Latest / The Achaemenid Empire: Persia's Golden Age of Power — Fexingo History / The Achaemenid Kurash: Persia's Lost Imperial Language
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the Achaemenid Empire — its roads, its armies, its postal system. But there's this one question that doesn't get asked enough: what language did the Great King actually speak at court? Luna: I always assumed it was some form of Persian, but I guess it's more complicated than that? Lucas: Much more. The Achaemenid court was a multilingual hubbub — Elamite, Aramaic, Babylonian, maybe even Greek after a while. But the language that the kings themselves used for their most important pronouncements — the royal inscriptions carved into rock — that was Old Persian. The Persians called it Kurash, or sometimes simply "Ariya" — 'the Aryan language'. Lucas: But here's the twist: Old Persian wasn't a written language before Darius the Great. It had been spoken for centuries, but it had no script. So when Darius needed to inscribe his deeds on the cliff at Behistun, he had his scribes invent a brand new cuneiform writing system for it, from scratch. Luna: Wait, they invented an entire script just for one inscription? Lucas: Not quite for one inscription, but for a very specific purpose: royal propaganda. Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic script — it has 36 phonetic signs, a handful of logograms, and a word divider. It's much simpler than the hundreds of signs used in Akkadian or Elamite. And it appears almost exclusively on monuments commissioned by the king. Lucas: So the question becomes: was Old Persian actually spoken by ordinary people, or was it a kind of ceremonial language, like Latin in medieval Europe? The evidence is mixed. We have very few everyday documents in Old Persian — most administrative records use Elamite or Aramaic. But the language itself is clearly a real spoken dialect, related to Avestan and later Middle Persian. Luna: So it was like the language of power, but not the language of the marketplace? Lucas: Exactly. The Persepolis Fortification Tablets — those thousands of clay tablets from the reign of Darius — are written almost entirely in Elamite, with some Aramaic labels. Old Persian appears only in a handful of seal inscriptions and, of course, on the royal monuments. That suggests that the scribes who ran the empire were trained in Elamite, which had been the administrative language of the region for over a thousand years. Lucas: But the kings themselves spoke Old Persian at court. We know this from Greek sources — they describe interpreters being used when the king addressed foreign delegations. And the very existence of the script, which was used consistently from Darius to Artaxerxes III, shows that there was a living tradition behind it. It wasn't just a dead symbol. Luna: So what happened to it? Why did it disappear? Lucas: That's the great mystery. After Alexander conquered Persia, Old Persian inscriptions stop. The script was forgotten for over two thousand years — until European scholars deciphered it in the 19th century, using the Behistun Inscription as a Rosetta Stone. But the language itself evolved. It gradually became Middle Persian, which was written in a different script derived from Aramaic. So Old Persian didn't die so much as transform. Lucas: But there's a poignant detail: the last known Old Persian inscription is from the reign of Artaxerxes III, around 350 BCE — just twenty years before Alexander. After that, the script vanishes. It's as if the empire's voice went silent. Luna: That's almost poetic. The language of the Great Kings, carved in stone, then lost, then found again. Lucas: And that's what makes studying Old Persian so fascinating. We have maybe a few hundred inscriptions total — most of them very formulaic: 'I am Darius, the Great King, King of Kings, King of lands containing all kinds of men, King of this great earth far and wide.' But within those formulas, there are tiny glimpses of something personal — like Darius's prayer to Ahura Mazda to protect the land from 'the lie'. Luna: The lie — that's a big concept in Zoroastrianism, right? The opposite of truth? Lucas: Exactly. In Old Persian, 'the lie' is 'drauga' — a word that appears over and over in the Behistun Inscription, where Darius describes how he crushed the 'lie' of the rebel kings. It's a moral and cosmic concept, not just a social one. For Darius, speaking the truth was part of ruling justly. Lucas: And that's where the language itself becomes a window into Achaemenid ideology. The Old Persian word for 'king' is 'khshayathiya', from the same root as 'shah'. The word for 'kingdom' is 'khshassa'. You can hear the echoes in modern Persian, like 'shahr' meaning city. So the language connects us directly to how they thought about power. Luna: I love that. So when we read an Old Persian inscription, we're hearing the king's own voice — or at least the voice he wanted to project. Lucas: Exactly. And that voice is remarkably consistent across decades and reigns. The formulas stay the same: the king's name, his genealogy, his titles, his deeds, his prayer. It's like a branding exercise, really. Every new king had to carve his own version of the same message, proving he was a worthy successor. Lucas: Now, one of the most interesting linguistic features of Old Persian is