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𐎠𐎼𐎹 Old Persian

Old Persian is the language of Achaemenid royal inscriptions, written in its own cuneiform script. It’s ideal if you want primary sources for the Persian Empire and a compact, learnable corpus.

Dictionaries

• Old Persian Inscription Lexicon

  • Notes: A very old book, but still useful!

• Old Persian Master Glossary

  • Notes: From the now-legendary University of Texas project.

• Old Persian Base Form Dictionary

  • Notes: Part of the same project.

• Old Persian-English Meaning Index

  • Notes: The last part of the UTexas project.

• Old Persian Grammar, Texts, and Lexicon

  • Notes: In this book you get—you guessed it—grammar, texts, and a lexicon.

• Ancient Persian lexicon

  • Notes: With the text of inscriptions.

• Cuneiform supplement to the lexicon

  • Notes: Accompanies the lexicon above.

• Guide to the Old Persian inscriptions

  • Notes: Even older than the grammar!

• Critical notes to the Old Persian inscriptions

  • Notes: Once again, accompanies the resource above.

• German-Old Persian dictionary

  • Format: PDF
  • Notes: A very old book in PDF form.

• Die Keilinschriften der Achämeniden

  • Notes: A book in German about the inscriptions.

• Pahlavi Dictionary

  • Format: PDF
  • Notes: Pahlavi is a middle Iranian form of the language.

• An Etymological Dictionary of Persian

  • Notes: And of other languages.

• Persian-English dictionary

  • Notes: Could be useful, depending on how much you already know about Persian.

Grammars

• An Introduction to Old Persian

  • Format: PDF
  • Notes: A PDF online, available for free.

• Old Persian Grammar, Texts, and Lexicon

  • Notes: In this book you get—you guessed it—grammar, texts, and a lexicon.

• Old Iranian Lessons

  • Notes: With plenty of grammar. Old Iranian is a language family which includes Old Persian and Avestan.

• Old Iranian Grammar Points

  • Notes: A full list of the grammar covered on this page.

• Historical grammar of the Persian language

  • Notes: The book is a bit historical as well.

• Grammar of the Old Persian Language

  • Notes: Not sure, but this book looks like it was very small.

• French Grammar of Old Persian

  • Notes: From the great Gallica website.

• French Historical Grammar of Old Persian

  • Notes: The first part of a two-part series; see the Other Resources section for the second part.

• German Handbook of Old Iranian

  • Notes: A comparative grammar, it looks like.

Charts & Aids

• Old Persian Nouns

  • Notes: From Wikipedia.

• Old Persian Verbs

  • Notes: Also from Wikipedia.

Texts

• Old Persian Text Corpus

  • Notes: Scroll to the bottom and click the arrow in the right to go to the next page.

• Old Persian Grammar, Texts, and Lexicon

  • Notes: In this book you get—you guessed it—grammar, texts, and a lexicon.

• Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions

  • Notes: A list of inscriptions.

• The Behistun Inscription

  • Notes: Soon to be a crappy movie with Nicholas Cage, no doubt.

• The Inscription at Behistun

  • Format: PDF
  • Notes: An old book in PDF form.

• Old Persian texts with transliteration

  • Notes: A huge collection!

• Old Iranian texts

  • Notes: The texts go with the grammar lessons, and have some annotations.

• Persian texts

  • Notes: A collection of links for Persian texts (not Old Persian, it seems).

Other Resources

• French Historical Study of Iranian Culture

  • Notes: The second part of the two-part series; see the Grammar section for the first part.

• A History of Old Persian

  • Format: PDF
  • Notes: This is the appendix to a full book.

• Omniglot Persian

  • Notes: None of this is about Old Persian, but modern Persian could be interesting to some.

• Old Persian Epigraphy

  • Notes: With a nice bibliography at the end.

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