of Potiphar's wife. We have no information in the Scriptures as to the causes of their imprisonment, or why, after their liberation, one should have been restored to favour, and the other executed; but it is more than probable that the chief baker was executed to appease popular fury, which the alternate vicissitudes of famine and plenty in Egypt would excite, and not altogether from a mere despotical caprice.

The Persians, like the modern Jews, draw lines on the walls of the apartments in which their children are born, and use various charms for the preservation of their infants. The Eastern women suffer little from parturition, and are often delivered "ere the midwives come in unto them," Exod. i. 19. It often happens that, after the birth of a son, if the child be sick, or if there are any other causes of grief, the mother makes a vow that no razor shall come upon the child's head for a certain time, and sometimes for his whole life. A similar custom existed among the Jews. Hannah resolved, if she was blessed with a man-child, to “give him unto the Lord all the days of his life; there shall no razor come upon his head," I Sam. i. 11; and in the Scriptures the unshaven head is an expression of grief, and a vow to that effect was held as an act of penitent humiliation. On the day the child is weaned, which if a male is done at the end of two years and two months, and if a female, is at the end of two years complete, they carry it to the mosque, where they perform certain acts of devotion, analogous to the custom which occasionally prevailed among the Jews, of taking their children and presenting them "in the house of the Lord," -a custom which has a complete parallel in the rite of confirmation in the Christian Church. The Persians give a feast to their relatives and friends on such occasions, which was also customary among the Jews; and with reference to Isaac we are told that "the child grew, and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast the day that Isaac was weaned," Gen. xxi. 8, which, according to some old

authorities, did not take place till Isaac was five years old.

At burials the Persians appear to rejoice instead of uttering lamentations, collecting round the grave, and singing and dancing to the sound of music. We have an instance of the same kind in the mourning of David for his infant son by Bathsheba. As long as the child lived David fasted, and lay upon the earth; but when he was told that the child was dead, he "arose from the earth, and washed, and changed his apparel." It is to be observed that David's conduct excited considerable astonishment in his court, which, however, he explained in a most satisfactory and philosophic manner, 2 Sam. xii. 20-23. The Persian mode of salutation among intimate friends is that of inclining the body over each other's neck, and then touching cheek to cheek, which is much the same as the "falling upon the neck and kissing," so frequently mentioned in the Old and New Testaments.

The strong analogy discovered between the manners of the Persians and the Jews, and the existence of various observances among the former mentioned in the Scriptures, are apparent in numerous instances. On some occasions, for example, a party of fanatics walk about the streets of the towns almost naked, with their loins only covered, and their bodies streaming with blood from the voluntary cuts which they give themselves. The Israelites were forbidden to practise these mortifications by Moses, Levit. xix. 28; Deut. xiv. 1; but the priests of Baal "cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them," 1 Kings xviii. 28; Jer. xvi. 5, 6, 7. In the 56th Psalm there occurs the expression, "Put thou my tears in a bottle,” which is practically illustrated by a curious Persian custom. In some of their mournful assemblies, the Persians contrive to shed tears immoderately, and a Mahometan priest goes about to each person at the height of his grief with a piece of cotton in his hand, with which he carefully collects the

falling tears, and then squeezes the tearbedewed cotton into a bottle, which is preserved with great care, and administered in drops to dying persons, in the hope of reviving them. "Smiting the breast" is also a common act during some of their religious observances, which is done after unbuttoning the top of the shirt, and laying the breast bare. The Persians esteem the morning to be the best time to drink wine when they intend to commit a debauch, by which means they carry on their excess till night. This custom completely explains the denunciation in the Prophecy of Isaiah (v. 11), "Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning that they may follow strong drink, that continue until night, until wine inflames them." Carpets are sometimes spread under a wall in the broad part of a street where the vizier transacts business, which certainly explains what Job says of himself in the days of his prosperity (xxix. 7), that he "prepared his seat in the street."

In Persia, as in the adjacent Eastern countries, people sleep on the tops of their houses, beds being spread on the terraces, without any covering. That this was also a Jewish custom is evident from the passage in the Second Book of Samuel (xi. 2), where it is said, “that at evening-tide David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's house."

