Old Persian Cuneiform
OriginIran
Earliest520 BC
TypeSyllabary
About Old Persian Cuneiform
A simplified cuneiform created for the royal inscriptions of Darius I. About 40 signs, far fewer than the thousand of Mesopotamian cuneiform. Mixed logograms for words like king with syllabic signs. Deciphered in the 1840s, providing the key to reading the Behistun Inscription. Its clarity helped unlock Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform in turn.
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