oi.uchicago.edu THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE NEWS & NOTES SPRING 1998 ©THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ACHAEMENID ROYAL INSCRIPTIONS FROM PERSEPOLIS IN ELECTRONIC FORM MATTHEW W. STOLPER. PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY GENE GRAGG. PROFESSOR OF NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES AND DIRECTOR OF THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE From 550 BC on, Cyrus the Great and his successors, the Persian structed narrative of Darius's triumph over his competitors for kings of the Achaemenid dynasty, conquered and held an em­ control of the empire, and it was not only addressed to posterity, pire on a scale that was without precedent in earlier Near East­ but also translated and disseminated to the conquered lands, and ern history, and without parallel until the formation of the an Aramaic version was copied out in Egypt about a century af­ Roman Empire. At its greatest extent, its corners were in Libya ter the text was composed. But the other inscriptions, for the and Ethiopia, Thrace and Macedonia, Afghanistan and Central most part, present the empire not as an accomplishment, the re­ Asia, and the Punjab. It incorporated ancient literate societies in sult of royal efforts, but as a divinely sanctioned order. Elam, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere. It engaged the The characteristic that best represented this order was its di­ versity, which was in turn an expression of the empire's size. In I ~ 13DDO!lDC,lDcnIS I nybljc nm,'mms I I w< t?sjtc infocmali oo & SIlUj Sljcs I clIoyriyhl$ & pcn)Jjs.~ioos I ~ I a world where few people had seen maps, where area and dis­ I webs;l!! nllviegriQnal aid I tance could not be expressed in geometric figures, the most im­ pressive way of putting them in words was to name the many ACHAEMENID ROYAL INSCRIPTIONS people who served the king, and so some of the inscriptions give lists of subject lands, twenty, or twenty-three, or twenty-eight items long. This characteristic was condensed in the Old Iranian Bmw .. , Whole Iext words vispazana. "(with) all kinds (of people)," or paruzana. '_ BrowS!! versiQm! By Sect jon "( with) many kinds (of people )," which the Achaemenid kings' t~ ~ Corpus Catalogue , translators rendered with Akkadian phrases indicating, literally, 11 "of many languages" or "of all languages." This diversity is a characteristic embodied in the Achae­ Pi nos am' Phulogrnphs menid royal inscriptions themselves. They are mostly cast in t .' ': 4' , ,.~ ="""-l.&OIlilill three unrelated languages: Old Persian, the language of the rul­ II, II'...Te xt jlns! Lexica] S... C;}"" !l:",,b"""'" ers; Elamite, the pre-Iranian language of the part of Iran that the ,t - i Persians had made their homeland; and Akkadian, the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians who had ruled much of west- continued on page 2 Revised: February 23. 1998 Copyright () 1998 Oriental Institute. University of Chicago bup:/Iwww-oi ,ucbicogo,edulOIIPROJ/ARUARI ,html From the Director's Study 2 Museum News: Building Update 6 Figure 1. The Achaemenld Royal Inscriptions home page at: www-ol.uchlcago.eduIOIIPROJIARIIARI.html Members Lectures 8 I emerging Greek states in a long confrontation that had profound Calendar of Events (Detachable) 9 effects on Greek and later European historical consciousness. It Travel Program: Central Anatolian Turkey 11 lasted without substantial loss of control until it was conquered Registration Form (Detachable) 12 by Alexander the Great, and then dismantled by his successors Electronic Resources: Middle Egyptian 13 after 330 BC. Unlike the Assyrian conquerors before them, the Development News 14 Achaemenid kings devoted little space in their royal inscriptions Adult Education Courses 15 to the struggles that forged the empire. It was not for want of Sunday Films 16 literary ability or for want of an understanding of the force that royal propaganda could have. In fact, the longest Achaemenid Special Events 17 royal inscription, the apologia of Darius the Great (DB), carved People: Museum Education Award 18 in three languages to accompany a relief on the cliff face at Suq Inventory Sale Back Cover Bisitun (near Kermanshah, in western Iran), is an elegantly con- oi.uchicago.edu PAGE 2 ACHAEMENID ROYAL INSCRIPTIONS NEWS & NOTES and the decisive work on the Babylonian script done by Edward From the Diredor's Study Hincks and Henry Rawlinson relied above all on the great in­ The winter quarter has been a scene of much activity in scription of Darius I at Bisitun (DB ). many arenas. In the field, John and Debbie Darnell contin­ The decipherment opened the way to exploring pre­ ued their Theban Desert Road Survey while Carol Meyer Achaemenid cultures and societies of ancient western Asia that and an Oriental Institute team worked at Bir