It is peculiarly noticeable in the Persian sculptures and inscriptions that they carry to excess that reserve which Orientals have always maintained with regard to women.  The inscriptions are wholly devoid of all reference to the softer sex, and the sculptures give us no representation of a female.  In Persia, at the present day, it is regarded as a gross indecorum to ask a man after his wife; and anciently it would seem that the whole sex fell under a law of taboo, which required that, whatever the real power and influence of women, all public mention of them, as well as all representations of the female form, should be avoided.  If this were so, it must of course still more have been the rule that the women—­or, at any rate, those of the upper classes—­should not be publicly seen.  Hence the indignant refusal of Vashti to obey the command of King Aha-suerus to show herself to his Court.  Hence, too, the law which made it a capital offence to address or touch one of the royal concubines or even to pass their litters upon the road.  The litters of women were always curtained; and when the Queen Statira rode in hers with the curtains drawn, it was a novelty which attracted general attention, as a relaxation of the ordinary etiquette, though only females were allowed to come near her.  Married women might not even see their nearest male relatives, as their fathers and brothers; the unmarried had, it is probable, a little more liberty.

As the employment of eunuchs at the Persian Court was mainly in the harem, and in offices connected therewith, it is no wonder that they shared, to some extent, in the law of taboo, which forbade the representation of women.  Their proper place was in the female courts and apartments, or in close attendance upon the litters, when members of the seraglio travelled, or took the air—­not in the throne-room, or the antechambers, or the outer courts of the palace, which alone furnished the scenes regarded as suitable for representation.

Of right, the position at the Persian Court immediately below that of the king belonged to the members of certain privileged families.  Besides the royal family itself—­or clan of the Achaemenidae—­there were six great houses which had a rank superior to that of all the other grandees.  According to Herodotus these houses derived their special dignity from the accident that their heads had been fellow-conspirators with Darius Hystaspis; but there is reason to suspect that the rank of the families was precedent to the conspiracy in question, certain families conspiring because they were great, and not becoming great because they conspired.  At any rate, from the time of Darius I., there seem to have been seven great families, including that of the Achaemenidae, whose chiefs had the privilege of free communication with the monarch, and from which he was legally bound to choose his legitimate wives.  The chiefs appear to have been known as “the Seven Princes,” or “the