“To Hades, the land whence none return, I turn myself, I spread like a bird my hands. I descend, I descend, to the house of darkness, the dwelling of the god Irkalla. To the house out of which there is no exit. To the road from which there is no return, To the house from whose entrance the light is taken, The place where dust is their nourishment, and mud their food, And its chiefs are like birds covered with feathers; Light is never seen, in darkness they dwell. In that house, O my friend, which I shall enter. There is treasured up for me a crown. With those wearing crowns, who from days of old ruled the earth. To whom the gods Anu and Bel have given names of rule.” But it is time for us to return to the inscriptions of Cyrus. Next to the fact that he was a polytheist, the most startling revelation they make is that he was not a king of Persia at all. Persia seems to have been acquired by him after his conquest of Astyages, at some time between the sixth and ninth year of Nabonidos. Both he and his ancestors were kings of Anzan or Elam. It is true, he could trace his descent back to a member of the royal Persian clan, Teispes, who appears to have taken possession of Elam during the troublous period that followed the fall of Assyria, and to have resigned his Persian dominions to his son Ariaramnes, the great-grandfather of Darius. It must be this conquest of Elam which was prophesied by Jeremiah at the beginning of Zedekiah’s reign (Jer. xlix. 34-39), and the result of it was to make Cyrus an Elamite in education and religion. The empire which he founded was not a Persian one; Darius, the son of Hystaspes, was the real founder of that. It was only as the predecessor of Darius, and for the sake of intelligibility to the readers of a later day, that Cyrus could be called a king of Persia, as he is in the Book of Ezra, where the original words of his proclamation, “king of Elam” have been changed into the more familiar and intelligible “king of Persia” (Ez. i. 2.). Elsewhere in the Bible (Isa. xxi. 1-10), where the invasion of Babylonia is described, there is no mention of Persia, only of Elam and Media, that is to say, of the ancestral dominions of Cyrus and that kingdom of Ekbatana which he had annexed. This is in strict accordance with the revelations of the monuments, and is a most interesting testimony to the accuracy of the Old Testament records.