The first clue to these questions was, as in the parallel case of Egypt, afforded by a trilingual inscription. The kings of the Persian Empire reigned over subjects of various races and languages. The three principal were the Persians, an Aryan race who spoke an inflectional language which has been preserved in old Persian and Zend; Semites, who spoke Aramaic, a language closely allied to Hebrew; and descendants of the older Accadian races, whose language was Turanian, or agglutinative. It is almost the same at the present day in the same region, where edicts or inscriptions, to be readily intelligible to all classes of subjects, would require to be made in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Accordingly, the pompous inscriptions and royal edicts of these ancient monarchs were frequently made in the three languages, and specimens of these were brought to Europe. The difficulty of deciphering them was, however, great, for the inscriptions were all written, though in different languages, in the same cuneiform characters, so that the aid afforded in the case of the Rosetta stone by a Greek translation of the hieroglyphic inscription was not forthcoming. The ingenuity of a German scholar, Grotefend, furnished the first clue by discovering that certain groups of signs represented the names of known Persian kings, and thus identifying the component signs in the Persian inscription as letters of an alphabet. A few years later Sir Henry Rawlinson copied, and succeeded in deciphering, a famous inscription engraved by the great Persian monarch, Darius the first, high up in the face of a precipice forming the wall of a narrow defile at Behistan, and giving an historical record of the exploits of his reign. The clue thus afforded was rapidly followed up by a host of scholars, among whom the names of Rawlinson, Burnouf, Lassen, and Oppert were most conspicuous, and before long the text of inscriptions in Persian and Semitic could be read with great certainty. The task was one which required a vast amount of patience and ingenuity, for the cuneiform writing turned out to be one of great complexity, Though phonetic in the main, the characters did not always represent the simple elements of sounds, or letters of an alphabet, but frequently syllables containing one or more consonants united by vowels, and a considerable number were ideographic or conventional representations of ideas, like our numerals 1, 2, 3, which have no relation to spoken sounds. Thus the simple vertical wedge [symbol] represented "man," and was prefixed to proper names of kings so as to show that the signs which followed denoted the name of a man; the sign [symbol] denoted country, and so on. The difficulties were, however, surmounted, and inscriptions in the two known languages could be read with considerable certainty. [Illustration]