Types of mankind, or, Ethnological researches, based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological and Biblical history / illustrated by selections from the inedited papers of Samuel George Morton and by additional contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H.S. Patterson ; by J.C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon.

  • Nott, Josiah C. (Josiah Clark), 1804-1873.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Types of mankind, or, Ethnological researches, based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological and Biblical history / illustrated by selections from the inedited papers of Samuel George Morton and by additional contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H.S. Patterson ; by J.C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    754/800 (page 698)
    Persian hero, Djemshid, (524) -whose fabulous because mythic epoch he fixed at 3209 b. c. To the same Iranian demigod are these edifices assigned by Sir W. Jones, estimating their age at about 800 years before Christ. Semitic historians without exception, as Sheridan neatly observed, “draw upon memory for their wit, and upon imagination for their facts:” wherefore slim clews to a reality could be obtained through them. Like the libraries of Alexandria, of Jerusalem, of China, of Budhic Hindostan, and of Hebraical Christendom, those of ante-Mohammedan Persia perished, from similar fanatical causes, in Saracenic flames with the dynasty of Chosroes, about a. d. 637. Such fitful traditions as survived the wreck of Persic literature became invested (after B6dawee destructiveness had become altered into caliphate restorations) with the hyperbolic extravagancies of Eastern poetry and romance. One immortal epic, Firdoosee’s Shah Nameh, or “Book of Kings,” composed in the eleventh century, purports, indeed, to cover 3600 years of his country’s annals, from the taurokephalic Kaiomurs down to the Arab invasion. Persepolis, under its local name of Istakhdr, is mentioned in twenty-eight passages, and its existence is referred to as coeval with Kai-kobad ; whose apochryphal era, under Sir W. Jones’s hypothesis, falls about b. c. 610 : but, neither from the “ History of the early kings of Persia” by Mirkavend, in the fifteenth century, nor from the “ Dabistan,” was archeeological acumen able to disentangle a solitary thread indicative of the age, the builders, or the writings, of Persepolis. As in Egypt the present fellclh, or peasant, ascribes the pyramids to “ Pliarabon” (525) or Pharaoh — a name to him the synonyme for Satan — so in Persia, the illiterate native is content that an ancient edifice should be the work of Suleyman; at once the arcliimagus of Oriental necromancy and the sage monarch of Israel: for at Murghab, Pasargadce, the mausoleum whence we have drawn the portrait of that great man [supra, p. 138, Fig. 43] whose sculptured epitaph is simply “ I am Cyrus, the king, the Achsemenian,” is called Talchli Suleymdn, or “Solomon’s throne.” Like Jeplitha’s, who was buried “in the cities of Gilead,” (526) Solomon’s tomb is shown at Shiraz and again on the road to Kashgar! Nimrod is even still more ubiquitous. Equally futile were attempts to rescue history applicable to Persia’s monuments from the Zend-Avesta of Zoroastric attribution, or from the later Boundeliesh-Pehlvi: sacred books containing the rituals and theosophy of the Guebres, or Persian expatriated ignicolists of Guzerat, now called Parsees. From Greek writers alone (Herodotus, Xenophon, Ctesias, &c.) were such elements of early Persian history derived as have stood the test of monu- mental investigation: but the science of the last century had ransacked all these sources without obtaining a glimmer of light as to the nature of Persepolitan wedge-shaped cha- racters. Like the once-mysterious hieroglyphs of Egypt, as interpreted by Father Kirchcr, the inscriptions of Persia were supposed to veil occult and awful things, black arts of magic, or diabolic talismans. With naught to guide them but the more or less faithless copies printed by De la Valle, Le Brun, Kaemfer, and other old travellers, how could the opinion of a student be other than a conjecture more or less rational according to the mental calibre of each critic ? Thus, by Leibnitz and by Cuper, these inscriptions were reasonably conjectured to con- tain the letters and elements of “ some very ancient writing.” Lacroze, the great Copto- logist, conceived them to be hieroglyphical inscriptions similar to those of Egypt (at that day undeciphercdy and of China, which last are not “ sacred sculptured characters” at all. (524) Djemsiud is the Persic, as Samson is the Hebrew, Hercules. The former we opine to be DJoM, the Egyptian Hercules, coupled with S/iaDT, the strong: the latter is simply S/<eMS-on, the Sun, with its Arabian euphonizing suffix. Hercules is but IlaR-OoL, “revolution of heat.” Compare Lanci, Puralipomeni; and ItAOUU- Rochette, Archiologie Com par ee; with Dupuis in Anthon’s Class. Die.. “Hercules.” (525) “ Yd Pharauon ebn Pharauon” is generally rendered “Thou Pharaoh son of a Pharaoh”! Why not “Thou crocodile son of a crocodile” f Conf. Rosenmuli.eri Instil. Ling. Arabics; 1818; p. 211. (526) Text. Judges xii. 7. The sacrifice of Jephtlia’s daughter is beautifully told by Euripides; for Iphigenia, In its Gieek sense of hptyivea, is only a “daughter of Jephtha.”