kings taking a ‘throne‐name’ instead of the birth‐name at the accession.3 Schmitt, R. (1995). Iranische Namen. In E. Eichler, G. Hilty, H. Löffler, et al. (eds.), Namenforschung: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Onomastik: 1. Teilband. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, pp. 678–690. Offers an overall view of Iranian onomastics from prehistoric to modern times.
CHAPTER 6 The Inscriptions of the Achaemenids
Adriano V. Rossi
The Achaemenid royal inscriptions together with the Elamite administrative tablets from Persepolis are the most important direct sources to reconstruct Achaemenid history. Even if they provide less insight into the Achaemenid state organization than is commonly thought (political and administrative events are generally not recorded in them), they have the advantage of being contemporary to the events. Most of them have been found in Persis (Persepolis, Naqsh‐e Rostam, Pasargadae), Elam (Susa), and Media (Bisotun, Hamadan). From outside the central regions of the state, barring the few inscriptions on objects and clay tablets, we know of three inscriptions by Darius from the Suez Canal, a rock inscription by Xerxes from lake Van in Armenia, and fragments of inscriptions from Babylonia.
While the Teispids basically produced monolingual inscriptions (Rollinger 2015: p. 117; see below for Kyros' name at Pasargadae), most of the inscriptions of Darius I and his successors were trilingual (OP, AE, LB). They are mostly engraved on rock walls, architectural elements, reliefs, and sculpture from royal residences or smaller portable objects connected to the activity of the court; an exception are the inscriptions on the statue of Darius I found at Susa, on which, besides the usual trilingual, hieroglyphic texts are carved (like other inscriptions from Egypt, cf. Briant 1999: pp. 99–113). Partial Aramaic translations of DB (late Achaemenid, end of the fifth century BCE) were found among the Elephantine papyri; this proves the circulation of the text in the didactic practice (the inclusion on the papyrus scroll bearing the Aramaic version of DB of various passages originating from different inscriptions points to “a school‐like milieu in which texts from the reign of Darius were not only studied but also used to create something new,” Rollinger [2015: pp. 125–126]) but not necessarily as an official act of the royal chancellery.
The sequence of the texts (OP>AE>LB) on the inscriptional supports and/or their spatial arrangement generally emphasizes the priority of OP on the other languages, of Elamite on Babylonian, though surely “written language was not part of the inherited sense of identity for Persian speakers” (Tuplin 2011: p. 158; about language and ethnicity, Stolper and Tavernier 2007: p. 22).
The bulk of the Achaemenid inscriptions, written on behalf of Darius, Xerxes, and the three Artaxerxes (especially the first), have possibly been planned in OP (see Chapter 3 Peoples and Languages), probably the (majority) language of the ethnic élite ruling over Fārs in the first millennium BCE. Although the basis for OP must lie in a southwestern Iranian dialect, ancestor to the Iranian dialects spoken in Fārs, the language attested in the inscriptions is likely to correspond to a literary, artificial form of it (Stolper 2005: p. 19; Jacobs 2012: p. 97); OP as we know it was probably a language “restricted to royal usage” (Schmitt 2004: p. 717).
The motivation underlying the choice of the three Achaemenid languages is not clear (Briant 1999: p. 94 suggests Darius' intention to appear as “héritier des vieux empires ‘cunéiformes’ assyrien, babylonien et élamite,” cf. also Jacobs 2012: p. 105 fn. 57), and it is probably not by chance that “Elamite was the first language used by the Achaemenids for formal inscriptions” (Stolper 2004: p. 63; also Henkelman 2011: p. 585); perhaps “[t]he unbroken Elamite language tradition of Susa and Elam was continued with the inclusion of Elamite cuneiform in the […] Achaemenid royal inscriptions” (Schmitt 1993: p. 457), even if it is difficult to determine the exact linguistic relationships between OP and AE (on Gershevitch's [1979] hypothesis of an “alloglottography” of OP, never effectively proved and at odds with much AE evidence, cf. Stolper 2004: p. 64; Rossi 2006: pp. 78–84; Henkelman 2011: pp. 614–622; on AE and its contacts with OP cf. particularly Henkelman 2008: pp. 86–88, 2011: pp. 586–595, 614–622).
According to Jacobs (2012: pp. 103–104), the mere existence of DPd,e (OP), DPf (AE), DPg (LB) on the southern wall of the Persepolis Terrace, a four‐column inscriptional complex attesting not different translations of a same original but a unitary discourse, points to a multilingual (and multicultural) ability to interpret the relevant metatext (on DPd,e,f,g cf. also Filippone 2012); Jacobs (2012: pp. 111–114) suggests an “ideal model of the ‘polyglot’ king,” as elaborated by Lanfranchi (2009: pp. 130–131) for the Neo‐Hittite cultural area (in which “mastering foreign scripts and languages was clearly considered a point of honor for kings and rulers”). Most probably, anyhow, the Achaemenid usage of a quantity of languages has the same function as displaying a quantity of different peoples in iconography (=OP vispazana‐ “having all kind of people”; cf. Stolper 2005: p. 18 “trilingual inscriptions […] emblems of the Achaemenid Empire's immensity and complexity”).
It is commonly assumed – with no sure linguistic evidence – that the specific cuneiform writing created (at an unknown time) for the OP language, the “OP script” (its “name,” if any, is unknown, pace Hinz 1952: p. 30 and followers), has not been used before Darius: the scribes of Cyrus seem to have used Babylonian only, even if the extent of the documentation attributable to Cyrus is much reduced. Anyway, a few trilingual inscriptions are attested at palaces presumably built by Cyrus at Pasargadae, although many scholars claim that they were probably added later. Nylander (1967) questions that all OP inscriptions bearing Cyrus' name were forgeries by order of Darius (Schmitt 2007: pp. 28–31): in his opinion Cyrus wrote the original texts in Elamite and Babylonian, Darius added their OP versions in a recently invented script. Vallat (2011: pp. 277–279) and the present author have supported the possible authenticity for all versions (mostly for paleographic reasons), even if one should admit in this case that the usage of OP script would have remained highly limited before Darius. Arguments in favor of Darius' invention of it are critically examined by Huyse (1999: pp. 51–55, cf. Rossi [2020]); in favor of a greater antiquity have also been – for different reasons – Hallock, Mayrhofer, Diakonoff, Gershevitch.
As to the “oldest” OP documents, the two gold laminae bearing monolingual OP inscriptions of Darius' great‐grandfather Ariaramnes and his grandfather Arsames are hardly authentic; besides their linguistic “corruption” (Schmitt 1999: pp. 105–111, 2007: pp. 25–28), their appearing and disappearing from the international scene renders their contribution invalid.
The problem of the introduction of the OP script is closely connected to the interpretation of a Bisotun passage (DB/OP Section 70 = DB/AE L), where possibly the word for the whole epigraphic complex is OP dipi[dāna‐?]/AE tuppime “the political message conveyed by the whole complex,” “Memorial,” cf. Rossi (2020: fn 75); Schmitt (2014: p. 169) reconstructs it as OP dipi[ciça‐ “[a]ls Bezeichnung der von Dareios “hinzugesetzten” (DB 4.89) altpersischen Version von DB”. In the interpretation of the political message of DB/OP Section 70 = DB/AE L, I fully agree with Tuplin's (2005: p. 226) sharp differentiation between “public display of a text with an iconographic component” (as for example the monumental reduced replica of the Bisotun Monument from Babylon) and “the more extravagant scenario of 70 in which the text alone will be sent ‘to the lands’ (i.e. throughout the empire).”
The scholars who assume that Darius wants to inform us that he had ordered the creation
