character of the sovereign, especially after the death of Zoroaster, when, he says, Darius assumed the title of Archimagus. He accepted Morier's suggestion that Murgab was the site of Pasargadae and its principal monument the tomb of Cyrus.[1] He had a thorough belief in the decipherment of Grotefend. He not only accepted his recognition of the names of Darius and Xerxes, but he followed him when he traced their descent from Jamshid. That hero was, he thought, none other than Shem, whom sacred writ planted in that very region of Persia, and possibly Persepolis bore his name from the very earliest ages.[2] Porter did not himself advance our knowledge of the inscriptions. He copied the inscription at Murgab, but that had been previously done by Morier and Ouseley, and, as he candidly remarks, he 'found that we all differed in some of the lines from each other.'[3] He also copied a portion of the inscription (A) on the sculptured staircase, of which Niebuhr had already given a satisfactory rendering;[4] and finally he took the trouble to execute an extremely imperfect copy of the four tablets of inscriptions on the south wall, which had also been much better done by Niebuhr.[5]
Notwithstanding its many defects, his book continued for thirty years to be the chief authority on the subject.[6] Heeren popularised the general result in the
- ↑ Porter, p. 502.
- ↑ Ib. pp. 622-3.
- ↑ Ib. p. 488-9, Plate 13.
- ↑ PL 44, p. 616. He omits the first four lines.
- ↑ Pl. 55 and 56, p. 681. Cf. Niebuhr, Pl. 31. Porter left out lines 18 and 19 of Inscription II. Westergaard, Ueber die Keilinschriften (Bonn, 1845), p. 2.
- ↑ Porter's Travels were published in 1821, the same year as Ouseley's, and three years after Morier's Second Journey, 1818. Loftus complains of the 'exceedingly rough and incorrect sketch' made by Porter of a bas-relief at Susa: Chaldea and Susiana p. 415. Yet Flandin admits Porter's talent in drawing. The plates of all his predecessors were, he says, superseded. He became the 'oracle of the archaeologists,' especially in architecture and sculpture (Flandin, i. 9). The most important contribution since made in English is the chapter on the subject in Lord Curzon's Persia, Vol. II. chap. xxi.
