Writings and Ancient Alphabets

The transition from a culture without writing to one with writing is often regarded by historians as the end of "prehistory" and the beginning of "documented history". Writing, scripts, and written works, whether in the form of hieroglyphs or ideograms, or particularly continuous scripts and alphabets, have been one of the main criteria for measuring the civilization of a land or social group. Approximately 3,500 years ago (the second half of the second millennium BC), when Iranian tribes (from the sub-branch of "Indo-Iranians" and the branch of "Indo-Europeans") poured into the Iranian plateau from Central Asia and the northern Caspian Sea, the indigenous peoples and tribes lived largely separated from one another. No information remains about their culture and language. These "pre-Iranian" natives of the Iranian plateau, like the newly arrived Aryan tribes and the majority of peoples in Europe, Central Asia, and the West, who lived in tribal and ethnic groups, did not yet possess a cohesive script or alphabet. Writing and scripts, along with human civilization, began in the regions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, and later Greece and Italy, and spread to other parts of the world. The Medes, Parthians, and Persians, who occupied the Iranian plateau, took advantage of the weakness of the Assyrian Empire, defeated them and other powerful neighbors, and soon consolidated and expanded their state. As they became more settled and urbanized, they became familiar with the scripts of their neighbors and adapted these scripts to their needs. The only part of present-day Iran that had its own script and urban civilization, and even a long-lasting and rich civilization, was in the present-day Khuzestan and southeastern Iraq, known as Elam. However, according to the accounts of contemporary Assyrian and Babylonian sources, the political and especially cultural power of Elam was much broader than this, encompassing at least large parts of present-day Fars province and the Caspian Sea region to the Persian Gulf. The two main centers of this kingdom were Susa (Khuzestan) and Anshan (Fars). Elam had created an important and rich civilization that began around 2700 BC and established a sometimes very powerful kingdom until more than two thousand years later, during the early Achaemenids. The Elamite language, according to most archaeologists and linguists, had no relation to the neighboring Afro-Asiatic languages (including Semitic) and other languages of Mesopotamia and Anatolia, nor to the emerging Iranian languages in that region. However, some believe there are certain structural similarities between Elamite and Dravidian languages in ancient India. The Elamite script, which, along with Assyrian, Hittite, and Babylonian, was a type of ancient cuneiform script in the region, was widely used in the Iranian empires of the Medes and Achaemenids for a long time until it eventually disappeared and was replaced by Middle Persian (Pahlavi) script, which was based on the Aramaic alphabet. The history of languages: Part One: The Beginning Part Two: The Indo-Europeans and Others Many writings from the Achaemenid period, from Sogdian and Parthian to Persian, were inscribed in cuneiform script inspired by Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform, and even ancient Achaemenid inscriptions, such as the inscription of Xerxes in the city of Van (present-day Turkey), were written in three languages: Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, in cuneiform script, created at the order of Darius I and known as the "Imperial Achaemenid Script." Nevertheless, the production of written cuneiform in Old Persian belonging to the Achaemenid period was very limited, essentially consisting of a few inscriptions ordered by Achaemenid kings. After the Achaemenids, especially during the Sasanian period, a significantly larger number of Middle Persian and even Old Persian works, including Zoroastrian texts, were written. In contrast to the very few written works in Old Persian, the Elamite language and neighboring languages such as Sumerian, Assyrian, or Babylonian produced a greater number of written cultural examples. For instance, in the 19th and 18th centuries BC, coinciding with the arrival of the Aryans in the Iranian plateau, when there was still no news of Persian writing, five hundred cuneiform tablets were obtained from the archives of the ancient city of Susa, which narrate the details of the social and economic life of the Elamites. An Elamite tablet from around 600 BC indicates that the remnants of the Elamite Empire were invaded and occupied by its northern neighbor, Assyria, and weakened. In this situation, along with an internal crisis within the Assyrian Empire, Elam was seized by Iranian tribes under the leadership of the Median kings and became part of the new Median Empire. The