Achaemenid royal inscriptions

These inscriptions are primary sources for the history of the empire, along with archaeological evidence and the administrative archives of Persepolis.

Scholars deciphered the Old Persian cuneiform script first, followed by the Babylonian and Elamite language versions using the trilingual inscriptions.

[2] A few Achaemenid inscriptions are instead written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example in stelae found near the Suez Canal.

Other hieroglyphic text has been found on crockery and pottery vessels that were made in Egypt but excavated at Persepolis, Susa, and possibly Babylonia.

[2] In 1958 Richard Hallock compiled statistics on the length and numbers of the Elamite language versions of the royal inscriptions.

[4] Most of the inscriptions have been found in the Achaemenid heartlands (in Pasargadae, Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rostam) with smaller numbers in the wider empire (at Susa, Bisutun, Ganjnameh, Babylon).

[7] In a first step, the writing direction was found out and that the Achaemenid inscriptions are three different scripts with a common text.

[7] The second phase, in which a first decipherment took place and correct values for a significant number of characters could be found, was initiated by Georg Friedrich Grotefend.

[7] In a final step, the decipherment of the Behistun inscription was completed by Henry Rawlinson and Edward Hincks.

[7] The designations or abbreviations of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions are based on the system introduced by Roland Grubb Kent in 1953.

Rüdiger Schmitt's 2009 Die altpersischen Inschriften der Achaimeniden is considered the modern reference work.

[8] The Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions online (ARIo) Project, part of the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, currently contains 175 composite texts with 11,712 words.

[10] A 2021 list of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions counted 179 texts, from Darius I to Artaxerxes III.