Old Persian Cuneiform Table
| Sign | Unicode name | Transliteration |
|---|---|---|
| 𐎠 | sign a | a |
| 𐎡 | sign i | i |
| 𐎢 | sign u | u |
| 𐎣 | sign ka | ka |
| 𐎤 | sign ku | ku |
| 𐎥 | sign ga | ga |
| 𐎦 | sign gu | gu |
| 𐎧 | sign xa | xa |
| 𐎨 | sign ca | ca |
| 𐎩 | sign ja | ja |
| 𐎪 | sign ji | ji |
| 𐎫 | sign ta | ta |
| 𐎬 | sign tu | tu |
| 𐎭 | sign da | da |
| 𐎮 | sign di | di |
| 𐎯 | sign du | du |
| 𐎰 | sign tha | tha |
| 𐎱 | sign pa | pa |
| 𐎲 | sign ba | ba |
| 𐎳 | sign fa | fa |
| 𐎴 | sign na | na |
| 𐎵 | sign nu | nu |
| 𐎶 | sign ma | ma |
| 𐎷 | sign mi | mi |
| 𐎸 | sign mu | mu |
| 𐎹 | sign ya | ya |
| 𐎺 | sign va | va |
| 𐎻 | sign vi | vi |
| 𐎼 | sign ra | ra |
| 𐎽 | sign ru | ru |
| 𐎾 | sign la | la |
| 𐎿 | sign sa | sa |
| 𐏀 | sign za | za |
| 𐏁 | sign sha | sha |
| 𐏂 | sign ssa | ssa |
| 𐏃 | sign ha | ha |
| 𐏈 | sign auramazdaa | auramazdaa |
| 𐏉 | sign auramazdaa-2 | auramazdaa-2 |
| 𐏊 | sign auramazdaaha | auramazdaaha |
| 𐏋 | sign xshaayathiya | xshaayathiya |
| 𐏌 | sign dahyaaush | dahyaaush |
| 𐏍 | sign dahyaaush-2 | dahyaaush-2 |
| 𐏎 | sign baga | baga |
| 𐏏 | sign buumish | buumish |
| 𐏐 | word divider | | |
| 𐏑 | number one | 1 |
| 𐏒 | number two | 2 |
| 𐏓 | number ten | 10 |
| 𐏔 | number twenty | 20 |
| 𐏕 | number hundred | 100 |
Old Persian cuneiform is the script an emperor ordered invented. Darius I (522-486 BC) commissioned a distinct Persian writing system for his royal inscriptions - the empire’s working language was Elamite, its diplomatic lingua franca Babylonian, and its king wanted his own language carved in his own script. The result is cuneiform reborn as display typography: wedges pressed into the living rock of Iran, written left to right (unusual for cuneiform), with a dedicated word-divider wedge - this chart’s full inventory runs from the phonetic signs through a small set of logograms to the numerals for one, two, ten, twenty and hundred.
The script is also the key that opened Mesopotamia’s buried libraries. Because the great Achaemenid monuments repeated their texts in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, the readable member of the trio became the lever for the unreadable ones: the decipherment was performed by Eugène Burnouf, Christian Lassen and Sir Henry Rawlinson in the mid-nineteenth century, and once Old Persian yielded, Babylonian and Assyrian - the records of everything from Sargon to Nebuchadnezzar - became texts. A script created to glorify one king ended up restoring three thousand years of Mesopotamian history. Unicode encodes the whole system at U+103A0, this chart’s verified source.
How to use
- Read the table in the block’s order: the phonetic signs first - vowels (a, i, u) then consonant-plus-vowel syllabary signs (ka, ku, ga, gu... through the full set) - then the word divider and the five numerals. Each row gives the sign, its Unicode name, and the transliteration scholars use (a, ka, baga...). Old Persian sits between an alphabet and a syllabary: consonant letters carry an inherent a unless the sign itself spells another vowel, which makes it a cousin of the abugida logic you can compare on the <a href="https://tooldune.com/baybayin-alphabet-table/">Baybayin chart</a> - convergent design across twenty centuries.
