Persian Language History: From Darius’s Cuneiform to Modern Farsi

Persian has a written history of about 2,500 years, which scholars divide into three stages: Old Persian, carved in cuneiform by the Achaemenid kings from the 6th century BCE; Middle Persian (Pahlavi), the language of the Sasanian empire; and New Persian, written in Arabic-based script from the 9th century CE. Modern فارسی (Fârsi), Dari and Tajik all descend from New Persian.

What makes this history unusual is how continuous it is. A word Darius the Great had carved into a cliff, such as the Old Persian word for “father,” is still recognizable in the word an Iranian child uses today. The script changed three times, the grammar became much simpler, and thousands of Arabic words came in, yet it is the same language moving through time. Below you will find each stage explained with real examples, a timeline, how Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh fit in, how Persian spread from Anatolia to India, and some practice to check what you remember.

Persian language history at a glance

Persian belongs to the Indo-European family, so it is a distant relative of English, German, Latin and Hindi. Within that family it is part of the Iranian branch, and within the Iranian languages it is a Western Iranian language that started in the southwest of the Iranian plateau, in the region the Greeks called Persis and Iranians call پارس (Pârs). That place name gave the language both of its names: “Persian” in European languages, and پارسی (Pârsi) Listen, later فارسی (Fârsi) Listen, in Persian itself. The change from P to F came from Arabic, which has no “p” sound.

The dates are approximate because languages do not change on a set day. Scholars place the boundaries a little differently, but this three-stage division is the standard one.

Old Persian: the language of Cyrus and Darius

Old Persian is the oldest stage we can read. It survives almost entirely in inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, the dynasty founded by Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BCE. The longest and most famous is the Bisotun (Behistun) inscription, which Darius I (reigned 522 to 486 BCE) had carved high on a cliff near Kermanshah. It tells, in three languages (Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian), how Darius took the throne and put down revolts. Shorter royal inscriptions appear at Persepolis, at Naqsh-e Rostam and at Pasargadae.

The Old Persian cuneiform script

Old Persian was written in a cuneiform script made of wedge-shaped marks. It looks like Mesopotamian cuneiform, but it is much simpler: a few dozen signs that mostly stand for a consonant plus a vowel, a handful of word-signs (for “king,” “country,” “god” and a few others), numbers, and a slanted wedge that separates words. Because it was so simple, it was the first cuneiform script that modern scholars cracked. Georg Friedrich Grotefend made the first breakthrough in 1802 by guessing royal names and titles, and Henry Rawlinson, who copied the Bisotun inscription in the 1830s and 1840s, completed the work. Reading the Old Persian part of Bisotun then helped scholars decipher Babylonian cuneiform.

It is worth knowing that Old Persian was mainly a royal, ceremonial language in writing. Day-to-day administration of the empire used other languages, especially Elamite and Aramaic. Ordinary Persians did not write letters in cuneiform.

What Old Persian grammar was like

Old Persian looked more like Latin or Sanskrit than like modern Persian. Nouns had grammatical gender and changed their endings for case (subject, object, possessor and so on), and verbs had many more forms. The famous opening of Darius’s inscriptions is adam Dârayavaush khshâyathiya vazraka, khshâyathiya khshâyathiyânâm: “I am Darius, the great king, king of kings.” Look at a few words in it and you can already see modern Persian:

Old Persian forms are given in simplified spelling. Notice that ده (deh) shrank in meaning from “country, province” to “village,” and that the Old Persian word for “I” (adam) did not survive: modern من (man) Listen comes from the form meaning “of me.” In Darius’s inscriptions you can read the phrase “my father was Hystaspes,” with the same word that became پدر (pedar) Listen.

Old Persian is not Avestan

You will sometimes read that the Zoroastrian scripture, the Avesta, is “ancient Persian.” It is ancient and Iranian, but Avestan is a separate Eastern Iranian language, a cousin of Old Persian rather than its ancestor. The two are close enough to show the family resemblance, much as Old English and Old Norse do.

Middle Persian (Pahlavi): the Sasanian language

After Alexander the Great conquered the Achaemenid empire in 330 BCE, Greek became the language of power for a time, and then the Parthians (the Arsacid dynasty, roughly 247 BCE to 224 CE) ruled Iran. Their language, Parthian, was another Iranian language, a close relative but not the direct ancestor of Persian. Meanwhile, in Pârs, the local speech kept developing into what we call Middle Persian.

When the Sasanian dynasty, which came from Pârs, overthrew the Parthians in 224 CE, Middle Persian became the official language of a great empire that lasted until the Arab conquest in the 7th century. It is often called Pahlavi, although strictly speaking “Pahlavi” is the name of the script and of the Zoroastrian books written in it.

