Old Persian Cuneiform

Origin

Darius I (550-486 BC) claims credit for the invention of Old Persian Cuneiform in an inscription on a cliff at Behistun in south-west Iran. The inscription dates from 520 BC and is in three languages - Elamite, Babylonian and Old Persian. Some scholars are sceptical about Darius' claims, others take them seriously, although they think that Darius probably commissioned his scribes to create the alphabet, rather than inventing it himself.

Notable features

The Old Persian Cuneiform glyphs are both phonemic and syllabic.
There are five logograms which represent commonly used words.

Used to write:

Old Persian, the language used in the cuneiform inscriptions of Achaemenian dynasty and the vernacular of the Achaemenian elite. Old Persian was spoken in southwestern Persia, an area known as Persis, and belongs to the Iranian branch or the Indo-Aryan family of languages.

Old Persian Cuneiform

Logograms

Old Persian logograms

Links

Free Old Persian Cuneiform font
http://finanz.math.tu-graz.ac.at/~kainhofer/rk_fonts

Further details of the Old Persian language
http://www.farvardyn.com/oldpersian.php

Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS), University of London: http://home.btconnect.com/CAIS/

ALPHABETUM is a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient languages that includes Old Persian Cuneiform, and many other ancient scripts
http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

Other cuneiform scripts

Akkadian, Elamite, Old Persian Cuneiform, Ugaritic