Download "Behistun", a free Old Persian Cuneiform Unicode font, install and refresh the page.

Texts written in this cuneiform have been found in Iran (Persepolis, Susa, Hamadan, Kharg Island), Armenia, Romania (Gherla),[1][2][3] Turkey (Van Fortress), and along the Suez Canal.

Scholars today mostly agree that the Old Persian script was invented by about 525 BC to provide monument inscriptions for the Achaemenid king Darius I, to be used at Behistun.

While a few Old Persian texts may seem to have been inscribed during the reigns of Cyrus the Great (CMa, CMb, and CMc, all found at Pasargadae), the first Achaemenid emperor, or of Arsames and Ariaramnes (AsH and AmH, both found at Hamadan), grandfather and great-grandfather of Darius I, all five, specially the latter two, are generally agreed to have been later inscriptions.

One of the chief differences between the writing systems of these languages is that Old Persian is a semi-alphabet, but Elamite and Akkadian are syllabaries.

Old Persian cuneiform was only deciphered by a series of guesses, in the absence of bilingual documents connecting it to a known language.

The first mention of ancient inscriptions in the newly discovered ruins of Persepolis was made by the Spain and Portugal ambassador to Persia, Antonio de Gouveia in a 1611 publication.

[5] Various travelers then made attempts at illustrating these new inscriptions, which in 1700 Thomas Hyde first called "cuneiform", but were deemed to be no more than decorative friezes.

[6][7] Around 1764, Carsten Niebuhr visited the ruins of Persepolis, and was able to make excellent copies of the inscriptions, identifying "three different alphabets".

[6] In 1802, Friedrich Münter confirmed that "Class I" characters (today called "Old Persian cuneiform") were probably alphabetical, also because of the small number of different signs forming inscriptions.

Because of its high recurrence and length, he guessed that this must be the word for "king" (xa-ša-a-ya-θa-i-ya, now known to be pronounced in Old Persian xšāyaθiya).

[10][11] This understanding of the structure of monumental inscriptions in Old Persian was based on the work of Anquetil-Duperron, who had studied Old Persian through the Zoroastrian Avestas in India, and Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, who had decrypted the monumental Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sasanian emperors.

[15] Grotefend similarly equated the sequence 𐎧𐏁𐎹𐎠𐎼𐏁𐎠 with kh-sh-h-e-r-sh-e for Xerxes, which again was right, but the actual Old Persian transcription was kha-sha-ya-a-ra-sha-a.

[11] However groundbreaking, this inductive method failed to convince academics, and the official recognition of his work was denied for nearly a generation.

[25] Building on Grotefend's insights, this task was performed by Eugène Burnouf, Christian Lassen and Sir Henry Rawlinson.

[31] 1 𐏑, 2 𐏒, 5 𐏒𐏒𐏑, 7 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑, 8 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒, 9 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑,10 𐏓, 12 𐏓𐏒, 13 𐏓𐏒𐏑, 14 𐏓𐏒𐏒, 15 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏑, 18 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒, 19 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑, 20 𐏔, 22 𐏔𐏒, 23 𐏔𐏒𐏑, 25 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏑, 26 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏒, 27 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑, 40 𐏔𐏔, 60 𐏔𐏔𐏔,120 𐏕𐏔 Although based on a logo-syllabic prototype, all vowels but short /a/ are written and so the system is essentially an alphabet.

However, as in the Brahmic scripts, short a is not written after a consonant: 𐏃 h or ha, 𐏃𐎠 hā, 𐏃𐎡 hi or hī, 𐏃𐎢 hu or hū.

Thirteen out of twenty-two consonants, such as 𐏃 h(a), are invariant, regardless of the following vowel (that is, they are alphabetic), while only six have a distinct form for each consonant-vowel combination (that is, they are syllabic), and among these, only d and m occur in three forms for all three vowels: 𐎭 d or da, 𐎭𐎠 dā, 𐎮𐎡 di or dī, 𐎯𐎢 du or dū.