prisoners of war.
It would seem, indeed, that mutilation and scourging were the ordinary
forms of secondary punishment used by the Persians, who employed
imprisonment solely for the safe custody of an accused person between
his arrest and his execution, while they had recourse to transportation
and exile only in the case of political offenders.

CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE AND WRITING.

It has been intimated in the account of the Median Empire which was
given in a former-volume that the language of the Persians, which was
identical, or almost identical, with that of the Medes, belonged to the
form of speech known to moderns as Indo-European. The characteristics of
that form of speech are a certain number of common, or at least
widely spread, roots, a peculiar mode of inflecting, together with
a resemblance in the inflections, and a similarity of syntax or
construction. Of the old Persian language the known roots are, almost
without exception, kindred forms to roots already familiar to the
philologist through the Sanscrit, or the Zend, or both; while many are
of that more general type of which we have spoken--forms common to all,
or most of the varieties of the Indo-European stock. To instance in a
few very frequently recurring words--"father" is in old Persian (as
in Sanscrit) _pitar_, which differs only in the vocalization from the
Zendic _patar_, the Greek [ ], and the Latin _pater_, and of which
cognate forms are the Gothic _fadar_, the German voter, the English
_father_, and the Erse _athair_.

[See the html version for the following pages of this
chapter which is a section with hundreds of Greek
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The ordinary Persian writing was identical with that which has been
described in the second volume of this work as Median. A cuneiform
alphabet, consisting of some thirty-six or thirty-seven forms,
expressive of twenty-three distinct sounds, sufficed for the wants of
the people, whose language was simple and devoid of phonetic luxuriance.
Writing was from left to right, as with the Arian nations generally.
Word