- To write, transliterate a royal formula: take a line from the Behistun inscription (the trilingual monument of Darius - every Old Persian primer starts there) and build it sign by sign from this chart. The word divider goes between every word - the script’s most distinctive habit, and the reason Old Persian text never misparses. Watch the logograms: a handful of high-frequency words (king, country, god, Darius, Xerxes) have dedicated single signs instead of syllable-spellings, exactly as Japanese kanji abbreviate what kana could spell. Right-facing wedges, left-to-right lines, stone-scale spacing.
- Then read the inscriptions as literature: the Behistun text is Darius’ own autobiography and propaganda - how he took the throne, the rebellions he crushed, and the divine mandate repeated like a chorus - and the later monuments (Naqsh-e Rostam’s tomb facades) show the script in its mature monumental form. The trilingual layout is the teaching tool: the same lines in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian let you see the script doing its diplomatic job. This chart plus any transliterated edition of Behistun is a complete self-course in the first writing system ever commissioned for a specific language.
Frequently asked questions
Who deciphered Old Persian cuneiform?
A trio, working in the 1830s-1850s: Eugène Burnouf and Christian Lassen in Paris and Bonn, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, the British officer who copied the Behistun inscription - carved high on a cliff face in western Iran - at considerable personal risk. The decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform was performed by all three, each building on the other’s readings; Rawlinson’s Behistun paper and Burnouf’s systematic sign analysis are the twin foundations. Because the monuments are trilingual (Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian), cracking Old Persian then unlocked the other two - and through them the entire cuneiform world, from Sumerian forward.
Why did Darius create a new script?
Prestige and politics: the Achaemenid court ran on Elamite and communicated in Babylonian, but Darius - who took the throne in 522 BC and spent years suppressing rebellions - wanted the king’s own words in the king’s own language, carved in a script no neighboring tradition could claim. The result was Old Persian cuneiform, used almost exclusively for royal display inscriptions rather than administration (the empire kept doing its paperwork in Elamite and Aramaic). It is writing as monument: a script whose main corpus is the king announcing, in the first person, what he did and why the gods approved.
What is the word divider?
A single angled wedge (Unicode: Old Persian Word Divider) placed between words - because the script had no spaces, and without the divider its long wedge-strings would be unreadable. It is one of the rare dedicated word-boundary signs in the world’s writing systems (most scripts either use spaces or let context parse the stream), and this chart gives it its own row between the phonetic signs and the numerals. For anyone learning the script, the divider is the first habit: it chunks the inscription into words before any sign is read.
Is Old Persian cuneiform the same as Babylonian cuneiform?
No - and the difference is exactly why the one helped decipher the other. Babylonian (Assyrian) cuneiform is a full logo-syllabic system: hundreds of signs, each with multiple readings, evolved across three thousand years of Mesopotamian writing. Old Persian is a deliberate reinvention with about forty signs - a near-alphabet whose simplicity suggests its designers knew the concept of letter-writing, possibly through Aramaic. The shared wedge shapes are family resemblance (both write by pressing wedges into clay or stone), but the systems work differently - which is why Old Persian, the simple member of the trilingual monuments, was the readable foothill from which scholars climbed the Babylonian mountain.
Can I learn Old Persian cuneiform?
Easily - it is the most learnable cuneiform system by design. The full inventory on this chart (phonetic signs, word divider, five numerals) plus a handful of logograms is a weekend of memorization, and the texts are freely available in transliteration (every edition of the Behistun inscription includes the Old Persian line). The reading order: learn the sign shapes from this chart, practice the word divider habit, then transliterate and translate the short royal formulas - the standard texts build vocabulary from repeated phrases (great king, king of kings, son of). Unicode fonts (the block is U+103A0) mean you can type it once you can read it.