Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/48

 Relations of Persu with Greece. 33 with Aramaic writing, which at that epoch began to be in com- mon use as far as Mesopotamia. They were borrowed from the Babylonian system, Persian being the only Aryan language written with cuneiform characters.* The drift of our remarks will long ere this have been antid- pated. The fascination Greece exercised over Persia before the time of Alexander was not of the kind which had caused Egypt, ' Phrygia, and Lydia to surrender at discretion, as far back as the seventh century B.c. In the eyes of the Greeks, despite the poetic colours with which they clothed the figure of the elder Cyrus, and the interest the tragic fate of Cyrus the Younger excited in their breasts, the Persians were from first to last no more than barbarians. The latter had no feelings but of contempt for the Greeks, by whom they had certainly been worsted more than once ; yet they were a people who, on the morrow of their victories, craved the interference of their late enemy to compose their home dissensions, and who did not hesitate to accept or ask for his gold. Eminent Greek refugees may have lived some years at the court of Persian kings, where > The Persian or old Persian fanguage differs in some respects from Zend, or, to speak accurately, from Median. They were diliects spoken at the same time, one in the south and the other in the north of Iran. The Persian writing whirh has come down to us consists of inscriptions, most of them very short and several times repeated. The most important of these, in point of length, fmish, and matter, is the f ode inscription at BehistOn, which ccmiprises ten times as many words as all the rest put together. The number collected from the short texts barely reaches four hundred words (J. Darmesteter, ktudes sur la Grammaire historique de la lant^u^ ptrsane, dans Us Eludes iraniennes, torn, i., Paris, 'ievveg, pp. 4, 7). The whole collection of these inscriptions will be found in AUpinUcfu Keilinschriften^ etc., Leipzig, 1862, second edit 1889, published by Spiegel, and in ImeripttMes prntmepenUm Aekmnutudammt editit et explidft, Petersburg, 1872, brought out by Kosaovicz. Mdnant has given a translation in the volume entitled Zf-f Achhuhiidei cf Ifs inscriptions de la Perse, 8vo, A. L^vy, 1872. This work, to which we shall refer more than once, besides the translation of epigraphic tacts that have been discovered and dedj^ieied all orer Imo, contains a summaiy of the buildings and the rock-cut sculptures associated with these inscriptions, together with numerous woodcuts, and an historical essay upton the princes who had them incised. Mdnant has more recently published an account of the labours and the discoveries that have led to the reading and the tnuulation of the Avesta on the one hand, and of the inscriptions of Persia upon stone; The great rock-inscription at Bchistun was first published by Sir H. Rawlinson, in the yeir 1846, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, vol. x. part L He likewise published in the same Journal (vol. xi. pp. 334-336) the short rock-cut inscription of Xerxes at Van, along with numerous legends of Darius, Xerxes, and one of Artaxerxes Ochus at Persepolis. — ^Trs. o Digitized by Google