to the Ethnological Society of London. 341 



and notices of important revolutions in the early history of 

 mankind, and pai'ticularly of those celebrated dynasties who 

 divided between them, or held successively, the dominion of 

 Asia. The longest and most extensive of these inscriptions 

 as yet known, is, as I believe, that of Behistun or Baghistan, 

 of which our illustrious countryman, Major Rawlinson, has 

 given a full description in one of the last volumes of the 

 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain. This 

 inscription covers the surface of a smooth, perpendicular rock, 

 1700 feet in height, situated on the western frontier of Me- 

 dia, on the high-road from Babylonia. Like many other in- 

 scriptions of the same sort, which were engraved under the 

 dominion of the ancient kings of Persia, it is trilinguar, con- 

 sisting of three separate insci'iptions in three different lan- 

 guages. All of them are inscribed in lettei'S consisting of 

 cuneiform lines grouped together, but the grouping and the 

 characters are different in the several inscriptions, and form 

 different alphabets belonging to separate languages. The 

 some import seems to have been repeated in each of the in- 

 scriptions ; and it has been conjectured, with great pi-oba- 

 bility, that the three languages were the popular idioms of 

 the great nations of the Persian empire, viz., the empire 

 of Darius Hystaspes, whose exploits the inscription re- 

 cords. The legend of one of the inscriptions, which, as I 

 have observed, seems to be repeated on the two othei's, has 

 been almost completely decyphered and read and explained 

 by Major Rawlinson, with wonderful ingenuity and unques- 

 tionable success. The language is that of the ancient Per- 

 sians, the subjects of Cyrus and Darius. It is fortunately so 

 near the classical Sanskrit, that the words are explicable, 

 through the medium of that language, with some assistance 

 from the Zend. 



The character as well as the language of one of these 

 triple inscriptions having been satisfactorily elucidated, at- 

 tempts were soon made to decypher the other two forms. 

 These are supposed to be Median and Babylonian, these 

 two nations being, as it is supposed, next to the Persians, 

 the principal races subject to the empire of the Achieme- 

 nidse. 



