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 All
historians and experts in Iran, believe that the Aryan
(Old-Persian) Cuneiform was invented during the
reign of Darius
the Great.
It is widely believed that the invention of this
script was due to the order of Darius the great,
the third king of kings in line from the beginning
of the Dynasty. Most of Achaemenid historical
texts support the same hypothesis as well but just
recently, Dr. Badr alzaman Gharib, delivering her
speech, titled Emergence and Changes in Ancient
Persian Script in a forum on Achaemenid tablets,
claimed that the Persian cuneiform predates
Darius.
She said, “I believe that this script predates
Darius and improved in his reign. Persian
cuneiform consists of 36 signs for three vowels
and syllables which are consisted of a single
consonant and a vowel, 8 ideograms for 4 concepts
regarding king, land, country, and Ahoora Mazda
(the great god of ancient Persians), 1 divider (a
diagonal wedged-shape sign to separate words), and
22 figures for numbers. All of these items and
especially the divider and the construction of
syllable script prove that this script was much
more ancient.”
She also indicated, “On the other hand, the
ancient Persian cuneiform led to decoding other
cuneiforms namely Elamite and Assyrian ones,
therefore is especially important. This script
because of the word separator and having fewer
alphabets was deciphered earlier than the other
scripts and as it was frequently inscribed along
with the same text in three other languages and
therefore scripts, it helped decoding other
cuneiforms as well.”
Archaeology and linguistics contributed a lot to
the decipherment of this script. When
archaeologists proved that the inscriptions belong
to Achaemenid era, linguists took Avestan and
Sanskrit grammar for a model to decipher the code
and actually they were not wrong as these
languages are really similar linguistically.
She concluded that, “If it wasn’t for the word
separator, its decoding would be impossible.”
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