Umm Fawakhir had been entirely unknown or only dimly understood, and ex­ (Egypt). Professor McGuire Gibson and Research Associ­ plorers of these areas soon left the Achaemenid texts behind as ate Tony Wilkinson returned to excavate in Dhamar, the domain of subspecialists in Iranian or Elamite philology, or Yemen; and the Amuq Valley Project, directed by Professor in the history of the encounters between Persians and Greeks. K. Ashhan Yener, is gearing up for an expanded 1998 sea­ These texts, terse as their contents often seem, are the very son working with mUltiple dig sites in south central Turkey. words of the Great Kings, but the fact that the Great Kings On the home front, the building project, in'shallah, is themselves produced them in more than one language is often nearly finished. Plans for the new Egyptian Hall are being ignored or merely acknowledged in passing. The inscriptions finalized, and we have set 5 December for a gala preview of are often cited, for example, from handy editions of the Old Per­ this reinstalled gallery. I am most anxious to raise the final sian version without reference to the other versions, and at other $800,000 needed to retire the debt on our $10.1 million con­ times continuous translations of one version are interrupted by struction project. Please consider a pledge or gift now. remarks on additions or omissions or divergences in the other I hope to see you on 18 May for Romancing the Past versions. Comes Home, to celebrate this year of achievement to­ Close study and accurate use of these texts, and even simple gether in the space that will become our new Egyptian Hall appreciation of their intended effect, calls for a synoptic presen­ showcasing the monumental statue of King Tut. Seating tation of the versions. No handy synoptic edition has replaced F. will be limited, so watch your mail for more details. And H. Weissbach's magisterial Keilinschriften der Achiimeniden of. come join us for a magical evening. 1911, in part, at least, because the development and divergence of scholarship on Old Persian and Old Irani~n , El amite, and Akkadian have made replacing it with an equally compendious and authoritative printed edition a forbidding task. Even Weissbach's edition presented only the verbal components of 9~;J(! the texts: parallel transliterations and translations of the ver­ sions, with textual apparatus. Readers who wanted to see what the inscriptions looked like in their original setting still had to search for drawings and photographs in publications by early ern Asia and parts of western Iran before the Persian conquests. visitors to the sites. When modern excavation reports - above Monolingual inscriptions are sometimes coupled with related in­ all, the Oriental Institute's final publication of the excavations scriptions in the other languages. And when trilingual versions of 1931- 1939 at Persepolis and nearby Naqs-i Rustam, in three are incorporated into architectural elements they also represent volumes produced between 1953 and 1970 - made good photo­ the political order. The Old Persian version always has pride of graphs and facsimiles of many of the inscriptions and their con­ place, on the top in a vertical arrangement or in the middle of a texts available, looking at the textual, architectural, and bilateral arrangement. archaeological aspects of these documents at the same time still Many of the Achaemenid inscriptions were incorporated required a lot of table space in a very good library. into the foundations or the architectural ornaments of palaces With the development of computers and then of the built for rulers. The court moved often from one royal complex Internet, the possibilities of on-line presentation of linked texts to another. In the classical and biblical accounts of the and pictures offer an opportunity for a different sort of synoptic Achaemenid court, most episodes take place in the palaces of presentation of texts, including these inscriptions. The Susa, and many of the Achaemenid inscriptions were found Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions project (ARI) is an exploration there by some of the earliest systematic excavations in the Near of these possibilities, with the creation of an electronic study East. But long before that, European travelers had brought back edition of Achaemenid inscriptions in all their versions, accom­ descriptions of the extensive standing remains at Persepolis, and panied by translations, glossaries, basic text-critical and refer­ accurate copies of the Achaemenid multilingual inscriptions ence apparatus, pictures of the original inscribed buildings and from Persepolis were the basis for the first steps in deciphering objects, and site plans to indicate their original locations, begin­ the cuneiform scripts. Georg Grotefend's early successes with ning with the inscriptions from Persepolis