In the adaptations of this to the requirements of an agglutinative speech a process of simplifying had occurred quite similar to that which the Japanese present upon the transmission to them of the graphic system of the Chinese. The Semitic Babylonian system which was originally adopted from the cuneiform of a Turanian people, had developed a complicated and cumbrous method of writing, including over five hundred signs. This had arisen in the attempts to adapt a syllabary and characters expressing an agglutinative speech to the uses of a Semitic language. It was from this that the Persian cuneiform was derived, and in the further simplicity which appeared in the transmission of this to an Aryan people, and its applications to an Aryan speech, that we find a development towards alphabetism. With the adoption of the Proto-Medic cuneiform by the Medes and Persians, many of the syllabic signs, instead of representing syllables came on the acrologic principle to be used as alphabetic characters. As certain of these signs retained a syllabic character, the Persian cuneiform was never a pure alphabet, though far on the way to this as early as the period of the Achæmenian kings. Dr. Taylor says of this: “The idea of alphabetism may not improbably have been suggested to the Persians by their acquaintance with the Phœnician alphabet, which as early as the eighth century B. C. was used in the valley of the Euphrates concurrently with cuneiform writing.” At the date of the Persepolitan and Behistun inscriptions, and during the two previous centuries, the Aramean alphabet, daughter of the Phœnician, had been a commercial script of the Semitic people of northern Mesopotamia and Syria. At the time of Darius it was used at the courts of the Assyrian kings in official records, and later on at Babylon. Again, upon the decline of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and with these the decadence of the cuneiform, this was superseded by the Aramean alphabet. Of this, however, later on. Whatever influences the alphabet of Aram may have had in suggesting the idea of alphabetism to the originators of the Persian cuneiform, the result was original and distinct. Of this Persian cuneiform, which has furnished the key to the decipherment of all cuneiform, the fullest vocabulary has been found in the Behistun inscriptions. The rock on which these are engraved is situated near the western frontier of Persia on the direct route from Babylon to Ecbatana. It rises an isolated mountain from the plain to a height of seventeen hundred feet.