Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/87

 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.' 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.'

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