The great importance of these texts arises from the fact that they give the genealogy of the Achæmenidæ, and confirm the statements transmitted to us on this subject by the Greeks, which are in direct opposition to the traditions of the modern Persians. The text of Artaxerxes III contains the genealogy of that king upward to the names of Hystaspes and Arsames, who were the father and grandfather of Darius Hystaspes of the Achæmenian line. A LATER PERSIAN TABLET. A much later tablet is merely a note of hand given by a Persian king (Pacorus II), with a promise to pay “in the month of Iyar (April) in the Temple of the sun in Babylon,” and it also bears the names of four witnesses. This little clay tablet was discovered by Dr. Oppert in the Museum of the Society of Antiquarians at Zurich, and has been carefully translated by him. It is interesting mostly from the fact of its comparatively modern origin, King Pacorus II having been contemporary with the Emperor Titus and Domitian. Some of the names mentioned upon it are Babylonish, and some of them Persian. All the witnesses, however, bear Persian names which may even be called modern. King Pacorus II commenced his reign A.D. 77, and hence this is the only tablet, so far as known, which belongs to the Christian era. RÉSUMÉ. These sculptured temples and graven stones have lain in the path of the ages with silent lips, but the questioning hand of the nineteenth century has broken the spell and wrested the story of the past even from the “heaps” of Nineveh and Babylon. From mountain cliff, from palace wall, from corner-stone and fallen pillar comes the same historic voice that speaks to us from the forgotten libraries of buried kings. The literature of the tablets comes into our own age, leading a splendid retinue of historic figures—Sargon, the early king of Accad, with his imperishable library, with the monuments and tablets of Assyria, then Nineveh, “that great city,” with her temples and palaces, where the gilded tiles of many a a dome flashed back the glory of the setting sun— Babylon, “the joy of the whole earth,” and “the beauty of the Chaldee’s excellency,” who for centuries held her position as the queen of the world’s commerce, and through whose hands the wealth of the Euphrates flowed down to the Persian Gulf. Babylon, with her maze of life and color, with her silver vases and golden vessels, with her princely halls and gorgeous hangings, with the breath of the myrtle and the bay, borne upward from her terraced gardens and moonlight meads. Then the scene changes, and the kingly Cyrus is riding at the head of his Medo-Persian cohorts, and the crown of the Orient is within his grasp. “Bel boweth down—Nebo stoopeth,” and the seat of government is removed, and “the daughter of the Chaldeans” sits in the dust beneath the foot of the invader.