Māda · Media
550/549 BC
The army of Astyages, the king of the Medes, rebels and hands him over to Cyrus.
Old Persian, 550 to 330 BC
Khat-e Mikhi خط میخی
The nail script of the Persian kings. Read the story of the empire, then learn the 36 signs and write your name.
History
The Achaemenid Empire
Cyrus II, "the Great", made the first Persian empire in the 6th century BC. At its height it went from Egypt and the Aegean Sea to the Indus valley.
Brief story of the empire
The dynasty takes its name from Achaemenes, an ancestor of its kings. Cyrus united the Persians and the Medes, then took Lydia and Babylon.
Darius I put the empire in order. Governors, the satraps, ruled its lands, and he built roads and new royal centers at Susa and Persepolis.
The empire held many peoples, languages and religions. Its kings wrote their official texts in three or more languages, often side by side.
Alexander of Macedon defeated Darius III, and the empire ended in 330 BC.
The script
Khat-e Mikhi, the nail script
Khat-e mikhi means "the nail script", the Persian name for cuneiform. Old Persian cuneiform is a small script: 36 sound signs, a few word signs, a word divider and the numbers. It reads from left to right.
Each sound sign is a vowel, or a consonant with a vowel. The script looks like the older cuneiform of Mesopotamia, but its signs are new and much simpler.
Most scholars think that the script was made in the time of Darius I, for the royal inscriptions. It was for display, on rock, on palace walls, on vases and on weights. The scribes wrote their daily records in Elamite and Aramaic.
Eight signs stand for a whole word, such as "king", "country", "god" and the name of the god Ahuramazda.
- Sound signs
- 36
- Word signs
- 8
- Direction
- Left to right
- Unicode block
- U+103A0 to U+103DF
- a
- i
- u
- ka
- ta
- pa
- ma
- ra
- king
- divider
How it was read again
- 1778Niebuhr publishes exact copies of the inscriptions of Persepolis. They show that the script reads from left to right.
- 1798Tychsen sees that one slanted wedge divides the words.
- 1802Münter shows that the texts belong to the Achaemenid kings.
- 1802Georg Friedrich Grotefend takes the titles of the later Sasanian kings as his model: "X, king, son of Y, king". He finds the word "king", then the names Darius, Xerxes and Hystaspes, and reads about ten signs.
- 1826Rask reads the signs n and m, in the word ending -ānām.
- 1836Burnouf and Lassen read more words, because they compare them with Avestan.
- 1845Lassen shows that a consonant sign also holds a vowel, as in the scripts of India.
- 1846-47Henry Rawlinson publishes the full Old Persian text of Behistun, with a translation. He copied it from ropes on the cliff.
- 1851Oppert finds the last sign, l. It writes four foreign names, such as Lebanon.
Inscriptions and tablets
Where the script survives
Old Persian lives on in a few hundred lines of royal text, cut in rock, carved on palace walls and written on tablets of gold, silver and clay.
Learn
Learn to read it
Old Persian is a good first cuneiform. It has 36 sound signs, and one sign has one sound. Learn it in four steps, with real lines of the kings from the start.
Signs. Learn the signs in families, a few at a time, and not as 36 separate shapes.
Words. A divider stands between two words, thus you find each word with no help.
Sentences. Many royal texts open with the same formula: "I am Darius, the great king, king of kings".
Reading. Read a real line of an inscription, then write your own name in cuneiform.
Resources
Read more
Free sources to go further, from the museum that holds the cylinder to the full texts of the inscriptions.
Show the sources (8)
Two older editions are in the public domain: Kent, Old Persian (1953), and the books of Tolman (1892 to 1910). Kent is free in the US, because nobody renewed its copyright. Kent died in 1952, thus his own text is also free where the term is life plus 70 years.
- The British MuseumThe Cyrus Cylinder, The British MuseumThe record of the museum that holds the cylinder: its size, its history, its photos and three translations.
- Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo), OraccCyrus II 01, the Cyrus Cylinder (Q006653), Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo), OraccThe Akkadian text of the cylinder, line by line, with the English translation that this page quotes.
- OraccAchaemenid Royal Inscriptions online (ARIo), OraccThe texts of the royal inscriptions in each language, with transliterations, a glossary and English translations.
- Encyclopaedia IranicaCuneiform Script, Encyclopaedia IranicaRüdiger Schmitt on the Old Persian script: its signs, its spelling rules, its origin and its decipherment.
- Encyclopaedia IranicaBisotun iii. Darius's Inscriptions, Encyclopaedia IranicaRüdiger Schmitt on the Behistun texts in their three languages, and on how they were copied and read.
- Encyclopaedia IranicaCyrus iv. The Cyrus Cylinder, Encyclopaedia IranicaMuhammad A. Dandamayev on the cylinder and its text.
- Prods Oktor Skjærvø, 2016An Introduction to Old Persian, free copy at the Wayback MachineA free textbook in 20 lessons, with the full grammar. The next step after this page. A copy on the Wayback Machine.
- H. C. Rawlinson and T. G. Pinches, 1880 to 1884The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, vol. V, free copy at archive.orgThe first publication of the cylinder: a hand copy of its signs on plate 35.
Credits
Sources and licenses
© 2026 Arsham Mehrani and Spectre Creation. All rights reserved.
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.
Show all credits (7)
Texts
- Cyrus II 01, the Cyrus Cylinder (Q006653), Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo), Oracc, Translated by Jamie Novotny, adapted from I. Finkel 2013. Lemmatized by Alexa Bartelmus and Bastian Still, license CC BY-SA 3.0
- CMa, Pasargadae (Q007131), Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions online (ARIo), Oracc, Lines 1-2, after Schmitt 2009, license CC BY-SA 3.0
Images
- 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
3D models
- "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