4 
Xerxes :—^ The great god Auromazdes, he created this earth, 
he created that heaven, he created the lot of mortals. He 
made Xerxes sole king of many men, sole ruler of many.’* 
There are traces indeed of the acknowledgment of certain local 
genii, but the attributes of creation and providence are confined 
to Oromasdes. No trace appears in them of the worship of 
Mithras before the time of Artaxerxes Mnemon, though Xeno¬ 
phon in his Cyropeedia, (vii. 5, 18), composing a speech for a 
courtier of Cyrus, makes him swear by Mithras. But the con¬ 
quest of Babylon corrupted the simplicity of their manners as 
well as of their faith, and in the time of Herodotus they wor¬ 
shipped Mylitta (Venus Urania) and Mithras.f This deserves 
notice in connection with Jewish history. It was from Cyrus 
that this people, carried captive by Assyrian and Babylonian 
monarchs, received the first permission to return to their father- 
land. Whether he recognised the God of the Jew’s as the 
author of his victories over the nations or not, there can be no 
doubt, I think, that sympathy with the monotheism of the 
Jews was joined wuth a political motive in his permission to 
them to return. And from this time we hear of no relapse of 
the nation into idolatry ; on the contrary, they resisted to death 
the attempt of the Greek monarchs of Syria to establish it in 
their country. 
The Persepolitan inscriptions, and those found in other parts 
of the empire are all triple. The character in all is cuneiform, 
but the language is different. The first is the old Persian, as 
already explained; the second is called Median, against the 
presumption derived from what Strabo and others tell us, that 
the Persian and Median language was nearly the same, (p. 1046, 
ed. Oxf.); the third has been called Scythian, by wdiich 
is meant that it belongs to some of those nations which modern 
ethnology calls Turanian, as distinct from Aryan. The cunei¬ 
form writing is singularly cumbrous, and it is difficult to con¬ 
ceive how it can have answered the manifold purposes for 
w’hich w’riting must have been required, in an empire so wide, 
* Lassen Die Keilinscliriften, p. 147. 
t Herod 1, 131. He appears to have considered the two deities as the same, 
hut the monuments show this to he a mistake. 