The modern Persians, however, differ widely from their martial ancestors, whose empire was at one time the most important in the civilized world. When we read of the glories of the reign of Cyrus, the vast resources of Persia in the time of Xerxes, and the brave contests sustained by Darius against Alexander the Great, we must at once perceive the striking contrast, and reckon Persia miserably prostrated in the scale of nations. The numerous revolutions which have occurred in Persia, especially in more mo→ dern times not excited by the people, but by different claimants to the sovereignty-have greatly retarded the reviv ing prosperity of Persia, while they have

weakened its political importance, and rendered the government fluctuating and uncertain. The wars of the Persians with the Turks have been characterized by all the fierceness of sectarian ferocity; the Russians have wrested from the Persians some of their finest provinces; and even at the present time the country is unsettled and distracted, although her sovereign is reputed wise, and her people high-minded and enlightened.

It has been observed, that the early history of Persia, like many other countries of Asia, is enveloped in almost impenetrable obscurity. The Arabs conquered Persia about the middle of the seventh century, and compelled its inhabitants to embrace the Islam Faith. The fire worship of the Guebres was destroyed by the sword, and with it all the historical materials which existed before that period. "It is only the history," says M. Julius Klaproth, "of the last Persian dynasty, the Sassanides, from A.D. 227 to A.D. 651, that has been written with some degree of purity by the native historians, but its chronology is quite uncertain, and its facts are unimportant. The history of the Parthian dynasty, and of the princes who reigned in Persia after the death of Alexander the Great, or from the third century before to the third century after the Christian era, consists of an extremely incomplete catalogue of kings, unaccompanied by dates, written by Mahometan historians of Persia; and we find a very scanty supply of particulars relating to this period among the Greeks. The history of the rulers of Persia, from Cyrus to Darius, or to the conquest of the empire by the Macedonian hero, is quite dis figured by the native historians, and unaccompanied by any dates. They make Alexander the son of Darius by the daughter of Philip of Macedon, who was demanded in marriage by him, and sent back to her father, after she was pregnant, on account of the offensiveness of her breath. Of Cyrus they know nothing. Those historical dynasties are preceded by the mythological dynasty of Pishdadier,

with which begins Kaiumarath, who is said to have been Adam by some, Noah by others, and who is supposed to have been a grandson of Shem. This is the state of the histories of Persia as they have been preserved in that country. They can neither be reconciled with the Grecian narratives, nor with the extremely meagre and indefinite accounts which are found in the religious books of the Parsees in India. Almost their only source is the Shahnameh. Firdewsï's great mythological and historical heroic poem, which he compiled at the beginning of the eleventh century of the Christian era, was written by command of the Sultan Mahmoud of Gasna, and for materials he had what was transmitted by the Fire-Worshippers and the Greeks."

This learned foreigner has given, in the above passage, perhaps, a faithful statement respecting the ancient history of Persia. The Mahometan writers, more, over, in what they have recorded of Persian history, have invariably fallen into the common error of their religious creed, and incorporated all the fabulous traditions originated by Mahomet, and mixed them with the facts of the Mosaic history. What dependence, for example, could be placed on the authenticity of a work in which fable is seriously narrated as truth at the very outset? Of this we have a remarkable instance in the case of a Persian writer named Chodja Rashid. Gasan Khan, a descendant of the famous Ghenghis Khan, who reigned in Persia towards the end of the thirteenth, and at the beginning of the fourteenth century, commissioned Chodja Rashid, his private secretary, to write the history of the Mongolian nation down to his time, to make use of the old Mongolian records in the royal archives for that purpose, and to consult several aged men who were acquainted with the Mongolian language, then almost forgotten in Persia, and with the oral traditions of those people. At the very outset of this work, which is described by those Oriental scholars who have seen it as being highly valuable, Chodja Rashid, in the

