Book Title: Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind
Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications
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THE ALPHABET inscription. It must also be pointed out that from the beginning of Darius reign early Persian inscriptions have come down to us in considerable numbers.
In 1930, Prof. E. E. Herzfeld published an early Persian inscription of Ariaramnes, the great-grandfather of Darius the Great. The inscription was discovered in Hamadan, the ancient Hagmatana (known by its Greek name Ecbatana), capital of Media. The text, incomplete, consists of ten lines of writing, engraved on the upper part of a gold tablet. A similar inscription of Arsames, the son of Ariaramnes, apparently still unpublished. was also found in Hamadan. Herzfeld, followed by other distinguished scholars, such as the French linguist Benveniste and the British assyriologist S. Smith, considers the inscription of Ariaramnes as genuine, placing the invention of the early Persian script at least three generations before Darius the Great, whereas other scholars, such as Schaeder, Brandenstein and Kent, hold that the inscription of Ariaramnes was engraved at the time of Artaxerxes II. According to Prof. inscriptions of Ariaramnes and Arsames were engraved "to do honour to the royal ancestors of Ariaramnes' line-apparently as a part of antiCyrus activity by Artaxerxes. Kent accepts Weissbach's theory that the early Persian script was probably an invention of the time of Cyrus the Great, who, however, made but a limited use of writing, and "had no craze for recording his exploits, as Darius did." The problem, however is still sub judice.
The early Persian script did not last long-its end coincided with the end of the Achæmenid dynasty and empire. It exercised no influence on future developments in writing.
Inscriptions
The early Persian inscriptions, which have been found mainly in Persepolis, belong to the period from the end of the sixth until the middle of the fourth century B.C. Besides the imposing monumental inscriptions, inscribed tablets of gold and silver have been found. However, the clay tablet as a vehicle for writing slowly declined in favour of the new writing materials then used by the western nations within the Persian Empire, that is, papyrus, skins or parchment, for which the cuneiform symbols were found to be unstritable. The Persian language was thus written in the Aramaic alphabet and this developed afterwards into the script employed for middle Persian and known as Pahlavi (see Part II, Chapter V).
Decipherment
Although early Persian was practically the last language to which cuneiform writing had been adapted, it provided the channel, as already