Elamite language and culture continued for a long time within the new framework of the Iranian Median and then Achaemenid Empire, but eventually, like many other ancient cultures and languages such as Akkadian, Sumerian, or Babylonian, it disappeared. The people of the Elamite kingdom mixed with other Iranian tribes, and although their language influenced the common language of the new Iranians, namely Persian, it gradually disappeared as a living language. After the Achaemenids, the period of "Middle Persian" began, whose script was inspired by the Aramaic script, the "mother of almost all scripts in the Middle East and Europe," including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. This script, unlike cuneiform, consisted of letters, but these letters generally did not represent vowels and had to be depicted with the help of some consonants like Y, W, and A. For this reason, scripts like Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic (and naturally Phoenician, from which all these alphabets originated) are called "consonant-based" or "abjad." The Aramaic script gradually replaced the cuneiform script of the Achaemenid period and became the main script of the Middle Persian language. Iranians, like other distant and nearby nations that used this script, made modifications to it according to their needs, to the extent that the Middle Persian alphabet or Pahlavi is referred to as the "Pahlavi Aramaic Alphabet" or simply "the Pahlavi Alphabet or Script." According to McKenzie, the Aramaic, Pahlavi, and Parthian royal alphabets underwent significant changes during this historical period in the Middle East, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa, which are of great importance for the cultural advancement of humanity. In this region, known as the "Fertile Crescent," writing and scripts underwent a historical evolution. The Phoenician sailors' script and their Aramaic successors were relatively widespread and "alphabetic," effectively reflecting consonants. In any case, this script, unlike cuneiform, was alphabetic. For this reason, its teaching and application were considered easier. However, this script did not have indications for vowel sounds like "ai," "a," and "ou." Gradually, the peoples of Mesopotamia, Iranians, and other Middle Eastern nations adopted this Aramaic alphabet, each using it in their own specific way. While some in the East still clung to cuneiform or hieroglyphs, ideograms, and logograms (Assyrian, Babylonian, Elamite, or Egyptian), most nations in the Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula moved towards the consonant-based alphabets of Phoenician and Aramaic. Compared to logograms and ideograms, which numbered in the thousands (just like the written signs of the Mandarin language in China) and required training and memorization of at least several thousand "characters" and images, the ability to read and write with distinct consonants like b, d, r, q, p, s, d, f, even without precise differentiation between vowels like a, i, u, o, e, became significantly easier. In consonant-based alphabets, consonant letters were often written together, and rarely were signs used to reflect vowel sounds. The most important living languages of this category are Hebrew and Arabic, both of which have based their scripts and alphabets on Aramaic, which itself originated from the Phoenician script and alphabet. After the emergence of Islam, Persian also adopted the Arabic alphabet, but four letters "p, ch, zh," and "g" were added to it to suit Persian needs, which Arabs also used in writing non-Arabic words. For this reason, even today in contemporary Arabic and Hebrew, consonants are written together (like "qalb," "mard"), and a reader who knows reading and writing must be able to guess how the correct and more precise pronunciation of the word is – قُلب or قَلب, مَرد or مُرد. The only help that the existing Arabic letters provided to ease the reading of vowels was the use of letters like "a, w, y" and additional signs like hamzah and what is called "harakah." In the mid-first millennium BC, another transformation occurred in Cyprus and other Aegean islands, which was the "syllabic script," which itself had various stages. For example, for each separate syllable composed of a consonant and a vowel like "ta," "ti," "ma," or "mo," a specific letter or sign was designated, and when these signs were written together, a word was formed. Iranians, like their Assyrian predecessors, continued to use cuneiform in their correspondence and after the Achaemenids used Aramaic script and even language, and writing and reading were limited to an elite class consisting of government officials and clergy. However, in the West, namely Greece and the islands and the western coast of Anatolia, which rapidly became Greek, "real alphabets" were being created – alphabets that indicated both vowel