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THE PERSIAN PERIOD

archives and reminding thus of the usual sequence of triple record—the daily records in the palace, the leather roll extracts for public record and the extracts from this for publication by inscription. Another passage of this inscription, though obscure as to exact meaning, at least points to the archives. "Through the grace of Auramazdas I made inscriptions such as did not exist before, on clay and on leather". This has been explained to mean that Darius had introduced the use of leather (cowskins) for recording purposes but however that may be it recalls the Persian archives written on "skins" of which the Greeks speak and shows that the Persian libraries clearly contained clay tablets as well as the roll record books read to Ahasuerus.

Whether the Houses of books in the Houses of Treasures at Ecbatana, Persepolis, Susa, etc., contained also religious texts, schoolbooks and schools or not can

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