true spirit of a Mahometan writer, thus gravely says, "We know from the his torian of Islam, and the Pentateuch of the Children of Israel (may he be blessed!) that Noah divided the earth from south to north into three parts. He gave the first to his son Ham, who was the father of the Sudan, or the Black Ethiopians; the middle division he gave to Shem, who was the father of the Arabians and Persians; and the third to Japheth, father of the Turks. One of his sons went towards the east, and he also is called Japheth by the Mongols and Turks; he is also call ed Abuldjeh Khan by the Turks; yet the learned do not know whether this Abuldjeh Khan was a son of the prophet Noah, or a son of one of his sons. He, however, derives his descent from him, and his descendants are the Mongols, the Turkish nations, and the inhabitants of the steppes of Asia." Such traditions, of which this is a specimen, almost nullify history as much as the custom of the Hindoos, among whom superstition has destroyed it, because considering this life merely as a state of sorrow and trial which must be passed through, they do not reckon its occurrences worthy of record.

It is, however, right to lay before the reader some observations of a different nature, respecting the doubts and difficulties connected with Persian history as given by the Greek writers, which are worthy of attention. The Persians have indeed evinced a greater anxiety than many other nations to preserve their records in writing; yet by a singular coincidence they have been unsuccessful, and, like most other nations of antiquity, they are indebted for their fame to foreign historians. With a few accidental exceptions, the documents of their history which recorded the acts of their governments have perished; and the various inscriptions on some of the magnificent ruins of ancient cities renowned for their greatness and their grandeur, such as Persepolis, for example, are as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics of Egypt, unless a key to the alphabet in which they:

are composed is discovered. The ancient historians of Persia were Jews and Greeks; of the former we have the sacred writers Ezra and Nehemiah, some of the later prophets, and the author of the Book of Esther, who gives an admirable description of the Persian court; and of the latter we have Herodotus, Ctesias, Xenophon, and Arrian. It was on account of the various relationships which the Persians had with foreign nations during the greatness and glory of their monarchy, that writers of other countries became the historians of this vast and at one period powerful empire. Ctesias. resided as a physician at the court of Artaxerxes, the same prince against whom Xenophon was engaged in the army of his younger brother. His work on Persian history extends to twenty-three books, of which only a few fragments now remain; but his residence at the Persian court afforded him many advantages, and gave him access to all those archives which were not destroyed by the Arabs, during their conquest of Persia in the seventh century. "Herodotus," observes Professor Heeren of the University of Gottingen ("Historical Researches into the Politics, Intercourse, and Trade of the Principal Nations of Antiquity, translated from the German," Oxford, 1833), "visited Asia rather as an observant traveller than as an historian, but his love of knowledge, bis unwearied curiosity, his sound judgment, his candour and simplicity, so conspicuous in every part of his work-qualities which are the readiest and surest introductions a traveller can have procured him access to the same authorities from which Ctesias derived his information. He has, indeed, no where expressly informed us that he drew his knowledge of Asiatic history from written records, but the attentive observer cannot fail to remark a multitude of particulars which could scarcely be derived from any other source."

"The Persians," continues Professor Heeren, in another part of his valuable work, "had not, as far as we know, any historical poet, far less any historian,

properly so called-a want common to all the East. The sort of history they did possess was closely connected with their polity, and a fruit of their des potic government, and of the almost idolatrous respect in which their kings were held. Whatever their monarchs said or did was of course worthy of being recorded, and to this intent his person was usually surrounded by scribes or secretaries, whose office it was to register all his words and actions. They were in almost constant attendance on the sovereign, and especially when he appeared in public. They are repeatedly mentioned, on very dissimilar occasions, by Jewish as well as Grecian writers. They attended the monarch at festivals (Esther iii. 12, viii. 9; Ezra vi. 1), at public reviews (Herod. vii. 100), and even in the midst of the tumult of battle (Herod. viii. 90), and noted down the words which fell from him on such occasions. To them also was committed the task of reducing to writing the commands and ordinances of the king, which, according to the customs of the East, were recorded from the mouth of the monarch, and being sealed with his signet, were immediately dispatched according to their destination. This institution was not peculiar to the Persians, but prevailed among all the principal nations of Asia. The king's scribes are mentioned in the earliest records of the Mongol conquerors (Mr Morier observes, that the present Shah of Persia has his scribe or annalist, who is destined to write his history); and it is well known, that Hyder Ali usually appeared in public surrounded by forty such secretaries. Such was the origin of the Chronicles or Diaries of the Persians, which, being deposited in the principal cities of the empire, Susa, Babylon, and Ecbatana, formed what were called the archives of the kingdom."

