in the triple Inscriptions of the Persians, 8c. 303 
this source the character in question may be easily conceived to have acquired 
its denomination of ‘ Chaldean,’ though not from the earlier one put forward 
through the ignorance and vanity of the Talmudie Rabbins; nor is there 
ground entitled to the slightest credit for ascribing to the Babylonians of ancient 
times any knowledge whatever of the use of letters. The faint resemblances of 
Shemitic characters met with, in a few instances, upon bricks in the ruins of the 
city formerly occupied by them, have the appearance of irregular lines accidentally 
worn in those bricks during the course of a long series of ages, rather than de- 
signedly excavated in them by human agency ; and are, at any rate, too thinly 
scattered through the place to be looked upon as elements of any species of 
national writing; so that, even supposing them to be letters, they can be ascribed 
only to foreigners who are known to have made use of such characters, as, for 
instance, to Phoenicians who may have resorted to Babylon for the purposes of 
trade, or to the Jews who were detained there as captives and slaves for seventy 
years. 
17. The ideagraphic nature of the cuneiform writing of the Babylonians is 
illustrated, in a very striking manner, by the copy of a large, though not entire 
specimen of it, marked g, in Plate Ixxvii. of Sir Robert Ker Porter’s Travels. 
This copy presents to view, amidst cuneatic ingredients, thirteen ovals, which 
the author has, indeed, left blank on account of the faintness of the figures inside 
their originals ; but he informs us of those figures being pictorial, and similar to 
others upon seals, likewise found in the ruins of Babylon, of which he gives 
delineations in Plate Ixxx. Now, those ovals are not at all, like modern seals, 
detached from the body of the text; and, although they are not as completely 
dispersed through that text as the Egyptian cartouches are through hieroglyphic 
inscriptions, yet, in the different parts of the document in which they occur, they 
are mingled with surrounding cuneiform characters, just as the cartouches alluded 
to are with hieroglyphs. ‘They have, therefore, a much closer correspondence 
with those cartouches than with seals, or any subsidiary additions to signatures, 
and must be looked upon as primary denominations of the parties to whom this 
document referred. How a symbolic representation of some quality attributed 
to an individual, or of some remarkable event in his life, might recal a character- 
istic appellation of him, grounded on that quality or event, to the memory of a 
reader acquainted with his history, and familiar with the language of the msculp- 
