It is not easy to account for the discrepancy in the statements about the number of men each of the vessels carried, or to comprehend the facility with which they were drawn up on a beach in the face of an approaching storm, or how they could, as Herodotus suggests, have been transported across the isthmus. Possibly Herodotus was misinformed as to the number of men in each of the vessels. Curiously enough, the descriptions preserved of the fleets and maritime exploits of Cyrus, and of other great conquerors, partake of the same character as these recorded of Xerxes, and are equally inconsistent, when we look to the capacity of the vessels as compared with the apparent ease with which they could be moved about on dry land. Although the ancients had capstans, of which Herodotus speaks, and were conversant with pulleys, and with the best mode of transporting, by means of manual labour, aided by blocks and rollers, heavy weights across land, it is difficult to understand how any vessels competent to convey between two and three hundred men each, could, just as a storm was coming on, have been hauled high and dry upon a beach with sufficient speed.[192] A vessel of size sufficient to take that number of men even for a short distance and across a smooth sea, must have been, according to the present mode of measurement, of at least seventy tons register. But no vessel of that tonnage, or of three-fourths that size, could be drawn up on a beach, much less across an isthmus, with the facility the narrative of Herodotus presumes, unless the ancients had methods for transporting their vessels on shore of which no accounts have been preserved. A vessel of fifty-five tons register might hold between two and three hundred men, and transport them, in a calm, across the smooth and narrow waters of the Hellespont; but to attempt to make a voyage of no greater distance than from Constantinople to Athens, in the craft of those days, measuring fifty-five tons, with so many men on board, would be attended with very considerable risk, and, this too, without taking into consideration the convenience of the troops, or the space required for their stores and accoutrements. FOOTNOTES: [152] Dr. Young, not Champollion, was the first to discover the true method of deciphering the hieroglyphics by determining that “certain characters in the Proper Names, whatever may have been their original import, were employed to represent sounds.” This he published, in 1819, in the “Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica.” Two years later, in 1821, M. Champollion published at Grenoble a work in which he still asserted “that hieroglyphics are not phonetic,” and “that hieroglyphical symbols are the signs of things, and not the signs of sounds.” [153] Herod. ii. 109. [154] Tacit. Ann. ii. 60. [155] Texier, “Asie Mineure,” ii. p. 304. Cf. Herod. i. 106. [156] Herod. i. 112, 154. Compare also Strabo, xvii. 1147. Joseph. Ant. Jud. xiv. 8. [157] Herod. ii. 179.