What Language Did the Ancient Persians Speak?
Old Persian, an Indo-Iranian language of the Indo-European family, written in a simplified cuneiform script designed for the imperial chancery. The working tool is Roland Kent’s Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon (1950, revised 1989); the Persian side of the imperial language policy is treated in Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander (2002), and in Stolper’s work on the Persepolis archives. The cluster on Persian language history treats the development of the language in detail.
Old Persian: the language of the Achaemenid court
Old Persian is the earliest attested stage of the Persian language proper, and the corpus of Old Persian inscriptions — the cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings — is the major documentary source for the language. The Old Persian cuneiform, designed in the sixth century BCE for the royal chancery of Cyrus the Great and his successors, was a remarkable adaptation of the Mesopotamian cuneiform to the phonology of an Indo-European language. The script used a mixture of logograms, syllabograms, and (in the case of the vowel /a/) a true alphabet, and it was used for only about 200 years.
The Old Persian cuneiform was used for the royal inscriptions on stone — the inscriptions of Cyrus at Pasargadae, of Darius the Great at Behistun, Naqsh-e Rostam, and Persepolis, of Xerxes, of Artaxerxes, and of the later Achaemenid kings — and the script was reserved for the monumental inscriptions of the king. The administrative documents of the Achaemenid Empire were written, in most cases, in Aramaic, the working language of the imperial chancery, and only the royal inscriptions, the coin legends, and a small set of administrative documents survive in Old Persian.
Old Persian was, like Latin in the Roman Empire, the prestige language of the court and the chancery, and it was the language of the Achaemenid kings in their public communications. The Behistun inscription of Darius I, for example, was composed in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, and the Old Persian version was the first in the order of presentation. The Old Persian text of the Behistun inscription, which includes a long autobiographical account of Darius’s rise to power, is one of the most important texts of the ancient world, and the trilingual text of the inscription, which was deciphered in the 1840s by Henry Rawlinson, was the key to the decipherment of the entire cuneiform tradition.
Median and the other Iranian languages
The other major Iranian language of the Achaemenid period was Median, the language of the Medes, the Iranian people of the northwest Iranian plateau. The Median language is attested only in a small set of loanwords in Old Persian, in the names of persons and places, and in a small set of Aramaic transcriptions. Median was closely related to Old Persian, and the two languages together formed a dialect continuum, with Old Persian in the southwest and Median in the northwest. The relationship between Old Persian and Median is sometimes compared to the relationship between classical Latin and Oscan in the Roman world, with Old Persian as the prestige language of the court and Median as the spoken language of the western Iranian heartland.
The other Iranian languages of the Achaemenid period — Parthian, Sogdian, Bactrian, Khwarezmian, and the other eastern Iranian languages — are not well-attested in the Achaemenid period, but they were spoken in the eastern provinces of the empire and were the ancestors of the Middle Iranian and Modern Iranian languages. The Parthian Empire and the Sasanian Empire used Parthian and Middle Persian, respectively, as their chancery languages, and the Avestan language of the Zoroastrian scripture was closely related to the eastern Iranian languages of the Achaemenid period.
The non-Iranian languages of the empire
The Achaemenid Empire used several non-Iranian languages in the administration of the satrapies. Elamite, the language of the ancient kingdom of Elam in lowland Khuzistan, was a major language of the Achaemenid administration, and the Elamite version of the Behistun inscription, the longest of the three versions, was a major source for the decipherment of the cuneiform. The Elamite language, a language isolate, was used in the lowland southwest, in the heartland of the Persian Empire, and the Elamite scribes were a major part of the Achaemenid chancery.
Akkadian, the Semitic language of ancient Mesopotamia, was used in Mesopotamia and the western provinces. The Akkadian version of the Behistun inscription, the third of the three versions, was composed in Neo-Babylonian, the dialect of Akkadian used in the late Babylonian period. Aramaic, the Semitic language of the Arameans of Syria, became the working language of the Achaemenid administration and the lingua franca of the empire, and the Aramaic script, derived from the Phoenician alphabet, was used for most of the administrative documents.
Egyptian, the language of the conquered Egyptian satrapy, was used in the administration of Egypt, and the Egyptian demotic script was used for many of the administrative documents. Greek, the language of the Ionian Greeks of the Aegean coast, was used in the administration of the western satrapies and became a major language of the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period after Alexander’s conquest. The multilingual character of the Achaemenid Empire is one of the most distinctive features of the imperial administration, and the policy of accommodation, of using the local languages in the local administration, was a major element of the Achaemenid policy of religious and cultural tolerance.
The legacy of the Old Persian cuneiform
The Old Persian cuneiform of the Achaemenid inscriptions is one of the most important scripts in the history of writing. The script, which was used for only about 200 years, was the vehicle of the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, and the decipherment of the Old Persian cuneiform by Henry Rawlinson and others in the 1840s was the foundation of the modern study of the ancient Near East. The Old Persian cuneiform was deciphered in part through the trilingual inscription of Behistun, in which the same text is given in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, and the decipherment of the Old Persian cuneiform was the key to the decipherment of the Elamite, the Akkadian, and the Sumerian cuneiforms.
The Old Persian cuneiform was also a major cultural achievement. The script, which was used for the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, was a vehicle of the imperial ideology, and the inscriptions of Darius I, Xerxes I, and the later Achaemenid kings are among the great documents of the ancient world. The Behistun inscription of Darius I, in particular, is sometimes called the “Rosetta Stone of Asia.”