Sanscrit Writing and Language. 151 



Great Cyrus, nor of any king of Persia, who, in the events of his reign, can 

 apparently be forced into a similitude. We have no Croesus, king of Lydia ; not 

 a syllable of Camhyses, or his frantic expedition against the Ethiopians. Smerdis 

 Magus, and the succession of Darius, the son of Hystaspes, by the neighing of 

 his horse, are to the Persians circumstances equally unknown as the numerous 

 assassinations recorded by the Greeks. Not a vestige is, at the same time, to be 

 discovered of the famous battles of Marathon, Thermopylce, Salamis, Platcea, 

 or Mycale; nor of that prodigious force which Xerxes led out of the Persian 

 empire to overwhelm the states of Greece. Minutely attentive as the Persian 

 historians are to their numerous wars with the kings of Turan or Scythia ; and 

 recording, with the same impartiality, whatever might tarnish as well as aggran- 

 dize the reputation of their country, we can with little pretence to reason suppose, 

 that they should have been silent on events of such magnitude, had any records 

 remained of their existence, or the faintest tradition commemorated their conse- 

 quences." — Dissertation, &c. p. xvi. 



The reasoning of our author at the conclusion of this extract is, so far, quite 

 correct ; but where he, as I conceive, fell into error, was in the tacit assumption 

 that the Persions actually had records of all events which In early ages occurred 

 in their country, from which he was necessarily led to the inference, that the 

 Greek accounts respecting those events wei'e mere idle fictions, without any real 

 foundation : — a paradox so monstrous, that at times he is forced to shrink from it, 

 and very inconsistently to admit, that there may be some truth in the older Euro- 

 pean statements. The only way of our escaping from the dilemma in which he 

 was placed, is that which I have already suggested. The Persians, it has been 

 proved, had in reality no permanent mode of recording events in ancient times, 

 nor is it likely that they had any, till long after those in question had 

 taken place ; and this consideration sufficiently accounts for the total ignorance 

 they now betray upon the subject ; — an ignorance which cannot upon any other 

 ground be rationally explained. They adopted the Arabic writing along with 

 the Mohammedan creed ; and previously, the Syriac writing, which, it is most 

 likely, they learned at the period when, during the reign of Constantine, they 

 were converted to Christianity. Whether they had before the last-mentioned 

 epoch the benefit of any alphabetic mode of designation is, I conceive, very 



