, 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