In England, besides the ballads in Percy's Reliques, William Godwin introduced the idea of an eternal witness of the course of civilization in his St Leon (1799),(1799), and his son-in-law Shelley introduces Ahasuerus in his Queen Mab.
One would suppose that the most ignorant Jew could never have mistaken Haman, the minister of Ahasuerus, for the minister of Pharaoh, as happens in the Koran, or identified Miriam, the sister of Moses, with Mary (= Mariam), the mother of Christ.
Here the sequence of the reigns in the Biblical writer and in the profane historians - in the one, Cyrus, Ahasuerus, Artaxerxes, Darius; in the other, Cyrus, Cambyses, Smerdis, Darius - led in the past (Ewald, &c.) to the identification of Ahasuerus with Cambyses (529-522 B.e.), son of Cyrus.
Modern scholars, therefore, identify the Ahasuerus of Ezra with Xerxes.
It is important to note in this connexion that Darius the Mede is represented as the son of Xerxes (Ahasuerus) and it is stated that he established 120 satrapies.