Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Old Persian is one of two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of the Sasanian Empire).Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as ariya (Iranian).
According to available documents, the Persian language is "the only Iranian language" [19] for which close philological relationships between all of its three stages are established and so that Old, Middle, and New Persian represent [19] [54] one and the same language of Persian; that is, New Persian is a direct descendant of Middle and Old ...
The Iranian languages are grouped in three stages: Old Iranian (until 400 BCE), Middle Iranian (400 BCE – 900 CE) and New Iranian (since 900 CE). The two directly attested Old Iranian languages are Old Persian (from the Achaemenid Empire) and Old Avestan (the language of the Avesta).
Modern Persian is classified as a continuation of Middle Persian, the official religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire, itself a continuation of Old Persian, which was used by the time of the Achaemenid Empire. [61] [57] [60] Old Persian is one of the oldest Indo-European languages attested in original text. [60] Samples of Old ...
Around the time period in which Old Persian was used, nearby languages included Elamite and Akkadian. One of the chief differences between the writing systems of these languages is that Old Persian is a semi-alphabet, but Elamite and Akkadian are syllabaries. Further, Old Persian was written in a consistent semi-alphabetic system, but Elamite ...
Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone (discovered in 1799) was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.
The trilingual inscriptions illustrate the multi-ethnic complexity of the Achaemenid Empire: Old Persian is an Indo-European language, Babylonian is a Semitic language, and Elamite is a language isolate.
It descended from Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire and is the linguistic ancestor of Modern Persian, the official language of Iran (also known as Persia), Afghanistan and Tajikistan .