How it began
At the start of the reign of Darius I, in 521 BCE, the Persians had no writing system of their own. According to Wikipedia's account, Darius ordered the creation of a distinct Persian script. Its best-known early use is the Behistun inscription, cut about 100 meters up a cliff on Mount Behistun near Kermanshah in western Iran. The panel is about 15 meters high and 25 meters wide and gives the same text in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. It records how Darius put down rebellions after becoming king in 522 BCE.
Before it existed
The older cuneiform systems in use in the empire were far larger. Elamite cuneiform used roughly 200 characters and Babylonian around 600, mixing syllable signs and word signs. The CREWS Project at Cambridge describes Old Persian cuneiform as the product of a deliberate and radical reform of those earlier systems rather than a gradual development.
How it works
The script kept the wedge-shaped strokes of Mesopotamian cuneiform but was a new system built on new principles. It has 36 principal phonetic signs plus a small set of logograms, where Babylonian cuneiform needed hundreds of signs. Scholars class it as a semi-syllabary or semi-alphabetic script. It also used a word divider to make reading easier. Most surviving texts are royal inscriptions of Darius I and his son Xerxes I.
What lasted
Because the Behistun text repeats one message in three languages, it has been called the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform. In the early 19th century scholars used royal names in the simple Old Persian version to fix sign values, and then worked across to the Elamite and Babylonian versions. That opened the way to reading the far older records of Mesopotamia.
Where it stands today
The Behistun inscription remains on its cliff on Mount Behistun, near the city of Kermanshah in western Iran, with its relief of Darius above the three versions of the text. Researchers on early writing, such as the CREWS Project, study Old Persian cuneiform as a case of a script created by deliberate design rather than by slow change.