A script that wrote one word and read another

Middle Persian was written in scripts that grew out of the Aramaic alphabet, written right to left. These scripts were hard to read: several letters looked the same, and scribes wrote many common words as old Aramaic words that were then read aloud in Persian. These are called heterograms. The best-known example is “king”: scribes wrote the Aramaic word MLK’ (malkâ), but readers said shâh. It is a little like writing “etc.” and saying “and so on.” This awkwardness is one reason the Arabic-based script later replaced Pahlavi so completely.

What changed from Old to Middle Persian

The big change was simplification. Middle Persian lost almost all of the old case endings and grammatical gender, so word order and small words like prepositions took over their job. In this respect Middle Persian already worked much like the Persian you learn today. The famous ezâfe construction (ketâb-e khub, “good book”), explained in our guide to ezâfe in Persian, grew out of an Old Persian relative word and is fully present in Middle Persian.

You can see a regular pattern: Middle Persian words ending in -ag end in -e today, which is why نامه (nâme) Listen is written with a final ه.

Middle Persian literature

Much of what survives is Zoroastrian religious writing, copied and finished in the early Islamic centuries, together with royal rock inscriptions and texts of the Manichaean religion. Middle Persian also served as a bridge for stories: the Indian animal fables of the Panchatantra were translated into Middle Persian in the 6th century, and that version, now lost, was the source of the Arabic Kalila wa Dimna, which carried the stories west. Many tales that later appear in New Persian literature, including some of the legends in the Shahnameh, were first written down in Middle Persian.

The Arab conquest and the birth of New Persian

In the 7th century, Arab Muslim armies defeated the Sasanian empire, which collapsed by 651. For the next two centuries Arabic was the language of government, religion and scholarship across the region. Many Iranians wrote in Arabic, and some of the most important early works of Arabic grammar, history and science were written by people of Iranian origin.

Persian, however, did not disappear. People kept speaking it, and the spoken language kept evolving into what we now call New Persian. In the 9th and 10th centuries, under local dynasties in the east of the Iranian world, above all the Samanids, whose capital was Bukhara, Persian came back as a written and literary language. Its early literary name was دری (Dari) Listen, usually explained as “the language of the court” (در, dar, meaning “court” or “gate”).

The new script

New Persian was written in the Arabic alphabet, adapted for Persian. Persian kept all the Arabic letters, because they were needed to spell Arabic loanwords, and added four letters for sounds Arabic does not have: پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (zh) and گ (g). That gives the 32-letter alphabet you learn today in our Persian alphabet guide. This is also why Persian has several letters that sound the same, such as ت and ط (both t), or س, ص and ث (all s): the extra letters appear mostly in words of Arabic origin.

Arabic words, Persian grammar

Persian borrowed a very large number of Arabic words, especially for religion, law, science and abstract ideas: کتاب (ketâb, book) Listen, فکر (fekr, thought), وقت (vaght, time), درس (dars, lesson). But the grammar stayed Persian. Arabic words take Persian plural endings (کتاب‌ها, ketâbhâ, “books”), Persian verb endings and Persian compound verbs (فکر کردن, fekr kardan, “to think”). Persian and Arabic share a script and many words, but they belong to completely different language families. Our comparison of Farsi vs Arabic shows the differences side by side.

Rudaki and the first great poets

The first major poet of New Persian was Rudaki, who worked at the Samanid court and died around 940. Iranians often call him the father of Persian poetry. A well-known anecdote in the old local history of Sistan tells how the Saffarid ruler Ya’qub ibn Leys, when praised in Arabic verse, asked why poems were recited in a language he did not understand, and a poet then praised him in Persian. Whether or not it happened exactly so, the story captures the moment: Persian was becoming the language of kings and poets again.

Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh

No single person is more closely tied to the history of the Persian language than Ferdowsi (فردوسی) Listen. Born near Tus in Khorasan around 940, he spent some three decades turning the old Iranian legends and history into a vast verse epic, the شاهنامه (Shâhnâme, “Book of Kings”) Listen, finished around 1010. It runs to roughly 50,000 couplets and tells the story of Iran from the first mythical king to the fall of the Sasanians.

Ferdowsi wrote in a Persian that uses comparatively few Arabic words, and the Shahnameh became a model of the language for later centuries. Because Iranians have recited it for a thousand years, much of its vocabulary never went out of use. That is one reason a modern Iranian can still read Ferdowsi with only modest help, which English speakers cannot do with the English of the year 1000. The epic opens with this line (text from ganjoor.net, Shahnameh, opening section):

به نام خداوند جان و خرد / کز این برتر اندیشه برنگذرد Listen
be nâm-e khodâvand-e jân o kherad / kaz in bartar andishe bar-nagzarad
“In the name of the Lord of soul and wisdom, beyond whom thought cannot rise.”

Almost every word in that line is still understood by Iranians today. Another couplet, in which Ferdowsi says he labored thirty years and brought the Persians back to life with “this Persian,” is quoted constantly in Iran, although scholars disagree about whether its second line is really his. For more about the epic, read our guide to the Shahnameh.

