most remote antiquity; the triumphs of Sefoftris were blazoned, in every country which he conquered, on columns that feem to have been infcribed at once with alphabetic and hieroglyphic characters; and the Hebrew decalogue itself was engraved on two tables of stone. The Indians used all these methods of conveying their ideas to posterity. Infcribed pillars and engraved copperplates have been discovered in every quarter of the empire; but the tablet in most general request among them has ever been the dried leaf of the palm-tree, many of which are faftened together, in long flips, and compose those books in which the fublime productions of the Indian mufe have been for fo many ages preserved. Diodorus farther informs us, in proof of the early cultivation of Affyrian letters, that Semiramis caused infcriptions, in the Syriac character, to be cut deep on the mountains of Bagisthan, and what, if the account can be depended on, is ftill more to our purpose, that, on her meditated expedition eastward, fhe received letters written to her from an ancient king of India.*

Diod. Sic. lib. ii. p. 127, 129.

To

To return from the confideration of the object inscribed to the letter defignated. — The general conformity of the most ancient Sanfcreet character with the fquare Chaldaic letter, in which moft Hebrew books are written, has been already noticed. Walton, in the Prolegomena to his Polyglott, has, in innumerable instances, remarked the ftriking fimilarity between the old Hebrew and Perfic dialect; and, in truth, Sir William Jones, in his Differtation on the Perfians, has confirmed all that Walton advanced on the subject, by avowing that the ancient Iranian, or Perfian, and the Sanfcreet languages are, in their original, the fame; " that hundreds of PARSI nouns are pure Sanfcreet, with no other change than fuch as may be observed in the numerous vernacular dialects of India ; that very many Persian imperatives are the roots of Sanfcreet verbs; and that even the moods and tenfes of the Perfian verb-fubftantive, which is the model of all the reft, are deducible from Sanfcreet by an easy and clear analogy." The prefident farther adds, towards the close of this differtation, that the

* Afiatic Researches, vol. ii. p. 51.

language

language of the first Persian empire, which he proves to have been Cuthite, and the latter governed by Cuthite princes, of whom Belus was the head, and the hiftory of all of whom was carried, with the colonies migrating eastward, to India, was the mother of the Sanfcreet, and confequently of the Zend and Parfi, as well as of Greek, Latin, and Gothic; that the language of the Affyrians was the parent of Chaldaic and Pahlavi; and that the primary Tartarian language, also, had been current in the fame empire.* This having been the cafe, and the fact being proved from an authority fo high and indifputable, can we wonder that the history of the ancient world, in the early post-diluvian ages, as detailed by Mofes, fhould be fo well. known to the ancient Brahmins, who used, both in speaking and writing, the fame language with the patriarchs, and in their facred books treasured up all the traditional dogmas and fublime theology of the Noachide. The allegorizing fpirit of their defcendants has, indeed, obfcured its brightnefs and defiled its purity; but, tear off the mythologic veil,

*Afiatic Researches, vol. ii. page 64.

and

and the Hebrew and Indian legislators are the fame.

On attentively contemplating the characters and fymbolic figures on the ruins of Iftakar, or Persepolis, the prefident was enabled to fix with precifion on the age of that maffy ftructure; for, had it been erected while the Hindoo dynasty in queftion, called by him Mahabadian and Mahabelian, fate on the throne of Perfia, it would undoubtedly have been decorated with the symbols of the Hindoo mythology, and with figures refembling those at Salsette and Elephanta; whereas those figures have reference folely to the Sabian fuperftition, or worship of the fun and planets. Confequently they must have been fabricated in a period after the migration of the Brahmins from Perfia, and when its intricate mythology had been purged of its impurities by Zoroafter, who fubftituted in its ftead the fimple adoration of the folar orb and fire as the pureft symbol of the Deity. The palace and temple of Iftakar, therefore, cannot be older than about 500 years before Chrift; and, with respect to the infcriptions engraved on them, he is not of opinion that they are in reality alphabetical letters, but a fecret and

facerdotal

facerdotal character, which could only be deciphered by the priests themselves. Among those ruins, however, may be plainly traced a few of the fquare Chaldaic letters to which he had alluded before, as resembling the old Devanagari, before the latter were inclosed, as they are now seen in India, in angular frames.

The relation of the old Perfian with the Indian language being thus clearly proved, and the characters at Canarah having been asferted, by the first linguist of any age, to be compounded of the Nagari and Ethiopic, he proceeds to detail his fentiments on the connection existing between the languages of two countries fo remote as India and Ethiopia; he afferts, that the written Abyssinian language, which we call Ethiopic, is a dialect of old Chaldean, and fifter of Arabic and Hebrew, known with certainty to be fo, not only from the great multitude of identical words, but (what is a far ftronger proof) from the fimilar grammatical arrangement of the feveral idioms. It is written, like all the Indian characters, from the left hand to the right, and the vowels are annexed, as in Devana