www.chn.ir  For the first time, a text has been found in Old Persian Language that shows the written language was used for practical recording and was not just limited to the royal family. The text is inscribed on a damaged clay tablet from the Persepolis Fortification Archive which is currently kept at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago for being decoded. The tablet is an administrative record of the payout of at least 600 quarts of an as-yet unidentified commodity belongign to 2500 years ago in five villages near Persepolis world heritage site in Iranian Fars province.

“Now we can see that Persians living in Persia at the high point of the Persian Empire wrote down ordinary day-to-day matters in Persian language and Persian script,” said Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute. “Odd as it seems, that comes as a surprise, a very big surprise,” added Stein.

Old Persian writing was the first of the cuneiform scripts to be deciphered between 1800 and 1845. When the script was cracked, scholars saw that the Old Persian language was an ancestor of modern Persian and a relative of Sanskrit. Knowing that, they could understand the inscriptions of Darius, Xerxes (Achaemenid kings) and their successors. Achaemenid dynasty (550-330 BC) was founded by Cyrus the Great and collapsed following the invasion of Alexander the Great to Persia who set Persepolis on fire.

Until now, most scholars of Old Persian thought that Old Persian script and language were used only for the inscriptions of kings on cliff faces or palaces, or else to identify vessels of precious metals or other luxury goods that were connected with the kings and their palaces. Aramaic, Babylonian, Elamite and other languages and scripts were already used ad the advent of the Empire by Persians to write records of administration or business.

The Persepolis Fortification tablets were excavated at the imperial palace complex of Persepolis in southwestern Iran, by the Oriental Institute in the 1930s and after getting the permission of the Iranian government were sent to the Oriental Institute in 1937 on a long-term loan in order to be decoded and analyzed.

The archive includes tens of thousands of clay tablets and gragments with texts in Elamite, an indigenous language already written in Iran for almost 2000 years before the Achaemenid Empire was founded. It also includes hundreds of clay tablets and fragments with texts in Aramaic, a Semitic language already used for practical recording over much of the Near East since the days of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires (ninth to sixth centuries BC). It also includes thousands of tablets with not texts at all, but with impressions of seals.

According to Oriental Institute of University of Chicago, over the years of study, a few extraordinary items have also been discovered among the Persepolis tablets such as a text in Phrygian (a language of western Anatolia, in modern Turdy), a text in Greek, and not a text in Persian, the language of the Empire’s rulers.  

“Most of the scribes around Persepolis could speak and write more than one language, and this text might be just an original experiment done by one of them,” said Mattew W. Stolper, head of the Oriental Institute’s Persepolis Fortification Archive Project. “However, it might also be the tip of an iceberg,” added Stolper.

He further explained that in 500 BC, just like now, administrative records did not work as isolates, only as items in much larger files. Before 1933, there was only one known example of an Achaemenid administrative tablet written in Elamite language, but since the discovery of the Persepolis Fortification Archive they have reached to thousands. “Like that first Achaemenid Elamite tablet, this Old Persian tablet could also be the first forerunner of something much bigger,” added Stolper.

Stolper strongly believes that unexpected discoveries are still being made and the meaning and reliability of every piece depends of its connections with the whole information system of the entire Fortification Archive.

Members of the Oriental Institute’s Persepolis Fortification Archive Project first announced the discovery of the old Persian tablet in November 2006 at a colloquium at the College de France and the University of Chicago’s Paris Center. They described the document in greater detail at a meeting of the American Oriental Society in March 2007.

A number of these tablets which have been studied by the Oriental Institute have been returned to Iran so far. A group of 179 complete tablets were sent back in 1948 and another group of more than 37,000 tablet fragments was returned in 1951. The last load which was consisted of 300 tablets was sent to Iran in 2004.