Persian cuneiform

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3 of the 5 logograms in Persian cuneiform

The Persian cuneiform is the youngest and most basic form of cuneiform . It was deciphered by the Mündener linguist and antiquarian Georg Friedrich Grotefend and the British officer Henry Creswicke Rawlinson .

The best-known document is the trilingual so-called Behistun inscription of King Darius I on a rock wall near the Persian town of Behistun . In this ancient Persian inscription, Darius claims to be the inventor of this writing. The fact that the Persian cuneiform script was not the official script of the Achaemenid Empire suggests that it did not originate historically, but was a deliberate new creation. It consists of only 41 characters. Of these, 36 are  phonograms , 5 frequently used logograms and 1 separator.

Decipherment

While Rawlinson risked his life to decipher the cuneiform script, Grotefend solved the puzzle on the desk. This was preceded by a bet in which he claimed that he could decipher a script that he did not even know in which language it was written.

As a Greek teacher, Grotefend knew the Persian kings. Then he determined ten of the 37 characters of a text submitted to him from Persepolis , starting from the form of the names as they appeared in the Avesta . Grotefend found that the kings sought could be neither Cyrus I nor Cambyses I , since both names begin with the same sound, but the initial characters of the kings sought were different. Nor could it be Cyrus or Artaxerxes I , as these two names had different lengths. So there were only Darius I and Xerxes I. He presented his results in his manuscript Praevia de cuneatis quas vocant inscriptionibus Persepolitanis legendis et explicandis relatio , which he presented to the Society of Sciences in Göttingen on September 4, 1802 .

In 1835 Rawlinson visited the Behistun rock relief. He let himself be rappeled down the rock face and copied the 18-meter-long trilingual inscription (Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian) that surrounds the relief. In 1846 he published the translation of the complete Behistun inscription. Today it can neither be proven nor excluded that Rawlinson knew about Grotefend's work, which did not appear in print until the end of the century.

Unicode

The Persian cuneiform script has been part of the Unicode standard since March 2005 with release version 4.1 .

The Old Persian Unicode block includes the range U + 103A0 – U + 103DF:

Old Persian
  0 1 2 3 4th 5 6th 7th 8th 9 A. B. C. D. E. F.
U + 103Ax ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
U + 103Bx ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
U + 103Cx ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
U + 103Dx ? ? ? ? ? ?

Web links

Commons : Persian Cuneiform  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dietz-Otto Edzard :  Grotefend, Georg Friedrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 164 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Old Persian - Range: 103A0–103DF (PDF; 95 kB) Official Unicode table on unicode.org; accessed on October 2, 2018.