Old Persian

Much like the Rosetta Stone, the Behistun Inscription contains an inscription in three languages.

It's an account of Achaemenid King Darius I written in Babylonian, Old Persian, and Elamite.

Henry Rawlinson published his work on the Old Persian section of it in 1849, and that enabled the translation of the other languages.

Ashurbanipal's library was part of the process of deciphering cuneiform, as it provided an array of additional samples of cuneiform script to work from.

Once people were able to read the cuneiform script that they were written in, the tablets in Ashurbanipal's library became the source of just a wealth of new historical information.

But for now, you know, I'm just gathering my knowledge.

knowledge so that way I can get like a real head start when I do actually go to college I'm hoping to write my thesis on reconstructed grammatical terms in old Persian but yeah that that's that's how it is

Yeah, so the reconstruction thing is actually a great place to start, I think, because I think one thing that I've found interesting that has confused me as a historian rather than being a linguist, because I've read a lot of old German and old Norse and old English and all that, which I thought it was funny that you said you were studying ancient languages to get hoes, because one of my best friends... on a date with, uh, his, his father on one of his early dates with, with his mother, um, apparently recited an entire bit of the Canterbury Tales to her in the, in the original, like, 12th century, or not 12th century, was it 12th century? 14th.

14th century.

Yes.

Okay, so in a video that I did, I made a video about how if time travel movies were realistic.

and that is that was a very fun project involved me translating into gothic latin and old persian um now the thing with old persian so for those of you who don't know old persian is the earliest attested form of the persian language um it's written in its own variants of cuneiform um and you mostly find it on the sides of walls and mountains And on, like, palaces and stuff.

And it's mainly royal inscriptions.

scholar and renowned linguist charles burlitz of the burlitz language schools spoke an amazing thirty-two languages and just like sir william jones his life's research in comparative linguistics led him to the inescapable conclusion that all the world's languages must trace back to a single lost ancient dialect Berlitz actually wrote several books about Atlantis and believed the primary language of the human race originated there.

And in 1786, Sir William Jones, a Supreme Court judge who could speak 30 languages, gave his third anniversary discourse to the Asiatic Society, where he declared that the similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, Celtic, Persian, could only be explained on the hypothesis that they all shared a common parentage.

his contemporary the german philosopher hedgel compared the consequences of jones's revelation to the discovery of a whole new world its groundbreaking work on the subject established him as the founder of comparative linguistics jones wrote that the sanscrit language whatever be its antiquity is of a wonderful structure more perfect than the greek more copious than the latin and more exquisitely refined than either yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar than could possibly have been produced by accident so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists there is a similar reason though not quite so forcible for supposing that both the gothic and the celtic though blended with a very different idiom had the same origin with the Sanskrit, and the Old Persian might be added to the same family.

And you can see they all have virtually the same flood story included in their mythos of these fallen entities coming to mingle with men.

And it's, well, inundated in our archaeology as well, if you simply know where to look, such as the Sumerian kings list.

So early Chinese writing is going to be influenced by these bones, these fortune-teller bones.

And then you go to Old Persian.

Now this is the height of that.

Everything in this Old Persian cuneiform is going to have the straight lines.

Now on this one, if you take your... your chisel and you bend it at an angle, one side of your straight line is going to be thicker than the other.

And so depending on the thickness of that line and which side is thick and which side is not, you have totally different letters.

Emboldened by their decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, they began attempts to translate the strange markings that had started to turn up, scratched into clay.

The Behistun inscription, written in three cuneiform languages, Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian, served as a Rosetta Stone for the emerging field, meaning that by the 1860s Akkadian cuneiform was understood quite well.

Sumerian took a bit longer, it seemed so alien that scholars suspected it was some sort of secret code rather than a language, but by the early 1900s it too was largely understood.

Meanwhile, tablets in their hundreds of thousands were arriving in the universities and museums of the world.

The area once known as Mesopotamia had changed enormously since Gilgamesh's time.

Waves of newer cultures, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, eventually even the Greeks, had worn away memories of the glory of Uruk and layered new traditions on top.

Sumerian and Akkadian languages gave way to Imperial Aramaic and Old Persian.

The region saw new religious practices, new bureaucratic traditions, and, most fatally for cuneiform, a new writing system, the elegant and easily mastered alphabet.