﻿56 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE : 



been exactly transcribed : they are very elegant 

 verses of Nizami and Sadi on the instability of human 

 greatness, but so ill engraved or so ill copied, that if 

 I had not had them near 1 :/ by heart, 1 should not 

 have been able to read them; and M. Rousseau of 

 han, who translated them with shameful inac- 

 curacy, must have been deceived by the badness of 

 the copy, or he never would have created a new king 

 If'akam, by forming one word of Jem and the par- 

 ticle prefixed to it. Assuming, however, that we 

 may reason as conclusively on the characters pub- 

 lished by Niebuhr as we might on the monumenis 

 themselves, were they now before us, we may begin 

 with observing, as Chardin had observed on the very 

 spot, that they bear no resemblance whatever to the 

 letters used by the Gabrs in their copies of the 

 Vendidad This I once urged, in an amicable debate 

 with Bah-man, as a proof that the Zend letters were 

 a modem invention 1 but he seemed to hear me 

 without surprize, and insisted that the letters to 

 which I alluded, and which he had often seen, were 

 monumental characters never used in books, and 

 intended either to conceal some religious my- 

 from the vulgar, or to display the art of the sculptor, 

 like the embellished Cicfick and Nagari on several 

 Arabian and Indian monuments. He wondered that 

 any man could seriously doubt the antiquity of the 

 Pahhivi letters; and in truth the inscription behind 

 the horse of Rustam, which Niebuhr has also given 

 us, is apparently Pahlcvi, and might with some pains 

 be decyphcred ; that character was extremely rude, 

 and seems to have been written, like the Reman and 

 the Arabic, in a variety of hands ; for 1 remember 

 to have examined a rare collection of old Persian 

 coins in the Museum of the great Anatomist 11 d- 

 liam Hunter ; and, though I believed he legends to 

 be PahJavi, and h d no doubt that they were coins 

 of Parthian kings, yet I could not read the inscrip- 



