golden ornaments.  The halls of their palaces were of great size and imposing effect.  Next to palaces, the most remarkable buildings were the tombs of kings; but we have no remains of marble statues or metal castings or ivory carvings, not even of potteries, which at that time in other countries were common and beautiful.  The gems and signet rings which the Persians engraved possessed much merit, and on them were wrought with great skill the figures of men and animals; but the nearest approach to sculpture were the figures of colossal bulls set to guard the portals of palaces, and these were probably borrowed from the Assyrians.

Nor were the Persians celebrated for their textile fabrics and dyes.  “So long as the carpets of Babylon, the shawls of India, the fine linen of Egypt, and the coverlets of Damascus poured continually into Persia in the way of tribute and gifts, there was no stimulus to manufacture.”  The same may be said of the ornamental metal-work of the Greeks, and the glass manufacture of the Phoenicians.  The Persians were soldiers, and gloried in being so, to the disdain of much that civilization has ever valued.

It may as well be here said that the Iranians, both Medes and Persians, were acquainted with the art of writing.  Harpagus sent a letter to Cyrus concealed in the belly of a hare, and Darius signed a decree which his nobles presented to him in writing.  In common with the Babylonians they used the same alphabetic system, though their languages were unlike,—­namely, the cuneiform or arrow-head or wedge-shaped characters, as seen in the celebrated inscriptions of Darius on the side of a high rock thirty feet from the ground.  We cannot determine whether the Medes and Persians brought their alphabet from their original settlements in Central Asia, or derived it from the Turanian and Semitic nations with which they came in contact.  In spite of their knowledge of writing, however, they produced no literature of any account, and of science they were completely ignorant.  They made few improvements even in military weapons, the chief of which, as among all the nations of antiquity, were the bow, the spear, and the sword.  They were skilful horsemen, and made use of chariots of war.  Their great occupation, aside from agriculture, was hunting, in which they were trained by exposure for war.  They were born to conquer and rule, like the Romans, and cared for little except the warlike virtues.

Such were the Persians and the rugged country in which they lived, with their courage and fortitude, their love of freedom, their patriotism, their abhorrence of lies, their self-respect allied with pride, their temperance and frugality, forming a noble material for empire and dominion when the time came for the old monarchies to fall into their hands,—­the last and greatest of all the races that had ruled the Oriental world, and kindred in their remote ancestry with those European conquerors who laid the foundation of modern civilization.