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Ancient Persia

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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Darius the Great and the Bisutun Inscription

J. Andrew McLaughlin. What is the significance of the association between Darius I ("The Great") of Persia and the inscription on the rock of Bisutun? Of what importance is this association to the reconstruction of Persian history? This inscription, carved 300 feet above the ground near Bisutun (a.k.a. Bisitun, Behistun, and Bahistun) in modern Ira...

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Old Persian (Aryan)

Edited by Shapour Suren-Pahlav. Linguistically, Old Persian is the oldest attested Persid language, which is classified in the group of Western Iranian languages. The Middle-Persian (Pahlavi) and New Persian, are the direct continuation of the Old Persian evolution. Old Persian was the vernacular tongue of the Achaemenid monarchs, but had already b...

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