in its Achaemenid variant. Gershevitch (1979) thought that Achaemenid Elamite was OP written ideographically, while OP versions were mere duplications for display purposes, but he never revealed the details of this “alloglottography” theory (Henkelman 2011: pp. 614–622) and therefore was strongly criticized by Elamitologists (in favor: Rubio 2006; research report: Rossi 2006).
Thirty thousand Elamite tablets and fragments were found at the Fortification wall on the Persepolis Terrace; 750 tablets and fragments in the “Treasury” area. Hundreds of tablets present Aramaic ink epigraphs; 163 Aramaic inscriptions on mortars, pestles, etc. which were found in the same “Treasury” area probably record the manufacture and their payment to treasurers in Arachosia (not their “ritual” use as believed by its editor Bowman).
According to Shaked (2003), it is reasonable to assume that knowledge of Aramaic, among speakers of Iranian, was confined to the scribes, who were conversant with OP in oral communication and with Aramaic in its written form. The earliest scribes could have been native speakers of Aramaic, who learned Persian; subsequently they may have been native speakers of Persian, who learned Aramaic as a written language.
At Persepolis, similar processes may have been active for Elamite. The officials who required the services of scribes probably preferred people who spoke their own language – Persian – with lesser attention to their fluency in Elamite.
The discovery of an isolated example of OP on a Persepolis administrative tablet (Stolper and Tavernier 2007) could change the accepted view of the functional differentiation between OP, Elamite, and Aramaic. This document actually contravenes stated expectations: at least one scribe wrote Persian language in Persian script and expected someone else to know how to read it. Gershevitch (1979: p. 143, cf. his “alloglottography” above) had insisted that there was not “the slightest chance for Old Persian written in Old Persian script … to have ever been in general use” (with different presumptions also Schmitt came to similar conclusions: “das Altpersische [hat] für die eigentliche Verwaltung […] keine Rolle gespielt,” 1993: p. 81).
Only hypotheses can be advanced to explain the existence of this tablet, but it is possibly the sole evidence of a larger group of documents, and therefore of more widespread recording in OP.
Evidence of multilingualism in the Achaemenid administration is provided not only by the interplay between Elamite and Aramaic language usage on the Persepolis tablets but also in the Aramaic name inscriptions on seals owned by personages whose primary language ought to have been different from Aramaic (Garrison and Root 2001: pp. 7–9).
All mentioned evidence reinforces the assumption that the Persepolis archive, like many others of the earlier Near East, represents the simultaneous use of several languages and asymmetric interference among them.
The relation between Elamite and Aramaic in the scribal practice of the Fortification texts has been discussed by Tavernier (2008); see also Rossi (2017).
The scribes using the Aramaic script, called teppi‐ in Elamite, are almost universally believed to write on parchment, but we do not have any Aramaic text ‘on parchment’ relatable to the tablets which contain this indication. Note that the teppi‐s whose names are preserved have Iranian names.
From the study of the different redaction patterns appearing in the Elamite tablets, Tavernier reconstructs three steps: (i) a Persian officer dictates an order in OP to employee A; (ii) employee A delivers the order to employee B, who makes an Aramaic translation (tumme) and gives it to employee C; (iii) employee C writes an Elamite copy (central administration), or a Demotic, etc. copy (peripheral administrations), of the tumme (see Chapter 3 Peoples and Languages).
The reconstruction is complex and entails many crucial assumptions impossible to discuss here (different interpretation: Vallat 1997); even Tavernier points out that only for a minority of the tablets this process could be envisaged, while according to the common procedure most likely the translation was directly from OP into Elamite.
Summing up, while on many details our vision of the Achaemenid multilingualism is much more advanced than in previous generations of scholars, the overall framework still eludes us.
REFERENCES
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