In conclusion, we may notice as a blot upon the Persian character and system, the cruelty and barbarity which was exhibited, not only in these abnormal acts of tyranny and violence, but also in the regular and legal punishments which were assigned to crimes and offences.  The criminal code, which—­rightly enough—­made death the penalty of murder, rape, treason, and rebellion, instead of stopping at this point, proceeded to visit with a like severity even such offences as deciding a cause wrongfully on account of a bribe, intruding without permission on the king’s privacy, approaching near to one of his concubines, seating oneself, even accidentally, on the throne, and the like.  The modes of execution were also, for the most part, unnecessarily cruel.  Poisoners were punished by having their heads placed upon a broad stone, and then having their faces crushed, and their brains beaten out by repeated blows with another stone.  Ravishers and rebels were put to death by crucifixion.  The horrible punishment of “the boat” seems to have been no individual tyrant’s cruel conception, but a recognized and legal form of execution.  The same may be said also of burying alive.  Again the Persian secondary punishments were for the most part exceedingly barbarous.  Xenophon tells us, as a proof of the good government maintained by the younger Cyrus, in his satrapy, that under his sway it was common to see along all the most frequented roads numbers of persons who had had their hands or feet cut off, or their eyes put out, as a punishment for thieving and rascality.  And other writers relate that similar mutilations were inflicted on rebels, and even on 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.