Apadana

Babylonafter 539 BC
The Cyrus Cylinder
Turn the clay barrel in 3D, and read its 45 lines word by word, with the gaps that time made.
Old Persian550 to 330 BC
Khat-e Mikhiخط میخی
The nail script of the Persian kings. Read the story of the empire, then learn the 36 signs and write your name.
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The editions, the corpora, the museums and the fonts behind every line of this site.

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Sources and licenses

This notice covers our own work on this page: the design, the code and the text.

It also covers our work on the 3D model of the Cyrus Cylinder: the sign grooves, the maps and the sign atlas.

Do not copy, download, extract, publish or sell this work, and do not use it to train an AI model, without our written permission.

The list below names the work of other authors. That work stays under the license of its author.

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The lamassu, human-headed winged bulls, of the Gate of All Nations at Persepolis: photo by Carole Raddato, Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY-SA 2.0. Changes: Resized to 2000 px on the long side and converted to WebP
The rock-cut royal Achaemenid tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam: photo by Alen Ištoković, Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY 3.0. Changes: Resized to 2000 px on the long side and converted to WebP
Close-up of cuneiform wedges of a royal rock inscription at Ganjnameh, near Hamadan: photo by Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY-SA 2.0. Changes: Resized to 1200 px on the long side and converted to WebP
Clay tablets of the Persepolis Fortification Archive at the Oriental Institute, Chicago, in 2017: photo by Pfa16, Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: Resized from 4032 to 2000 px wide and converted to WebP. The page shows it cropped. The smaller files are this file at 640 and 1024 px, in WebP

"The Cyrus Cylinder" (3D scan of British Museum 1880,0617.1941), adapted: its form, its damage and the hue of its clay, Sketchfab, artfletch, license CC BY 4.0. Changes: scaled to the museum size, the stand and the fill under it removed, resampled into a new mesh, grooves of the hand copies added, its texture used as a hue only