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Ancient Persia

Persians

Around 1200 BC, some new people invaded West Asia from the north. These people were called the Persians and the Medes. Both of them were Indo-European people, distantly related to the Hittites, the Greeks and the Romans. Like the Scythians, the Medes and the Persians were nomadic people. They travelled around Siberia with their horses and their cat...

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Behistun Inscription

The Behistun Inscription is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptian hieroglyphs: the document most crucial in the decipherment of a previously lost script. It is located in the Kermanshah Province of Iran. The inscription includes three versions of the same text, written in three different cuneiform script languages: Old Persian, Elamite...

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Ancient Persian Alphabet

When the Persian king Darius I the Great (522-486) ordered the Behistun inscription to be made, he also ordered the making of a special, Persian alphabet, which he called 'the Aryan script'. It consists of thirty-six signs indicating syllables and eight ideograms for the words 'king', 'country' (2x) 'good', 'god', 'earth', and 'Ahuramazda' (3x). A ...

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ANE History: Persia

The first mention we have of the Persians is on a tablet recording the expedition of Shalmanesser III into a country called Parsua, in the mountains of Kurdistan around 837 BC. There, it seems that twenty-seven chieftain-kings ruled over twenty-seven states thinly populated by a people called Amadai, Madai, or Medes. They were Indo-European and had...

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