Sketch of the first column of the Behistun Inscription

Old Persian is the oldest attested Persid language. It is classified in the group of Western Iranian languages, subgroup of Indo-Iranian and Indo-European languages. Download high resolution version (1000x331, 137 KB)Behistun Inscription, Column 1 (DB I 1-15) Sketch: Fr. ... Download high resolution version (1000x331, 137 KB)Behistun Inscription, Column 1 (DB I 1-15) Sketch: Fr. ... The Behistun Inscription, carved into a cliffside, gives the same text in three languages, telling the story of King Darius conquests. ... The Iranian languages are a part of the Indo European language family. ... Numerous languages are spoken in Iran, yet all of them originate from the same linguistic roots. ... Indo-Iranian can refer to: The Indo-Iranian languages The prehistoric Indo-Iranian people, see Aryan This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ...

This language was used in the inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings. Old Persian texts (including inscriptions, tablets and seals) have been found in Iran, Turkey and Egypt. It evolved into the Middle Persian language (Pahlavi) of Sassanid Iran, and eventually into modern Persian language. Achaemenid empire at its greatest extent The Achaemenid Dynasty (Hakamanishiya in the Old Persian (Avestan ??) language - transliterated Hakamanshee in Modern Persian) - was a dynasty in the ancient Persian Empire. ... The Pahlavi script was used broadly in the Sasanid Persian Empire to write down Middle Persian for secular, as well as religious purposes. ... Sassanid Empire at its greatest extent The Sassanid dynasty (also Sassanian) was the name given to the kings of Persia during the era of the second Persian Empire, from 224 until 651, when the last Sassanid shah, Yazdegerd III, lost a 14-year struggle to drive out the Umayyad Caliphate... Persian (فارسی = Fârsi . ...

Script

Old Persian was written from left to right in a kind of Cuneiform script. Old Persian cuneiform contains 36 signs which represent consonants, vowels, or sequences of single consonants plus vowels, a set of three numbers (1, 10, 100), one word divider, and eight ideograms. It is essentially alphabetic in nature. The Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-18, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... A Chinese character. ...

While the letters may look like Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, only one, L, derives from that script. (L didn't occur in native Old Persian words, but was found in Akkadian borrowings.) Scholars today mostly agree that the Old Persian script was invented by about 525 BC to provide monumental inscriptions for the Achaemenid king Darius I. Sumer (or Shumer, Egyptian Sangar, Bib. ... Akkadian (lišānum akkadÄ«tum) was a Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language famaily) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians. ... The Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. ... Centuries: 7th century BC - 6th century BC - 5th century BC Decades: 570s BC - 560s BC - 550s BC - 540s BC - 530s BC - 520s BC - 510s BC - 500s BC - 490s BC - 480s BC - 470s BC Events 529 BC - Cambyses II succeeds his father Cyrus as ruler of Persia. ... Achaemenid Empire The Achaemenid Dynasty was a dynasty in the ancient Persian Empire, including Cyrus II the Great, Darius I and Xerxes I. At the height of their power, the Achaemenid rulers of Persia ruled over territories roughly emcompassing some parts of todays Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon... Seal of Darius I, showing the king hunting on his chariot, and the symbol of Ahuramazda Darius the Great (Pers. ...

Although based on a logo-syllabic prototype, the system is essentially alphabetic in character. 13 out of 22 consonants are invariant, regardless of the following vowel (that is, they are alphabetic), while only 6 have a distinct form for each consonant-vowel combination (that is, they are syllablic), and among these, only d and m occur in three forms for all three vowels. (k, g, j, v only occur before two of the vowels, and so only have two forms.) In addition, 3 consonants, t, n, r, are partially syllabic, having the same form before a and i, and a distinct form only before u. For instance, =< could be na or ni, whereas <<= is specifically nu. Ambiguous syllables such as =< na/ni must be followed by a vowel for clarification, but in practice even unambiguous syllables such as <<= nu, or fully syllabic ma, mi, mu, are followed by explicit vowels.

The effect is not unlike the English [dʒ] sound, which is typically written g before i or e, but j before other vowels (gem, jam), or the Castillian Spanish [θ] sound, which is written c before i or e and z before other vowels (cinco, zapato). It is more accurate to say that some of the Old Persian consonants are written by different letters depending on the following vowel, rather than classifying the script as syllabic. This situation had its origin in the Assyrian cuneiform syllabary, where several syllabic distinctions had been lost and were often clarified with explicit vowels. However, in the case of Assyrian, the vowel was not always used, and was never used where not needed, so the system remained (logo-)syllabic. This article concerns the Assyrian people. ...

For a while it was speculated that the alphabet could have had its origin in such a system, with a leveling of consonant signs a millennium earlier producing something like the Ugaritic alphabet, but today it is generally accepted that the Semitic alphabet arose from Egyptian hieroglyphs, where vowel notation was not important. (See Middle Bronze Age alphabets.) The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform version of the Levantine consonant alphabet (abjad), used from around 1300 BC for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Canaanite language discovered in Ugarit, Syria. ... A hieroglyph is one part of an ideographic writing system that is often found carved in stone. ... Two similar but undeciphered scripts believed to be ancestral to all modern alphabets are attested from the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 BCE): the Proto-Sinaitic script discovered in the winter of 1904-1905 by William Flinders Petrie, and dated to 1500 BCE, and the Wadi el-Ħôl (or Wadi...

Further information

• Ancient Iranian Languages & Literature: The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies (CAIS)

References

• Aryan (Old Persian) Language

See also

• Persian language
• Avestan language
• Behistun Inscription

Persian (فارسی = Fârsi . ... Yasna 28. ... The Behistun Inscription, carved into a cliffside, gives the same text in three languages, telling the story of King Darius conquests. ...

External links

• Iranian Languages Group
• Decipherment of Persian Cuneiform
• Old-Persian Cuneiform Inscription
• The Ancient Persian Alphabet