report on 30 years of scholarship on Old Persian and Achaemenid Elamite (to be completed with Rossi 2017a above).
7 Schmitt, R. (2008). Old Persian. In R.D. Woodard (ed.), The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 76–100. The latest synthetic description of Old Persian by a major specialist.
8 Stolper, M.W. (2004). Elamite. In R.D. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 60–94. An updated and problematical description of Elamite by a major specialist.
9 Tavernier, J. (2007). Iranica in the Achaemenid Period (ca. 550–330 B.C.): Lexicon of Old Iranian Proper Names and Loanwords, Attested in Non‐Iranian Texts. Leuven, Paris, and Dudley: Peeters. The most updated repertoire of Iranian names as attested in any source of the Achaemenid period, with linguistic commentaries and indexes.
10 Tavernier, J. (2011). Elamite: analyse grammaticale et lecture de textes. Res antiquae, 8, pp. 315–350. The latest (very synthetic) description of Elamite.
CHAPTER 5 Onomastics
Rüdiger Schmitt
For the Achaemenid Empire evidence of personal names is much more extensive than that of geographical names (toponyms, names of countries [together with the ethnonyms derived from them], river names, and oronyms). As they have much greater importance for the historian looking at the empire, too, they are given priority in the present chapter.
Personal Names: Evidence
Evidence of personal names belonging to the Achaemenid period is considerable, even if in the Old Persian royal inscriptions themselves fewer than 50 names are attested (cf. Mayrhofer 1979). Among them a first large group are the names of the early kings (Haxāmaniš, Cišpiš, Ariyāramna, Kuruš, Kambjiya), some of which being rather unclear, then the etymologically transparent throne‐names (cf. below) of Darius and his successors (Dāraya‐vauš, Xšaya‐r◦šan‐, R◦ta‐xšaça‐) and names of other Achaemenids (R◦šāma, Vištāspa, Br◦diya). Other lots are the names of Darius' fellow conspirators and their fathers, of members of the court, of Darius' generals and satraps, and finally the names of the disloyal pretenders to the throne rebelling against Darius, part of them being non‐Iranian in origin.
Since the Achaemenids ruled a multinational and multilingual empire covering for a while almost the entire Near East from the Aegean Sea to the Indus river and including Egypt, Old Iranian personal names are attested in a lot of sources written in the numerous languages (and writing systems) of the various peoples of the empire and of those in connection with it. The most important, but not the only branches of this so‐called collateral tradition of Old Iranian anthroponyms, are the Elamite, Babylonian, Aramaic, and (Hieroglyphic and Demotic) Egyptian sources. From outside the empire it is in particular the Greek evidence that is found in the contemporary literature, even if the onomastic credibility of the individual authors may differ considerably (as we see, e.g., from the comparison of the names of the fellow conspirators as attested by Herodotus and Ctesias respectively with those found in Darius' Bīsutūn inscription DB). The most comprehensive collection for the period and the languages of the Achaemenid Empire is Tavernier (2007), with the Greek evidence excluded; not such a strong restriction is followed by Hinz (1975), who had attempted a similar collection, which should be used with caution, however. In every of the partial corpora of anthroponyms of that period, in the royal inscriptions as well as in contemporary Greek literature, the Achaemenid Empire's character as a multinational and multilingual state is clearly reflected.
More than 2000 anthroponyms, the great majority (about 90%) being of Iranian origin, are attested in the Elamite texts found in Persepolis (Fortification and Treasury Tablets) and thus come from the center of the empire itself, right where those names were in actual use. As a rule, the Iranian names differ so clearly from the Elamite anthroponyms that they can be assigned to Iranian quite easily. The whole of the evidence is collected and analyzed now in Tavernier (2007). The interpretation of this material with regard to Iranian is somewhat complicated by the all too irregular and superficial representation of the Iranian forms by the Elamite spelling, so that often varying Old Iranian original forms were reconstructed.
Similarly, in Babylonian texts from Achaemenid times, chiefly civil law documents (e.g. contracts and economic texts), a large number of individuals from all levels of Babylonian society (members of the royal house, officials, agents of commercial firms, and even chattel slaves) are attested; most of them bear Babylonian names, but we know also more than 600 Iranian anthroponyms from these sources. To these must be added the names attested in the royal inscriptions and those in astronomical texts. Apart from the usual difficulties caused by the blurred rendering of the Iranian names in Babylonian writing, the linguistic analysis of this material (collected now in Zadok 2009) is hampered by its distribution over the whole of Mesopotamia and of the Achaemenid period. The onomastic data testify by the way to a stronger acculturation of the Iranians there, since many individuals bearing a native Babylonian idionym have an Iranian patronymic or an ethnic indicating Iranian descent.
In the many texts written in Official Aramaic dispersed over the whole empire, among them the hundreds of papyri uncovered in Egypt, apart from Aramaic and other names also a lot of Iranian anthroponyms are attested, which are only in part available in recent compilations (cf. Porten and Lund 2002). Moreover, some books of the Old Testament (written in Hebrew or Aramaic) contain dozens of Iranian names relating to Achaemenid times.
In Achaemenid Asia Minor, Old Iranian personal names are found in Lycian and Lydian inscriptions, not rarely also in Greek ones belonging to that time, whereas the later evidence shows that names originating in the Achaemenid period in some strongly Persianized regions lived on for centuries.
The principal focus of the Greek collateral tradition of Old Iranian anthroponyms is the literature, mainly the historians of the classical period (Herodotus, Thucydides, etc.), and in particular those authors who dealt with the Achaemenid Empire, with the Persian Wars, or the Greeks living in Asia Minor under Achaemenid rule. This material is collected and analyzed now in Schmitt (2011).
Iranian Names
1 Morphology: The system of the formation of personal names in the ancient Iranian languages is in principle the same as in the cognate languages, i.e. it is inherited from Proto‐Indo‐Iranian and Proto‐Indo‐European times. All of the various types of names (single‐stem names, two‐stem compound names, names shortened from compound names, and hypocoristics) are attested in Old Iranian and thus either in Old Persian itself or in the collateral tradition (cf. Schmitt 1995, 2005).
2 Dialectology: The numerous anthroponyms attested in the Elamite‐language corpus of the Persepolis tablets offer a cross‐section (even if not a representative one) of the population, as do in that late period those mentioned in the Babylonian‐language private documents, so that one may recognize people of quite different tribes and nations. But the forms of the names let us also make out features of different Iranian dialects, and rather clearly in cases where pairs of names reflect such divergent phonetic development. It is remarkable that Old Persian forms appear in the Babylonian and Aramaic versions of the royal inscriptions, usually in non‐Persian (probably Median) dialect forms.
Since in the formation of names not only the living and productive vocabulary of the time is used but, owing to the often traditionalist tendency of name‐giving, also archaic and foreign lexemes that in the past had become part of the “onomastic vocabulary,” hybrid formations were possible, too, in which elements of different linguistic (or at least dialectological) origin are joined together.
Particulars
1 Motives for name‐giving: Anthroponyms are not primarily motivated by the lexical meaning of their constituents;