How Persian spread from Anatolia to India

From the 10th century on, Persian became the language of culture and administration far beyond the lands where it was a mother tongue. Turkic dynasties such as the Ghaznavids and the Seljuks, and later the Ottomans in their early literary culture, the Timurids and the Mughals, used Persian at court, in government and for poetry. For several centuries Persian played a role across West, Central and South Asia somewhat like the one Latin and French played in Europe.

• Anatolia: Rumi lived and wrote in Konya, in today’s Turkey, and his great poems are in Persian. Ottoman Turkish absorbed a huge number of Persian words.
• Central Asia: Bukhara and Samarkand were centers of Persian learning, and Persian has been spoken there ever since; it is the ancestor of today’s Tajik.
• India: Persian was the language of the Delhi Sultanate and then the official language of the Mughal empire. Poets such as Amir Khosrow wrote in Persian, and the British East India Company kept using Persian in administration until 1837, when it was replaced by English and local languages. Urdu is full of Persian vocabulary, as our page on Farsi vs Urdu explains.

The great classical poets lived during these centuries: Khayyam, Attar, Rumi, Saadi and Hafez. Through them and through trade, a few Persian words reached English too, such as bazaar, caravan and paradise; see our list of Persian words in English.

Modern Persian: Farsi, Dari and Tajik

In the 19th and 20th centuries, printing, newspapers and modern schools made written Persian simpler and closer to speech. Writers moved away from the very ornate style of earlier court prose. In Iran, an academy called the Farhangestân was founded in 1935 to create Persian words for modern ideas, and many of its coinages are now ordinary vocabulary:

You can hear the first two here: دانشگاه Listen and هواپیما Listen. At the same time, French and later English gave Persian many everyday words, from مرسی (mersi, thanks) to تلفن (telefon).

Today Persian is an official language in three countries, and each calls it by a different name. The differences are mostly in accent, some vocabulary and, for Tajik, the alphabet; educated speakers of the three can usually understand one another, especially in the written standard. Our article on Farsi vs Persian vs Dari vs Tajik goes into detail, and where Persian is spoken covers the map.

One more modern development matters to every learner: the gap between written and spoken Persian. In Tehran people say می‌خوام (mikhâm) for written می‌خواهم (mikhâham, “I want”) Listen. That is simply the next chapter of the same story of a language that keeps simplifying itself.

Why this history helps you learn Persian

Knowing the history is not just trivia. It explains several things that puzzle beginners:

• Why the grammar is easy: Persian lost its cases and gender over two thousand years ago, so there is no “he/she” distinction (او, u, means both), no noun gender and no case endings to memorize.
• Why some letters sound the same: the extra letters came with Arabic loanwords, so spelling often tells you a word’s origin.
• Why you can read classical poetry: the core of the language has changed little since Ferdowsi, so the same learner who reads a newspaper can, with some help, enjoy Khayyam and Hafez.
• Why spoken and written forms differ: the spoken language keeps changing faster than spelling, as it always has.

If you are starting out, our free Farsi alphabet lessons and the Persian quizzes are good next steps.

Common questions

How old is the Persian language?

Persian has been written for about 2,500 years. The oldest texts are the Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings from the late 6th century BCE, especially Darius I’s Bisotun inscription. The spoken language is of course older, since it was already a distinct Iranian language when it was first written down.

Is Persian older than Arabic?

Both languages have long histories, and they are not related, so “older” is not a simple question. Old Persian inscriptions date from the 6th century BCE. Arabic is attested in early inscriptions too, but its great written tradition begins around the 7th century CE. Modern New Persian took shape later, in the 9th century, and uses a script adapted from Arabic.

Can modern Iranians read Old Persian?

No, not without study. Old Persian used a cuneiform script and had a grammar with cases and genders, so it is as foreign to a modern Iranian as Old English is to an English speaker, though some words are still recognizable. Classical New Persian, such as Ferdowsi or Hafez, is a different matter: Iranians read it at school and quote it every day.

What is the difference between Pahlavi and Farsi?

Pahlavi is the common name for Middle Persian, the language of the Sasanian empire, and for the Aramaic-based script it was written in. Farsi is modern Persian, written in the Perso-Arabic script. Farsi descends from Middle Persian, but it has much simpler spelling, many Arabic loanwords and some grammar changes.

Why did Persian switch to the Arabic alphabet?

After the Arab conquest in the 7th century, Arabic became the language of religion, government and learning, and the Arabic script was widely known. When Persian returned as a literary language in the 9th and 10th centuries, writers used that script, adding پ, چ, ژ and گ for Persian sounds. It was also far easier to read than the old Pahlavi script.

Did Ferdowsi save the Persian language?

Persian was already being written again before Ferdowsi, by poets such as Rudaki, so he did not revive it alone. But the Shahnameh gave the language a monumental, widely loved work with relatively few Arabic words, and Iranians see it as the book that preserved their language and stories. That is why Ferdowsi holds such a special place in Iran.

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