The charge that Daniel misapprehended the relative position of the Medes and Persians at the capture of Babylon, regarding the supremacy of the Medes as still continuing, is unjust, and rests on an omission to look carefully to the original text. It is true that the Medes are placed before the Persians in the words of the handwriting upon the wall, and also in the formula, "according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not." But this honorary precedence assigned to the Medes is a mere trace of their ancient supremacy--a trace much more strongly marked in Greek writers, who actually call Cyrus and his successors "Medes"--and is not an indication of its continuance. Daniel twice marks very strongly the subordinate position of the Medes, stating in one place[91] that Darius the Mede "_received_ the kingdom"--_i.e._, was given it by another; and further declaring that he "_was made king_ over the nation of the Chaldæans,"[92] using in this case an expression which distinctly implies that he derived his position from some superior authority, which made him king.[93] The notion that Susa, or at any rate, its palace, was not built at the time when Daniel says that he saw himself in vision there, rests wholly upon a statement made by Pliny, six hundred years later, that "Susa, the ancient regal city of the Persians, was built by Darius Hystaspis."[94] Now this statement, one of very weak authority, had we nothing to set against it, is contrary to the declarations of various other classical authorities, among them notably of Herodotus; and is completely disproved by the Assyrian inscriptions, which show that Susa was one of the most ancient of all the Mesopotamian cities, and that its "palace" was famous for many centuries before the time of Daniel. The truth which underlies Pliny's statement, is the fact that Darius Hystaspis was the first Persian monarch to build a palace at Susa after the Persian fashion; but the ancient residence of the Susian kings, the Memnonium, as the Greeks called it, had existed for considerably more than a thousand years when the son of Hystaspes began his edifice.