Persian monuments; these were afterwards annexed by an Italian named Careri, who published them as his own. But the earliest inscription to be reproduced in full was a short one inscribed by Darius I. over the windows of his palace, which had been copied by Sir John Chardin during one of his two visits to Persepolis (in 1665 and 1673). Chardin was the son of a Huguenot jeweller in Paris, and after returning from his travels settled in London, where he became a great favourite of Charles II., and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. The inscription he had copied, however, was not printed in the earlier edition of his Travels, and had to wait until 1735 before it saw the light.[1] The existence of the cuneiform script thus became known in Europe, and that was all. It was not until Carsten Niebuhr, the father of the better-known historian, had been sent by the Danish Government on an exploring mission to the East that fairly complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions of Persepolis were at last put into the hands of European scholars. Niebuhr, who sacrificed his sight to the work, returned to Denmark in 1767, and seven years later the first of the three volumes in which the scientific results of his travels were embodied was published at Copenhagen. With the publication of the second volume, which contained his description of the Persepolitan monuments, the attempt to decipher the cuneiform characters began. He himself had noticed that in the first of the three classes or systems of cuneiform writing of which every inscription consisted, only forty-two characters were employed, and he therefore concluded that the system was alphabetic. Another Dane, Bishop Münter, discovered that the words in it were divided from one another by an oblique wedge,[2] and further showed that the monuments must belong to the age of Cyrus and his successors.[3] One word, which occurs without any variation towards the beginning of each inscription, he correctly inferred to signify “king”; but beyond this he was unable to advance.