as ša napar lišānu gabbi, “of all nationalities (?).”
Epigraphy documents the usage of different languages in the Achaemenid administration. Aramaic was, or was becoming, a sort of vehicular language (not official, Folmer 1995: p. 13), while local languages kept on being used in private texts, in the local administrations, and in some royal proclamations.
Despite the diffusion of so many languages, only three were used for the monumental records: OP, Elamite, and Babylonian. Different degrees of bilingualism and/or diglossia have been hypothesized.
The Achaemenid inscriptions are presumed to have been planned in OP, an Indo‐European (IE) language close to Avestan; the people associated with that language were the Achaemenids, who we conceive as an ethnic élite, settled in Fārs at an undetermined period (traditionally fixed at the end of the second millennium BCE, even if it could be antedated at least at the first half of that millennium). Although the basis for OP must lie in a southwestern Iranian dialect, the specific variety attested in the inscriptions is likely to correspond to a literary, artificial form of it.
It is commonly assumed that the specific cuneiform writing adapted to the language, the “OP script,” has not been used before Darius: the scribes of Cyrus seem to have used Babylonian, even if the extent of the documentation attributable to Cyrus is much reduced. Nonetheless, trilingual inscriptions (OP, Elamite, and Babylonian) are attested at palaces built by Cyrus at Pasargadae. Many scholars claim that the OP version was probably added later. Nylander (1967), who investigated the matter, questions that all OP inscriptions bearing Cyrus' name were forgeries by order of Darius (also Schmitt 2007: pp. 28–31), and believes that while Cyrus wrote the original texts in Elamite and Babylonian, Darius added their OP versions. Vallat (2011: pp. 277–279) supports their authenticity for paleographical reasons.
Even more complicated problems are posed by two gold laminae bearing inscriptions of Darius' great‐grandfather Ariaramnes and his grandfather Arsames, which may or may not be authentic.
It is uncertain whether the OP script was really invented during Darius' reign, as became fashionable to claim after Weissbach's siding (1911: pp. lx–lxix; Weissbach changed his mind before 1930, cf. Schaeder 1930: p. 293). As Diakonoff (1970) argued, the OP script may have been devised to write Median, or any other Iranian language. For those scholars who do not want to subscribe to Diakonoff's views, the inconsistencies of the OP script can be explained on the basis of a principle of economy: only the signs that were necessary to avoid ambiguity would have been created.
The problem of the language(s) and the script(s) used in everyday life on the plateau remains open. One could assume, with Grantovskij (1998: p. 342), that “Iranian languages had been subject to interdialectal merging long before the rise of Media;” Lecoq has pointed at the language of the inscriptions as a literary language (1974: pp. 56–58, 1997: p. 50), an interdialectal koiné (1974: p. 61). Kellens (2002: p. 455) suggests an interpretation in terms of sabir/lingua franca, Henkelman (2011: p. 615 fn. 105) of diglossia.
A document which could hint at the relation between royal proclamations and their dissemination is a passage in the Bisotun inscription, in which Darius says something about the monument/inscription itself, but a question about the interpretation of this passage (= OP § 70, Elam. Inscription L) has been going on for more than 100 years, and there is no consensus to date (research report: Rossi 2020). The Aramaic version of the inscription found at Elephantine (Folmer 1995: pp. 741–742) hints at an important role of this language, but surely not as pervasive as suggested by Sancisi‐Weerdenburg (1999) because of the scanty Aramaic evidence on the plateau.
Other ancient Iranian languages could be ascribed to the Achaemenid world. “Median” is a cover term used for the minimal Old Iranian remnants in the OP inscriptions (names, specific vocabulary items, etc.) and other sources (especially Elamite tablets), whose phonology departs from that which is believed to be “typical OP.” “Median” does therefore not refer to a specific language (theoretically a northwestern Iranian language, in view of its location) but is merely a conventional label (Rossi 1981, 2017b). Since the 1980s the Median component in Late Iron Age Iran has been strongly reduced, and the nerve‐racking search for a Median language and script as a major feature connoting the “Median State” collapsed (Schmitt 2003; Rossi 2010, 2017b). Even less can be said about the languages of the nomadic tribes known as Scythians/Saka (Mayrhofer 2006).
Moreover, as before the Achaemenids emerged the Iranian plateau had been inhabited by peoples who spoke Elamite (language with no relatives, attested in cuneiform inscriptions from the twenty‐third century BCE), there is no surprise that an important administrative language was Elamite in its Achaemenid variant. Gershevitch (1979) thought that Achaemenid Elamite was OP written ideographically, while OP versions were mere duplications for display purposes, but he never revealed the details of this “alloglottography” theory (Henkelman 2011: pp. 614–622) and therefore was strongly criticized by Elamitologists (in favor: Rubio 2006; research report: Rossi 2006).
Thirty thousand Elamite tablets and fragments were found at the Fortification wall on the Persepolis Terrace; 750 tablets and fragments in the “Treasury” area. Hundreds of tablets present Aramaic ink epigraphs; 163 Aramaic inscriptions on mortars, pestles, etc. which were found in the same “Treasury” area probably record the manufacture and their payment to treasurers in Arachosia (not their “ritual” use as believed by its editor Bowman).
According to Shaked (2003), it is reasonable to assume that knowledge of Aramaic, among speakers of Iranian, was confined to the scribes, who were conversant with OP in oral communication and with Aramaic in its written form. The earliest scribes could have been native speakers of Aramaic, who learned Persian; subsequently they may have been native speakers of Persian, who learned Aramaic as a written language.
At Persepolis, similar processes may have been active for Elamite. The officials who required the services of scribes probably preferred people who spoke their own language – Persian – with lesser attention to their fluency in Elamite.
The discovery of an isolated example of OP on a Persepolis administrative tablet (Stolper and Tavernier 2007) could change the accepted view of the functional differentiation between OP, Elamite, and Aramaic. This document actually contravenes stated expectations: at least one scribe wrote Persian language in Persian script and expected someone else to know how to read it. Gershevitch (1979: p. 143, cf. his “alloglottography” above) had insisted that there was not “the slightest chance for Old Persian written in Old Persian script … to have ever been in general use” (with different presumptions also Schmitt came to similar conclusions: “das Altpersische [hat] für die eigentliche Verwaltung […] keine Rolle gespielt,” 1993: p. 81).
Only hypotheses can be advanced to explain the existence of this tablet, but it is possibly the sole evidence of a larger group of documents, and therefore of more widespread recording in OP.
Evidence of multilingualism in the Achaemenid administration is provided not only by the interplay between Elamite and Aramaic language usage on the Persepolis tablets but also in the Aramaic name inscriptions on seals owned by personages whose primary language ought to have been different from Aramaic (Garrison and Root 2001: pp. 7–9).
All mentioned evidence reinforces the assumption that the Persepolis archive, like many others of the earlier Near East, represents the simultaneous use of several languages and asymmetric interference among them.
The relation between Elamite and Aramaic in the scribal practice of the Fortification texts has been discussed by Tavernier (2008); see also Rossi (2017).
The scribes using the Aramaic script, called teppi‐ in Elamite, are almost universally believed to write on parchment, but we do not have any Aramaic text ‘on parchment’ relatable to the tablets which contain this indication. Note that the teppi‐s whose names are preserved have Iranian names.
From the study of the different redaction patterns appearing in the Elamite tablets, Tavernier reconstructs three steps: (i) a Persian officer dictates an order in OP to employee A; (ii) employee A delivers the order to employee B, who makes an Aramaic translation