In the earliest civilization, that of Egypt, it would seem as though torture was too opposed to the whole theory of judicial proceedings to be employed, if we are to believe the description which Diodorus Siculus gives of the solemn and mysterious tribunals, where written pleadings alone were allowed, lest the judges should be swayed by the eloquence of the human voice, and where the verdict was announced, in the unbroken silence, by the presiding judge touching the successful suitor with an image of the Goddess of Truth.[1376] Yet a papyrus recently interpreted gives us a judicial record of a trial, in the reign of Rameses IX. of the XXth Dynasty (circa 1200 B. C.), of the robbers of the tomb of the Pharaoh Sebakemsauf, and this shows how the accused, after confession, were tortured for confirmation, first by scourging and then by squeezing the hands and feet, showing that, sometimes at least, this mode of ascertaining the truth was employed.[1377] Among the Semitic races we find torture used as a regular judicial process by the Assyrians,[1378] though the Mosaic jurisprudence is free from any indication that the Hebrew law-dispensers regarded it as a legitimate expedient. Earnest advocates of the torture system, in the eighteenth century, however, did not hesitate to adduce the ordeal of the bitter water of jealousy as a torture which justified the employment in modern times of the rack and strappado. In the earliest Aryan records, so far as we can judge from the fragments remaining of the Zoroastrian law, torture had no recognized place. Astyages was rather a Mede than a Persian, and therefore no conclusion can be drawn from his readiness to employ it when he sought to extort the truth from unwilling witnesses, as related by Herodotus;[1379] but the savage punishments which Darius boasts of inflicting upon the rival pretenders to his throne[1380] presuppose a readiness to resort to the most violent means of intimidation, which could scarcely fail to include torture as an extra-judicial means of investigation when milder methods failed. To the other great branch of the Aryan stock which founded the Indian civilization, torture would likewise seem to have been unknown as a legitimate resource; at least it has left no trace of its existence in the elaborate provisions of the Hindu law as handed down to us for nearly three thousand years. In the Institutes of Manu there are very minute directions as to evidence, the testimony preferred being that of witnesses, whose comparative credibility is very carefully discussed, and when such evidence is not attainable, the parties, as we have seen above, are ordered to be sworn or tried by the ordeal. These principles have been transmitted unchanged to the present day.[1381]