Old Persian Language and Cuneiform

Old Persian is the language of the Achaemenid kings, the oldest recorded form of Persian, written from about 520 BCE in a cuneiform script made for the royal inscriptions. It is the direct ancestor of Middle Persian and of the Persian spoken in Iran today, so that words such as Old Persian xšāyaθiya, “king”, and brātar, “brother”, live on as modern شاه (shâh) and برادر (barâdar).

A script made for kings

Old Persian cuneiform looks like the wedge writing of Mesopotamia, pressed or carved with the same triangular strokes, but it works quite differently. Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform used hundreds of signs for whole words and syllables. The Old Persian script has only 36 signs for sounds: three for the vowels a, i and u, and the rest for a consonant with a following vowel (such as ka or ku). On top of these come a few word signs for “king”, “country”, “earth”, “god” and the name Ahuramazda, a sloping wedge that divides one word from the next, and signs for numbers. It is a half alphabet, half syllabary, and one of the simplest cuneiform systems ever used.

Who designed it and when is debated. In a passage near the end of the Behistun inscription, Darius I says he made a form of writing “in Aryan” that had not existed before. Many scholars take this as the invention of the script around 520 BCE. The short texts in Cyrus’s name at Pasargadae are then explained as additions made under Darius, and gold tablets in the names of his great-grandfather Ariaramnes and grandfather Arsames are widely thought to be later works, not originals of their time.

Where Old Persian was written

Old Persian was a monument language. It was carved on rock faces, palace walls, column bases, door frames, gold and silver foundation plates, stone weights and seals, nearly always alongside Elamite and Babylonian versions, and sometimes Egyptian hieroglyphs. The largest text is Behistun. Others include Darius’s tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, the foundation charters of Susa, the inscriptions of Persepolis, the two panels at Ganjnameh near Hamadan, and the Xerxes inscription on the citadel rock of Van in eastern Turkey.

The empire did not run on Old Persian. Its accounts at Persepolis were kept in Elamite, its letters across the provinces in Aramaic, and local records in Babylonian, Egyptian or Greek. Among the tens of thousands of Persepolis tablets, a single administrative text in Old Persian was identified in 2007 by Matthew Stolper and Jan Tavernier, which shows that scribes could use it for business, but rarely did.

The last inscriptions

Old Persian texts continue under Xerxes, Artaxerxes I, Darius II and Artaxerxes II, but grow shorter and more formulaic. Inscriptions of Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III contain grammatical forms that look wrong by the standards of Darius’s time: case endings misplaced or dropped. Scholars read them as a sign that the spoken language had already moved toward Middle Persian, while the carvers copied an old formula they no longer fully understood.

How it was deciphered

European travellers copied the Persepolis inscriptions from the seventeenth century, among them the French jeweller Jean Chardin. In the 1760s the Danish traveller Carsten Niebuhr made careful copies and saw that they contained three different scripts, with the simplest always first.

In 1802 a young German teacher, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, guessed that two short texts followed a pattern known from later Persian royal inscriptions: “X, great king, king of kings, son of Y”. Using the Greek king lists, he matched the repeated words to the names Darius, Xerxes and Darius’s father Hystaspes, and read about a third of the signs correctly. The work was completed in the 1830s and 1840s by several scholars, above all Henry Rawlinson, who copied the Behistun inscription on its cliff, and the Old Persian key then opened the Elamite and Babylonian versions beside it.

From Old Persian to the Persian of today

Old Persian was a heavily inflected language, close in structure to Avestan and Sanskrit. Nouns had several cases and three genders, and verbs many endings. By the time of Middle Persian, the language of the Sasanian empire written in the Pahlavi script, most of these endings had gone. Modern Persian, written in Arabic script since the ninth and tenth centuries, continued the simplification and added many Arabic words, but its core vocabulary still runs back to the Achaemenid inscriptions:

• xšāyaθiya “king” became Middle Persian šāh, modern shâh; the title “king of kings” survives as shâhanshâh.
• adam “I” is the ancestor of modern man.
• pitar “father” became pedar, and brātar “brother” became barâdar.
• būmi “earth, land” survives in bum, as in marz-o-bum, homeland.
• Pārsa, the name of the homeland, became Fârs, and through Arabic, the word Fârsi for the language itself.

A reader of modern Persian cannot read Old Persian without study, much as an English speaker cannot read Old English. But the line of descent is direct, and few languages can show their own words carved in stone 2,500 years ago. For the other languages spoken in Iran today, see Languages Spoken in Iran.