128

TRANSFER OF THE

ciiap. hi.

from India by Ormus on the Persian Gulf , andby the traffic of caravans, which arrived fromvarious countries at that emporium. The trea-sures of the palace of Solomon, the magnificenttemple he had erected, and the accumulatedsavings of five centuries, were transferred with itsenslaved inhabitants to the capital of Nebuchad-nezzar . About the same period the successes ofCambyses had enabled that monarch to collectand transmit to Babylon the vast treasures ofEgypt that have been already noticed 1 ; andthese, whatever allowances may be made for theexaggerated statements of the ancients, musthave amounted to a most enormous quantity.

Under the reign of Darius, the great impostslevied by that monarch must have augmentedhis treasures; and if the grand expedition ofXerxes scattered a portion, and even a verylarge portion, of them over the surface of thecountries between Babylon and Europe , therewas more than sufficient time to collect themagain at the seat of the government in the hun-dred years which passed between the conclusionof that disastrous expedition and the periodwhen Alexander the Great swallowed up thePersian state in his universal but ephemeralmonarchy. If the actual amount of the revenueof the Persian empire, as stated by Herodotus ,be but tolerably correct—if the account of the

1 See page 13.