letters and consonant letters, making reading and writing revolutionary easy. These are called "real alphabets," with the Greeks and Etruscans (Latins) being the first users. Around the 8th century BC, the Greek alphabet was used for the first time – more or less the same alphabet that is still in use today. The emergence and spread of "real alphabets" was a transformation that might be considered "revolutionary" to the degree of the discovery of writing itself in Sumer and Egypt. These alphabets were the beginning of the Latin script and alphabet, which today (alongside Chinese writing) is the most widely used script and alphabet, and from Greek, Russian, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish to hundreds of European, Asian, and African languages use this alphabet. These "real alphabets" also based their scripts and alphabets on Aramaic and its origin, Phoenician. Syllabic alphabets did not gain much interest. In contrast, consonant-based alphabets, namely abjad (Arabic and Hebrew) or "real alphabets" Latin, competed with these new alphabets in Mesopotamia, the Middle East, and even Asia, while cuneiform writing (like Assyrian, Babylonian, Elamite) and hieroglyphs (like ancient Egyptian) remained prevalent for a while but soon fell out of use. In this context, some centuries later, alphabets "real" for their languages were created, which were also inspired by the Aramaic alphabet (like Armenians and Georgians who created their specific alphabet in the 4th century AD). As we mentioned, after Islam, Iranians and the majority of other Muslims, like Central Asian Turks and later Anatolian Turks, adopted the Arabic alphabet. Almost a thousand years later, some, like the former Soviet Turks and Turks, or new nations of Asia and Africa, turned to Latin to write their languages, while others (like Jews, Arabs, and Iranians) remained loyal to their consonant-based Hebrew or Persian alphabets. The 1100-year period of Iran, Greece, and Rome The period from 550 BC to the emergence and spread of Islam in 650, which is about 1100 years of history in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, can easily be named the "1100-year period of Iran, Greece, and Rome." Regarding this period, there is sufficient and comprehensive information and references in the sources of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, Greece, Iran, and even myths and religious texts like the Torah, as well as in archaeological data. At the beginning of this period, namely in the years 550 BC, the only "state" that can be referred to as a cohesive country with a defined territory and a powerful government over it is the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, which systematically expanded its territory for more than 200 years. Before them, the Median Empire ruled this region, which also had a degree of state cohesion like many ancient states. Here, we conventionally consider the Medes, about whom we have less information regarding their culture, language, and history compared to their successors, the Achaemenids, along with the ancient cultures of Transoxiana like Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon, as part of another stage in the history of this region, assuming that with the Achaemenids, a relatively newer chapter in ancient Iranian history and the region began. However, at the beginning of this period, Greece was not yet a cohesive country with a single state. Earlier, Greek-speaking tribes had settled in the islands of present-day Greece. The coasts of Anatolia, the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean Sea, and even the Mediterranean were gradually becoming Greek, and the Greek language and writing were developing well, but there were still many local disputes and even wars between the Athenians and the islands and also regions of Anatolia, including the "Ionians" (from which the word "Greece" is derived) and "Sparta" on the western coasts of Anatolia. Greece itself was generally governed by a military system based on a collection of "city-states," the most important and powerful of which was Athens (which is why we refer to "Iranians" on the map but write "Greeks" on the map of present-day Greece). Incidentally, it may have been a fortunate coincidence that Greece, instead of a central and dominant state in a vast territory in Asia, experienced a kind of so-called "primitive democracy" in a much smaller territory in Europe and embedded that culture in its history. Perhaps because of the vastness of the Iranian territory and its natural conditions, a similar trend to Greece in ancient Iran may not have been possible. In any case, it is likely that this is why the beginning of classical Greek thought and culture in various scientific, philosophical, historical, mythological, medical, and astronomical fields occurred during this period. Architecture, urban planning, and sculpture.