s were separated from one another by an oblique wedge; and were
divided at any point at which the writer happened to reach the end of
a line. Enclitics were joined without any break to the words which they
accompanied.

The Persian writing which has come down to us is almost entirely upon
stone. It comprises various rock tablets, a number of inscriptions upon
buildings, and a few short legends upon vases and cylinders. It is in
every case incised or cut into the material. The letters are of various
sizes, some (as those at Elwend) reaching a length of about two inches,
others (those, for instance, on the vases) not exceeding the sixth of
an inch. The inscriptions cover a space of at least a hundred and eighty
years, commencing with Cyrus, and terminating with Artaxerxes Ochus,
the successor of Mnemon. The style of the writing is, on the whole,
remarkably uniform, the latter inscriptions containing only two
characters unknown to the earlier times. Orthography, however, and
grammar are in these later inscriptions greatly changed, the character
of the changes being indicative of corruption and decline, unless,
indeed, we are to ascribe them to mere ignorance on the part of the
engravers.

There can be little doubt that, besides the cuneiform character, which
was only suited for inscriptions, the Persians employed a cursive
writing for common literary purposes. Ctesias informs us that the royal
archives were written on parchment; and there is abundant evidence that
writing was an art perfectly familiar to the educated Persian. It might
have been supposed that the Pehlevi, as the lineal descendant of the
Old Persian language, would have furnished valuable assistance towards
solving the question of what character the Persians employed commonly;
but the alphabetic type of the Pehlevi inscriptions is evidently
Semitic; and it would thus seem that the old national modes of writing
had been completely lost before the establishment by Ardeshir, son of
Babek, of the new Persian Empire.

CHAPTER V. ARCHITECTURE AND OTHER ARTS.

If in the old world the fame of the Persians, as builders and artists,
fell on the whole below that of the Assyrians and Babylonians--their
instructors in art, no less than in letters and science--it was not so
much that they had not produced works worthy of comparison with those
which adorned Babylon and Nineveh, as that, boasting less antiquity and
less originality than those primitive races, th