Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/25

 lO History of Art in Antiquitv. the Greeks, who made no distinction between Medes and Persians, since the)- spoke of their long struggles against the kings of Persia as Me clian wars. The Aryans found the remnants of the Elamites, with Susa as chief fortress, established in the south-west of Iran, on the slopes turned towards the lower valley of the Tigris and the Persian Gulf. The Ninevite reliefs sometimes represent the Susians as decidedly Negroid in type (Figs, i, 2), and recent explorers have confirmed the deductions arrived at by former scholars in respect to these graven images. They have remarked that the difference which exists between the inhabitants of Dizful and Shiister» the representatives of the ancient Susians, and the other populations of Persia is fully as great as that observable between the various groups in the reliefs. We subjoin the con- clusion reached by one who had ample leisure to study them on the spot: "Anthropology teaches us that Susiana, at an epoch it devolves on historians and ar- chaeologists to specify, was oc- cupied by a negro population related to the blacks of India, whom the white races compelled to take refuge in the hilly regions of difficult access. These blacks were Negritos/'* In Susiana, names of localities, of men, and gods are exceedingly peculiar, and indicate that the language of the people to whom they belong, had no affinity to the Semitic dialects of Mesopotamia or the Aryan speech of the Persians. Scholars identify the language in question, as found in the trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenid dynasty,* with what is called the second system of writing. But the texts still ' The Ionian Greeks, who first introduced these two nations to the Hellenic wotid, altered their names in their transliterations. Their dislike to the broad sound of (7 induced them to replace it whenever they could, by e; thus die ''Mada** and "Parsa" of the inscriptions became " Nf cdeioi " and " Perseioi." ' pRfiD. HoussAV, La Races humaines de la Perse (Socit^td d' Anthropologic de Lyon), 8vo, 1887, p. 45. opinion that these epigrajdis are in the ancient dialect of Susiana. Figs, i, 2. — Susian types after ihc bas-rciicfs of Asar-nat-sirpal. Britt&h Museum. G. Rawlinson, The Five Gnat MmanJUes, etc., torn. ii. p. 500. Digitized by Google
 * See J. DAMfBSTiTER, /«; at, MM. Rawlinson and J. Hal^ are also of