Sanscrit Writing and Language. 145 



tive narratives cannot, I will venture to assert, be rationally doubted.* With 

 respect to the subsequent portion of the ancient history of Persia which Hero- 

 dotus has given, it is a fortiori to be relied on, as coming so close to his own 

 time; not that he is to be implicitly followed in every thing he tells, for no un- 

 inspired writer was ever wholly free from error, and he particularly, though an 

 evident lover of truth, was very credulous; but the general correctness of his nar- 

 rative in its leading features must, I conceive, be acquiesced in. After him the 

 continuation of this history was, in consequence of the increased intercourse 

 between Greeks and Persians, undertaken by so many writers, that a judicious 

 comparison of their works has enabled the moderns in Europe to arrive very 

 nearly at certainty in reference to the principal facts. 



If now we turn to the accounts at present in the possession of the Persians 

 respecting the ancient history of their country, we must be struck by their total 

 silence as to every one of the circumstances relative to Cyrus which have been 

 above enumerated ; and by the blank they exhibit not only as to these, but also 

 as to every other event of importance which occurred in Persia down to the time 

 of its conquest by Alexander the Great. Their writers, indeed, give us long 

 lists of Persian sovereigns, which, as a matter of course, they extend backwards 

 to the highest date assigned to the deluge ; — a practice of which all nations avail 

 themselves who have from any source got even the most obscure idea of that 

 catastrophe, but are wholly ignorant of their own ancient history. But if we 

 examine the actions of those sovereigns, we shall find that they are engaged 

 almost exclusively in wars with the Turanians or Tartars; that is, with the 

 nations with which the Persians had chiefly intercourse for the last 1500 years; 

 so that all their historians have been able to effect was, cither to transfer lives 



* In comparing those two writers I have not taken into account Ctesias, the colemporary of the 

 latter; because very little of his history has been preserved, and that little cannot be at all depended 

 on, as he wrote under the control of a despotic monarch accustomed to the most servile flattery. 

 There is, however, one point in his narrative worth noticing. He makes the duration of the 

 Assyrian empire, previous to the revolt of the Medes, to be 1300 years ; while Herodotus rates it 

 only at 520. Lib. i, c. 95. This discrepance has puzzled chronologers in no small degree, in con- 

 sequence of their overlooking the want of alphabetic writing among the Persians in the time of the 

 two historians ; but it is just such as might be expected to arise, in the course of the sixty or seventy 

 years that intervened between them, from the natural tendency of tradition to augment the antiquity 

 of dates, wherever it has been unchecked by documents of permanent legibility. 

 VOL. XVIII. T 