that it preserves a very archaic Indo-European grammar. It has eight cases for nouns — like Sanskrit or Latin — and a complex verb system. By the time of the later inscriptions, you can see the language starting to simplify, which hints that the spoken language was evolving faster than the written one. Luna: So the inscriptions became more and more conservative, like a frozen snapshot of an earlier stage of the language? Lucas: Precisely. The scribes were copying traditional formulas, maybe not even speaking Old Persian themselves day-to-day. That's why some scholars argue that by the fourth century, Old Persian was already a ceremonial language — maintained by a small class of scribes who learned it as a special skill. Lucas: And that brings us back to the question of how many people actually spoke it. The consensus now is that Old Persian was the native language of the Persian tribe from Persis, the heartland of the empire. But as the empire expanded, Persian nobles and administrators would have spoken it as a mother tongue, while using Elamite or Aramaic for official business. So it was an elite language, but not a dead one. Luna: That makes sense. It's like how Latin was spoken by the Roman elite even as Greek was used for administration in the East. Lucas: Right. And just as Latin evolved into the Romance languages, Old Persian evolved into Middle Persian, which then became New Persian — the language of Ferdowsi and Rumi. So in a way, the echoes of Kurash are still with us. Lucas: But here's something that keeps me up at night: we have almost no idea what Old Persian sounded like. The cuneiform script doesn't record vowels perfectly — it's what linguists call a 'defective' script. So we can reconstruct the consonants and some vowel patterns, but the actual pronunciation — the tone, the rhythm, the accent — that's lost forever. Luna: That's heartbreaking. So we can read the words, but we can't hear them. Lucas: Exactly. And that's true for so many ancient languages. But with Old Persian, we're lucky to have as much as we do. The Behistun Inscription alone gives us over a thousand lines of text. And because it's trilingual — Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian — it was the key to deciphering Mesopotamian cuneiform itself. Lucas: The decipherment story is just as dramatic. In the 1830s, a British officer named Henry Rawlinson climbed the cliff at Behistun — nearly 300 feet up — to copy the inscription. He risked his life to get those wedge-shaped signs. And he used his knowledge of Old Persian, which he'd learned from studying the inscriptions at Persepolis, to begin cracking the code. Luna: So the same language that the Achaemenids used to project their power became the key to unlocking their entire history. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the kind of irony that history loves. The empire's voice, silenced for two millennia, started speaking again because of a soldier with a pencil and a lot of courage. Lucas: You know, it's conversations like this that remind me why we keep doing these shows — digging into these small, overlooked corners of the past. And I'm really glad we can do it without any ads interrupting the flow. Luna: Absolutely. No commercials, no sponsored segments — just us, talking about history because we love it. Lucas: If that kind of thing matters to you, and you want to help keep it ad-free, there's a simple way: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small gesture, but it genuinely makes a difference. And with that out of the way — let's get back to Kurash. Luna: So we were talking about how Old Persian evolved into Middle Persian. What's the turning point? Lucas: The key moment is the fall of the Achaemenid Empire itself. After Alexander, Greek became the prestige language of the Seleucid court, and Persian administrative traditions were disrupted. But Persian didn't disappear — it just changed. By the time of the Sasanian Empire, three hundred years later, the language had simplified its grammar, adopted a new script based on Aramaic, and become what we call Middle Persian. Lucas: And interestingly, the Sasanians consciously looked back to the Achaemenids as their ancestors — even though they couldn't read the Old Persian inscriptions anymore. They had lost the key. So they built their identity on a memory of greatness, not on the actual texts. Luna: That's bizarre — they were trying to emulate an empire whose own language they couldn't understand. Lucas: Exactly. And that disconnect lasted until Rawlinson and others pieced it back together in the 19th century. So the study of Old Persian isn't just about the Achaemenids — it's about how we recover lost voices, and how fragile even the most powerful empire's cultural legacy can be. Lucas: There's a line from one of the Persepolis inscriptions — I'm paraphrasing — where Darius says: 'By the favor of Ahura Mazda, I made this inscription. May Ahura Mazda protect me, and my house, and this land.' It's a prayer, but it's also a statement of permanence. He thought the words would last forever. And in a way, they did — just not in the way he imagined. Luna: That's beautiful. The words outlasted the empire, but not the script. And now they're speaking again. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the magic of history — and of languages like Kurash.