other from father to son, all men and sons of men, without a single god or demigod, are no longer fables for us. All the Pharaohs have risen from their graves, and in addition to them the numberless gay pictures of a full and abundant life of the people, all ranks and all occupations being preserved with wonderful fidelity, and domestic scenes of touching truth and simplicity, three and four millennia old! No inconsiderable relics of literature, too, have been found,-documents from daily life, historical records, and poetry, and of the sacred books, especially the so-called Book of the Dead, upon which criticism has already laid its hands, trying to separate a more ancient nucleus from subsequent commentaries.

Far less important, but interesting as the solution of a problem which seemed almost impossible to be solved, is the decipherment of the Persian cuneiform writing. On a precipitate side of a rock about 1500 feet high, near Bisitun, in ancient Media, there was found, at an inaccessible height, the coloured relievo-portrait of a king, who, attended by his guards, sits in judgment upon his vanquished foes. One of them is lying prostrate, and the king sets his foot on his body; nine others are standing chained before him. This relievo is surrounded by not less than a thousand lines of cuneiform characters. Similar characters were found on the rocks of Nakhsh in Rustein, on the ruins of the palaces of Persepolis, and in other places. But neither the writing nor the language of the inscriptions was known; aye, not even

approximate guess at their contents could be made. How could hopes be entertained of their ever being read? And yet we have succeeded so completely that at this day we are able to read the Persian inscriptions with nearly the same certainty as Latin. The first successful attempts in this direction were made here at Frankfort. Professor Grotefend, since 1803 viceprincipal of the grammar-school of this city, with the sagacity of genius, recognised in some briefer inscriptions, copies of which were at his command, the passages where names of kings were to be expected, and with a rare gift of combination he discovered, by a comparison of the names of the Persian rulers known to us according to their sounds and the relationships of the kings bearing these names, those of Xerxes and Darius. The latter called himself in an inscription son of Hystaspes; this, too, Grotefend recognised on finding that, in agreement with history, the title of king was absent in the case of Hystaspes. He had at once recognised in the Persian cuneiform inscriptions an alphabetic writing: from the names deciphered he traced out part of the alphabet and attempted to read entire inscriptions. Upwards of thirty years, however, elapsed ere Professor Lassen succeeded in discovering an alphabet complete in all essentials, and, the science of language having meanwhile made rapid strides, and languages which had great affinity with ancient Persian having become better known, in actually deciphering and translating the inscriptions. At present we read on the Bisitun

monument a whole history of the reign of Darius in his own words. The man on whom the king, armed with a bow, puts his foot, is the false Smerdis, or, in Persian, Barthiya, known to us from Herodotus. The inscription beneath his portrait runs thus: "This is Gumata, the magician; he has cheated; he said: I am Barthiya, son of Kurush. I am king."

On the sites where Nineveh and Babylon once stood there have been quite recently, as is well known, likewise brought to light, amongst ruins of palaces and imposing sculptures, numerous inscriptions, especially tiles and cylinders, bearing cuneiform writing-the only gloomy remnants of Assyrian and Babylonian magnificence and universal empire.

Here, too, the problem was not only to decipher unknown contents conveyed in an unknown writing, but first to discover a language, nay, several languages, the very existence of which had partly been unknown. Fortunately the Assyrian language is met with on Persian monuments too; on several of them one and the same inscription is repeated in the Persian and Assyrian languages; and the Persian text having once been deciphered, it also afforded a clue to the decipherment of the Assyrian.

In order to appreciate the effect which the coming to light of all these new and yet most ancient marvels could not fail to produce on the conception of our time, we need but realise the impression made by a ruin only a few centuries old, or the excavation of an ancient coin or utensil, or even a mere rough stone

that in olden times passed through the hands of man, and still shows traces of having done so. The curiosity raised by what we have never before seen, the desire and craving of lifting the veil from the realms of the past, and of catching a glimpse, at least, of what has for ever perished, are blended with a feeling of awe and devoutness. How peculiarly are we moved at the sight of the slightest object brought to daylight from the buried streets of Herculaneum and Pompeii; how many reminiscences it evokes! In the case of an unknown, strange antiquity, however, that suddenly begins to revive and stir before our eyes, every one feels something analogous to what we feel at the sight of the curious extinct animals of the antediluvian world-the Ichthyosauri and the Mastodons. We cast a divinatory glance at unmeasured periods of creation, and begin darkly to guess at that great mystery-the mystery of our development.

And yet it was not the treasures discovered beneath the soil which were destined to contribute most to the elucidation of that mystery.

The finding, nay, one may say, the discovery of two literatures, which were indeed defunct, but were so in no other sense than the Latin or Hebrew-that is to say, which still continue to be studied and reverenced by living peoples-this discovery, with its consequences, it was which formed an era in European conception as to the past of humanity. Both literatures were discovered in East India. Zend literature, the sacred writings of the ancient Persians, ascribed to Zoroaster,

had been carried away with them to India by the Parsees, who remained faithful to the ancient religion, on their flying from their native land to save themselves from the Mahomedans. Sanskrit literature is the holy national literature of the Brahmanic Hindoos themselves. The merit of having discovered and promulgated these treasures, of which, until about the middle of last century, no European scholar had any inkling, is due, in the first instance, to the English and the French, who were at that time engaged in a mutual struggle for the possession of India. The knowledge of the Zend writings we owe before all to French, that of Sanskrit to English science. It is German scholars, however, who in a pre-eminent degree have thoroughly investigated both, and who have more especially made use of them in perfecting linguistic science. As Columbus, urged on by an irresistible impulse which made him overcome all doubts and surmount all difficulties, went in quest of the western hemisphere, so Anquetil du Perron, from 1754, searched for the celebrated writings of Zoroaster among the priests of the Parsees in India, and employed his life in translating and commenting upon them. Nothing more strikingly exhibits the contrast of our times to those than the disappointment which the writings, brought home at so much sacrifice, then caused in Europe. Of the wisdom which so great a name led to expect they contained but little. On the other hand, the god Ahuramazda occasionally revealed in them things which, from their childlike naïveté, could only call forth smiles;