in the triple Inscriptions of the Persians, &c. 267 
covered with Assyriac letters.”* But a yet earlier acquaintance with the Greek 
alphabet, on the part of the Persian scribes, might be established, if the accuracy 
of a statement in the fifteenth book of Strabo could be relied on, in which this 
geographer asserts, on the authority of Onesicritus, and Aristus of Salamis, that 
the scription on the tomb of Cyrus was written in Greek, as well as in Persian. 
From the account, however, of this subject given by Plutarch, which is more 
likely to be the true one, it may be collected, that the two legends were of diffe- 
rent ages, and that the Greek part of the inscription was not added till the time 
of the Macedonian Alexander, who ordered it to be insculped under the original 
epitaph.f Still it is to be observed in this, as well as in the former case, that the 
Persian legend is not described by any author as triple, and that, therefore, it was 
most probably in one of the older, or ideagraphic kinds of cuneiform writing ; 
so that, if any weight be allowed to the above statement of Strabo, it concurs with 
the adduced evidence of Herodotus, to prove that the Persians had some know- 
ledge of Greek letters before they set about forming their cuneiform alphabet. 
Secondly. Through recent discoveries of travellers in Lycia, the ancient inha- 
bitants of that country are found to have employed, while under the dominion of 
the Persians, in inscriptions that may be traced back to very near the time of 
Darius, an alphabet which is manifestly of Grecian descent. Most of the letters 
= The wey voy oTHANTS TaUTnot BuCavrsot, nomlravres bs THY OAM, Uoregoy TovTewy eyenrayro meas Tov 
Bapeoy tis Opbucing Agrzpesdoc, xwpic ivdg Aidou" obr0s 38 xarersiQen mapa tov Asovucov tov vnav ev BuCavrin, 
yetupdrar Accugiay xAtos'—Herodotus, lib. iv. cap. 87. 
+ Thv 08 iyeaPny cvayrors, extrevoey EAAnvinois Imoyaputas yeaumuacw’—Plutarchus, Ed°. Pari- 
siaca, tom. 1. p. 703. 
~In support of the above point may be further urged a circumstance of a more positive 
nature. In fact, the two versions recorded by Strabo of the Persian epitaph in question, and 
that transmitted by Plutarch, differ materially all three from each other, as well as from the later 
inscription found so often repeated on the remains of the magnificent temple erected to the honour 
of the deified Cyrus at Pasargade, and whose purport is ascertained from the portion of it 
insculped in the first, or alphabetic kind of cuneiform writing. Now, that the Persian scribes in 
the time of the Macedonian conqueror should have been unable (as their mutual disagreements 
show they were) to give the exact meaning of the earlier legend, though very short,—not then 
above 200 years old,—and about the general subject of which they could no more be ignorant, 
than they could then make any mistake as to whom the tomb belonged to on which it was 
inscribed, is a case perfectly reconcilable with the supposition of that legend having been idea- 
graphic, but not at all so with the notion that it was alphabetically written. 
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