Then Darius the king made a decree, and search was made in the house of the rolls, where the treasures were laid up in Babylon.
Darius the king. This was Darius Hystaspes. Great and interesting light has been thrown on the history of this monarch and the transactions of his reign by the decipherment of the cuneitic inscriptions on the rocks at Behistun.
In the house of the rolls, where the treasures were laid up in Babylon х bªbeeyt (H1005) ciprayaa'
(H5609), in the house of books; Septuagint, en tais bibliotheekais, in the libraries]. An idea of the form of this Babylonian register house, as well as the manner of preserving public records within its repositories, can be obtained from the recent discoveries at Nineveh. Two small chambers were discovered in the palace of Kouyunjik, which, from the fragments found in them, Mr. Layard considers as a "house of the rolls." After reminding his readers, that the historical records and public documents of the Assyrians were kept on terra cotta tablets and cylinders of baked clay, many specimens of which have been brought to this country, he goes on to say, 'The chambers I am describing appear to have been a depository in the palace of Nineveh for such documents. To the height of a foot or more from the floor they were completely filled with them; some entire, but the greater part broken into many fragments probably by the falling in of the upper part of the building. They were of different sizes; the largest tablets were flat, and measured about 9 inches by 6 1/2 inches; the smaller were slightly convex, and some were not more than an inch long, with but one or two lines of writing. The cuneiform characters on most of them were singularly sharp and well defined, but so minute in some instances as to be almost illegible without a magnifying-glass. These documents appear to be of various kinds. The documents that have thus been discovered "in the house of rolls" at Nineveh probably exceed all that have yet been afforded by the monuments of Egypt, and when the innumerable fragments are put together and transcribed, the publication of these records will be of the greatest importance to the history of the ancient world' ('Nineveh and Babylon,' appendix, 344, 345: cf. 'Nineveh and its Remains,' 2:, p. 185).
The record referred to in this passage at Ecbatana was probably written on similar materials; and that a character employed for cursive purposes was in use under the Achaemenidae, there is clear and abundant evidence (see 'Royal Asiatic Journal,' vol. 10:, p. 42; also 'Primeval Language,' part 3:, p. 63, note).