As Persia is very minutely described under its proper title in the present work (see PERSIA), we merely here insert observations of a general nature respecting this celebrated Asiatic country, which would perhaps be extraneous when the

history, habits, and customs of a people are strictly investigated. The reader's attention is directed, in the first instance, to the language of Persia; yet here all inquiries as to that which was anciently spoken are as unsatisfactory as the history of the country. "The origin of ancient tongues," observes a judicious writer, "like all research into high antiquity, is naturally involved in perplexity and darkness; and every disquisition, however ingenious, must rest at last on the uncertain basis of fancy and conjecture. Yet on this visionary field learned and pious men have disputed with much want of temper. The original idiom of man has been considered as an interesting pursuit, and advocates have been found for the superior claim of every ancient tongue. Adam has been taught dialects he never knew, and the language even of Omnipotence they have not blushed to determine with precision." In conformity with these observations we may add, that St Ephraim and St Basil insist strongly that the Aramean or Mesopotamian dialect of the Syriac was that in which God delivered his commands to Adam; the Maronites, or Eastern Christians, contend for the Chaldaic; Bochart and others that it was the Hebrew; Eutychius supports the Greek; Goropius gives the precedence to the Tuetonic; an ingenious recent writer (Mr Webb) thinks it must have been the Chinese; while Gregory Nyssæus declares one of his polemical antagonists named Eunomius to be an impious heretic for supposing man to have received any language whatever from God. Bochart gives a list of about twenty languages alleged to have been used in the ancient ages of the world, and thus arranges them with regard to antiquity-the He brew, the Chaldaic or Syriac, the Arabic, Phoenician, Egyptian, the Azotian or Philistine, the Persian, Parthian, Midian, Elamite, Cappadocian, Pontic, Asiatic, Phrygian, Pamphylian, Lybian, Cretian, and Lycaonic, together with the Greek and Latin, all of which (the three first, the Persian, and the two last always

excepted) were probably only dialects of the principal tongues. As it respects the ancient language of Persia, the opinion of Sir John Chardin is probably the correct one-that the old dialect of Persia, excepting what remains of the present language, is entirely lost-that no books now exist in it—and that the jargon and characters of the Parsees of Carmania and Guzerat are barbarous corruptions or inventions of the Guebre priests, or Fire Worshippers, without the least resemblance to the inscriptions still discernible on the ancient ruins of Persepolis. Dr Hyde derives the ancient dialect from Media, but the union of the people termed the Medes and Persians is of such high antiquity, that it is lost in darkness, and we cannot discover the origin of their speech. The modern Persian has a close and intimate connection with the Arabic, which was introduced into Persia in the seventh century of the Christian era. Before that period the Arabians, confined within their own peninsula, made no figure in Asiatic affairs, and were, in a political view, known only to be despised by the Grecian and Persian powers. In those times, however, Persia was differently estimated even by the haughty and philosophizing Greeks. She had a language and a literature which induced them to exempt her from the list of those nations which they termed barbarous; while the splendour and glory of her kings dazzled the surrounding states. But the genius, intrepidity, and enthusiasm of one man suddenly changed the scene, and gave a beginning to revolutions equally as rapid as they were com plete. Mahomet by various means subjected to his power the numerous Arab tribes, but he died before any impression could be made upon the adjacent countries. And here it is curious to observe the mistakes into which many modern European writers occasionally fall respecting the career of Mahomet. Mariana, the chief historian of Spain, in introducing the Arabian conquest of that country with an account of the Mahometan religion, says, "The founder of this accursed superstition