shew that they have been invested with this new phonetic quality.

The specimen No. 1 in Plate XVII., is copied from the end of a very beautiful manuscript of the Bibliothèque Royale at Paris, containing the celebrated heroic poem of Ferdusi, intitled Shah-Nameh, or the Book of Kings; a composition of 60,000 verses, written in the tenth century in the Parsi dialect, which has become the common language of Persia. To this dialect, two epochs may be attributed, namely, that of Ferdusi and other ancient Persian poets, who used only the words of their national language, as spoken in the courts of their sovereigns before the Arab conquest; and that of the modern Parsi or Persian, properly so called, which in consequence of the invasion of the Arabs, the irruptions of the Turks, and the conquests of the Mongols, has become intermingled with Arabic, Turkish, Tartar, and Indian words, and which from its easy pronunciation, and harmonious terminations, is now in use from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Persia, and from the Tigris to beyond the Indus: Anquetil indeed says, from Constantinople to Pekin.

This portion of the Shah-Nameh, (which is in four columns, and came from the library of the Sophis of Persia,) contains the end of the poem; and the inscription states, that the volume was copied in the year 1012 of the Hegira (A.D. 1604) by the hand of Mohammed-Djan; the writing is very elegant.

The specimen No. 2 in Plate XVII., is taken from a manuscript of the poetry of Hafiz, belonging to M. Reinaud, member of the Institute, written by a celebrated Persian scribe, named Hedayat-Allah. In 1828, the King of Persia, being desirous to make a present to the Emperor of Russia, sent him a copy of the work of Hafiz, written by this scribe. The specimen No. 3 in the same Plate, is a fragment of the romance-history of Hatim-Tai, a personage of ancient

India, celebrated for his liberality.

written in India, and is of recent date.

This manuscript was

The specimen No. 4 is the ordinary writing of the public offices, and is known by the name of diwani; the lines of which are often raised at the end.

Plate XVIII. is copied from a Persian poem, intitled The Amours of Jupiter and the Sun. The manuscript appears to be of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the beautiful illustration which accompanies this specimen affords a favourable idea of the talent of the Persian miniaturists.

The manuscript which has furnished the specimens of writing and painting in Plate XIX. is, on the contrary, of Indian origin. It contains the romance of Kamrup, a work in prose, translated into Persian from the Indian text. This volume is executed in the Persian writing of India, very regular, sloping but little, and much nearer in form to the Arabic neskhi than to the Persian taalik.

The miniature is also of Indian execution, as shewn by the physiognomies and costumes of the personages. This manuscript, which is of the nineteenth century, belongs also to the Bibliothèque Royale, to which it was presented by M. Jomard. It presents to us the means of bringing down to our own time the series of specimens necessary for exhibiting the successive state of the graphic art among the ancient and modern Persians; a nation contemporary with the earliest generations of the human race, and with which are historically intermingled the most ancient vestiges of India, Babylon, Arabia, and Egypt, as well as the impenetrable mysteries of the primitive Bactria.

PLATE XX.

PHOENICIAN WRITING.

DATE UNKNOWN.

FRAGMENT ON EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS.

FOR several centuries archæologists have applied themselves with praiseworthy zeal to the discovery and interpretation of Phoenician monuments of every kind. Coins and inscriptions were at first the only objects of investigation; soon afterwards many medals and bilingual inscriptions, Phoenician and Greek, more directly favored their researches; but manuscripts were unknown. It was not even supposed that the smallest fragment of this kind was in existence, until Egypt, which seems to have entertained the idea of preserving authentic documents of the annals of the earliest civilized nations, unexpectedly restored, together with her own national writings, several leaves of Phoenician books, written upon papyrus.

The Plate represents one of these leaves, belonging to the precious collection of manuscripts in the Musée Royal of the Louvre.

This leaf is not the only one hitherto known. Two others are preserved in the Royal Museum of Turin, and four were in the rich collection of the late Duc de Blacas; all these leaves were brought from Egypt.

Their existence in that celebrated country is perfectly natural; the proximity of Egypt and Phoenicia readily explains it; nor is it more remarkable, that Phoenician monuments should have been discovered in the Isle of Cyprus, at Athens, Malta, Sicily, and in Africa; the Phoenicians having traded to all the coasts of the Mediterranean.

From a general survey of the Phoenician monuments known up to the present time, some definite views have been sought to be gained, concerning the most ancient of them; and the earliest date has been assigned to the coins of Cilicia, which are considered to be of the year 394 B.C.

The primitive antiquities of the Phoenicians, however, go back to a much earlier age. The people thus named is one of the most ancient known, and most anciently civilized; yet it is but a branch of the great Arab family; its language being very analogous to the Hebrew, and, like the Hebrew itself, only a dialect of the Arabic, preserving all the characteristic types of its origin. Now, since the time of Abraham, at least, that is to say, during a period of 4000 years, documentary history furnishes us with accounts of this great family, to which belong all the ancient monuments of the Peninsula of Arabia, and all the Hebrew, Phoenician, Ethiopian, Chaldæan, and Syriac writings. The Arab nation and the Arab language are the original stock of all these nations and languages; the alphabets alone are different, and the formation of alphabets is too arbitrary to influence the constitution of an idiom. Hence it is with just cause that philologists of all periods have considered the Hebrew language as a certain means of interpretation of the monuments written in the Phoenician tongue, the alphabet of which alone remained to be discovered; and the bilingual inscriptions, in which various proper names are found written, both in Phoenician and Greek, supplied with certainty the elements of interpretation. It happened, however, that whilst the Phoenician monuments discovered in so many parts of Asia and Africa present inscriptions written in similar or nearly similar characters, their language is less uniform.

With respect to the written Phoenician monuments discovered in Egypt, it has been supposed, that the texts of these monuments were written in Phoenician characters, but in the

Aramæan dialect of Egypt, a dialect used in Ethiopia, in which we possess a nearly complete translation of the Bible, and which is also referable to the common Arabic stock*.

The Phoenician monuments of Egypt are divided into several classes, not only from their form and matter, but also from their intrinsic character; engraved stones, bearing figures of Egyptian divinities, with their Egyptian names in Phoenician letters; other stones entirely Aramæan, both in their subject and inscription; bas-reliefs of Egyptian rites, with Phoenician inscriptions; leaves of manuscripts purely Aramæan in idiom and writing; and lastly other leaves of Jewish origin, and written for the use of that people.

The Abbé Barthélemy published in 1761+ the explanation of a funerary Egyptian stele, accompanied by a Phoenician inscription in four lines, a bas-relief which exists in the Public Library at Carpentras. It is the adoration of Osiris by a Phoenician woman, converted to the Egyptian worship.

The alphabet of this inscription does not materially differ from that found on the leaves of papyrus, if the material of these two kinds of monuments is considered; the papyrus allowing the brush or calamus to give to the letters slender and rounded forms, whilst the incision of an inscription on a stone, or other hard material, necessarily produces rectangular and massive forms.

The writing of the fac-simile is to be read from right to left, like all other eastern writings.

* See Gesenius, Scripturæ linguæque Phoenicia monumenta. Lipsia, 1837, 4to.

+ See the Mém. de l'Academie des Inscriptions, tom. xxx., p. 405. -ED.

Not all, but only those of Semitic origin; since the languages of the Arian stock are read from left to right.-Ed.