'Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, from January 1847 to May 1849. Edited by the Secretary. Volume VIII.' [‎301] (410/496)

301
arc engraved on the pedestal which the sculptures occupy, thus forming
one great whole, which for elaborateness of conception, and skill in design,
is scarcely surpassed, or even equalled, by any single work of art in all
Persia, for it contains, in addition to the sculptures, nearly 1000 lines of
complicated writing.
Both Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus maintain that the Egyptians
possessed two forms of writing, and other authors add to them a third*
form. These are classed as the epistolatory, the sacerdotal, and the hiero
glyphic. The latter, we are aware, was used as a lapidary character,
and in this respect we may assimilate to it the cuneated letters of the
Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians. The very form, indeed, would
cause this species of writing to be adopted by the early engravers as the
most easy and simple, and in this respect the primitive printers of Eng
land followed in their wake, for the angular form of the old English
letters was the best adopted either for the speedy formation of types or
for the trade of the stone-cutter; and as subsequent improvement in the
arts, combining greater skill and dexterity of hand, enabled the moderns
to employ the more elegant Roman, or the still more graceful Italic, cha
racters for the purposes of their vocation, so it may have been with
the ancient races of Babylonia, and Media, who, on the adoption of
a new style, may have lost imperceptibly all traces of the old.f It is
hardly possible to suppose, from its formation, that the cuneiform could
have been used in a cursive form in the numerous archives of the Per
sian Kingdom, and we may, therefore, presume, that the courtly docu
ments styled by Ctesias At Baot At /cat were written in a character
more suitable to an amanuensis, and answering to that employed on the
epistolatory correspondence of Egypt.
Be this as it may, however, a few months will disclose the at present
hidden meaning of this extensive legend; and the ray that has just dawn
ed on literature at Behistan may yet illumine the dark and mysterious
* See note b y L archer, in the English Translation of Herodotus, Enterpe 36.
t Within the last twenty years the old English writing has been in a great
ea,sure abolished m school exercises, for more useful attainments, and now I
1GVe ’ f, e f om except to grace a deed of settlement, a tomb-stone, or a
L / i f^ey* ^ ere England overrun with successive revolutions such as
ice sioo t the once mighty empires of the East, in which the sword, for centuries
° . 1€ ! P, a ? e °f die pen, and in which all cursive records were either destroyed
I 11 . ? ie ru ^ ns die public edifices, it is not improbable indeed, that
iiie traces of this, our primitive character, would, like the cuneiform, be found only
tlieiii U1 lapidary tablets > tliat CVtin now require an “ Old Mortality’’ to restore