128 TRANSFER OF THE 



CHAP III. 



from India by Ormus on the Persian Gulf, and 

 by the traffic of caravans, which arrived from 

 various countries at that emporium. The trea- 

 sures of the palace of Solomon, the magnificent 

 temple he had erected, and the accumulated 

 savings of five centuries, were transferred with its 

 enslaved inhabitants to the capital of Nebuchad- 

 nezzar. About the same period the successes of 

 Cambyses had enabled that monarch to collect 

 and transmit to Babylon the vast treasures of 

 Egypt that have been already noticed 1 ; and 

 these, whatever allowances may be made for the 

 exaggerated statements of the ancients, must 

 have amounted to a most enormous quantity. 



Under the reign of Darius, the great imposts 

 levied by that monarch must have augmented 

 his treasures; and if the grand expedition of 

 Xerxes scattered a portion, and even a very 

 large portion, of them over the surface of the 

 countries between Babylon and Europe, there 

 was more than sufficient time to collect them 

 again at the seat of the government in the hun- 

 dred years which passed between the conclusion 

 of that disastrous expedition and the period 

 when Alexander the Great swallowed up the 

 Persian state in his universal but ephemeral 

 monarchy. If the actual amount of the revenue 

 of the Persian empire, as stated by Herodotus, 

 be but tolerably correct if the account of the 



1 See page 13. 



