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Persian Language

Persian Language

Persian language, also known as Farsi, is the most widely spoken member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages. It is the official language of Iran and is also widely spoken in Afghanistan and, in an archaic form, in Tadjikistan and the Pamir mountain region....

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Ancient Scripts: Avestan

Avestan was an Iranian language in which the earliest Zoroastrian hymns were orally transmitted since 1500 BCE. Due to lingusitic change, fluency in Avestan as spoken a thousand years earlier was deteorating, and hence the need to write the language became increasingly apparent. By the 3rd century CE an alphabet was created to write down the ancien...

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Ancient Scripts: Old Persian

The first Persian Empire of the Achaemenid dynasty rose to power in the middle of the 6th century BCE and quickly conquered an area that stretched from Mesopotamia to Afghanistan. Early in the history of the dynasty, a syllabic script to write the Old Persian language was developed. This script was not a direct descendent of the Sumerian and Akkadi...

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Iranian Scripts: Old Persian Cuneiform

Darius I [522 - 486 BCE] claims credit for the invention of Old Persian Cuneiform in an inscription on a cliff at Behistun in south-west Iran. The inscription dates from 520 BCE and is in three languages - Elamite, Babylonian and Old Persian. Some scholars are sceptical about Darius' claims, others take them seriously, although they think that Dari...

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The linguistic Setting of Old Persia

Old Persian "" The linguistic Setting of Old Persia. Old Persian is the name applied to the Persian language used in the cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenian dynasty; it can be localized as the language of the southwestern Persia, or Persis in the narrower sense, and was the vernacular speech of the Achaemenian rulers. The OP inscriptions ar...

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Persian Language and Literature

NETBible: Persian Language and Literature (Ancient) The Persian language, ancient and modern alike, is an Aryan tongue. In its ancient forms it is more closely connected with Vedic Sanskrit than with any other language except Armenian. Most of its roots are to be found also in Slavonic, Greek, Latin and other tongues of the same stock. Dialects: T...

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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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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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