Persepolis Fortification Tablets: Writing and texts type

Authors

Abstract
In Great Achaemenian empire different writings and languages have been used in diverse areas of the Achaemenian dominion for doing administrative-economic activities in administrative system. Persepolis Fortification archive in the empire’s center, belonging to the 13 to 28 years of Darius the Great’ reign, can be distinguished as the greatest and most important Achaemenid multilingual administrative organization. Although the main language of archive tablets is Elamite, there are tablets of the Aramaic language and samples of ancient Persian, Greek, Neo-Babylonian and Frigian writings. Multilingualism is representative of Persepolis and its surrounding regions’ social status of diverse nationality. The fortification multilingual documents are placed in a web of complex evidence. Of course their texts are related to similar administrative activities. In the present article we attempt to investigate the importance of these documents and their represented classification based on their shape, language and texts.

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Volume 1, Issue 2 - Serial Number 2
February 2010
Pages 49-62

  • Receive Date 05 January 2010
  • Revise Date 07 October 2009
  • Accept Date 01 March 2010