In ca.521, the Persian king Darius I the Great ordered that a new alphabet, which he called the "Aryan script", was to be developed. It was used for a small corpus of inscriptions, known as the Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions. This page offers links to transcriptions, translations and pictures.

• The general system to refer to these texts consists of three letters. The first one indicates the king (e.g, X = Xerxes); the second the site (e.g., S = Susa); the third letter is added to distinguish the inscriptions of the same ruler on the same site.
• I have created these pages because these important sources are not available online, and not every library in the world owns the relevant publications.
• The drawings were scanned from R.N. Sharp, The Inscriptions in Old Persian Cuneiform of the Achæmenian Emperors (s.l., s.d.). They will be replaced by something better as soon as I have mastered Unicode.

Overview

In this table, the first column indicates the inscription; the second column offers a very brief summary; the four last columns indicate whether there is a Photo, a Drawing, a Persian Text, and an English translation.

Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions

Literature

• Pierre Lecoq, Les inscriptions de la Perse achéménide (1997 Paris)