138 



THEOPHILUS G. PINCHES, LL.D., M.K.A.S , ON 



King of the city of Anzan, the grandson of Cyrus, the great 

 King, King of the city of Anzan, son of Sispes (Teispes), the 

 great King, King of the city of Anzan ; the all-encluririg royal 

 seed whose reign Bel and Nebo love." 



This royal descent of Cyrus is confirmed by the royal pedigree of 

 his kinsman, Darius Hysdaspes, recorded in the great Behistun Eock 

 Inscription. There Cyrus is referred to by Darius as " of our race," 

 and Cyrus and Darius are shown to have had the same ancestor, 

 Teispes, King of the city of Anzan, son of Achaemenes, from whom 

 this line of Persian kings are called the Achaemenians. 



There is also a short inscription on the ruins of Murghab, the 

 remains probably of the tomb of Cyrus, repeated four times, " I am 

 Cyrus the King, the Achaemenian " (Eawlinson, Trans. Royal Asiatic 

 Society, Vol. X, Part II, p. 270). 



In the light of these inscriptions, the narrative of Ctesias with 

 his robber married to a goatherd, and his ridiculous story of Cyrus 

 as a " kitchen knave " in the household of Astyages — his stirring up 

 of the Persians to rebel against the Medians, and the decisive battle 

 in which 60,000 Medians were slain — which has been gravely 

 accepted as serious history, may surely be dismissed with utter 

 contempt. 



Then Herodotus is contradicted also by these inscriptions, for his 

 account makes Cyrus the son of merely a Persian of private rank — 

 not son of a king, the descendant of a line of kings. So his won- 

 derful story — which was eagerly accepted by antiquity, and also by 

 grave historians of more recent times — about the son of "Harpagus, 

 whom Astyages, King of Media, had served up at a banquet for his 

 father Harpagus to eat — an incident famous in antiquity under the 

 allusion " Median banquets " passes away, and with it the victorious 

 revolt of Cyrus and the Persians against the Mecles. 



So the natural story of Xenophon in the Cyropedia holds the field. 

 He relates — in agreement with the cuneiform inscriptions — that 

 Cyrus was the son of Cambyses, King of Persia; and he further 

 says, in this agreeing with Herodotus, that his mother was 

 Mandane, daughter of Astyages, King of Media. He gives a very 

 natural account of the boyhood of Cyrus spent for a time at his 

 grandfather's court in Media. After the death of Astyages, his son 

 Cyaxares succeeded to the throne ; and being threatened with war 

 by the Babylonians, he sent to his brother-in-law, Cambyses, 



