ancient Inscriptions of' Pcrsepolis. 325 



year that his precarious usurpation lasted, or that his name 

 should have remained inscribed among the legitimate mon- 

 archs of Persia. The name of Artaxerxes appeared too long for 

 the characters of the inscription, and hence Darius and Xerxes 

 were fixed upon as the most probable. It was obviously 

 in favour of this supposition that in the group assigned to 

 Xerxes, the second letter was the same as the sixth, and the 

 fourth the same as the seventh. The final s in Xerxes was 

 rejected, as being probably a Greek termination, and the x, 

 as a double letter, resolved into k and scJi, and thus the whole 

 was read Kschharsha or Kschhersche*. The correctness of 

 this ingenious analysis has since received confirmation in a 

 very remarkable and unexpected manner. When M. St. Martin 

 was engaged in the study of what Grotefend had written, it 

 occurred to him that an alabaster vase in the Royal Library 

 of Paris, of which an engraving had been published by Caylus 

 in his Recueil d'A7itiqtiites, vol. v. pi. 30, exhibited an inscrip- 

 tion in Persepolitan characters, and also in hieroglyphics, and 

 he inspected it in company with ChampoUion. His discoveries 

 were even then sufficiently matured to enable him to read the 

 name in hieroglyphics, which is surrounded with that oval 

 ring which always incloses royal names, into Kschearscha. 

 The only error committed by Grotefend was, that he read the 

 third letter as an h, instead of an e. The name of the son 

 being thus fixed, that of the father must be Darius. Several 

 letters of his name were indeed ascertained by their identity 

 with those of Kschearscha. It is written Dareiousch* . That 

 the OS of the Greek name is not a mere termination, is evident 

 from the word being spelt tyvit {Dariosh) in Hebrew. The 

 same remark may be made of the os in Kuros. The buildings 

 of Persepolis were therefore probably begun, or the oldest part 

 of them completed, in the reign of Darius. And if we consi- 

 der that the workmen were not sent from Egypt till Cambyses 

 had accomplished the conquest of that country, and that he 

 died, after a reign of only seven years, almost immediately on 

 his return, we shall not wonder that he had no time to execute 

 any thing at Persepolis; and that consequently Darius is the 

 first king whose name appears there. The remaining build- 

 ings were probably erected by Xerxes. 



Hitherto all that had been done was to decipher proper 

 names ; an attempt was next to be made to read some of the 

 words, and ascertain what they meant, and to what language 

 they belonged. The group of characters which 1 have so 

 often mentioned, as probably standing for hinii, was observed 

 to begin with the same two letters as the name which had been 

 read Kschearscha ; if therefore it really meant Iciu^, a word 

 » Sec Pkitc III. fig. 2. 



must 



