How Old Is Persian? 2,500 Years From Cuneiform to Farsi

Short answer: Persian has been written for about 2,500 years. Its oldest known text, Darius I's Behistun inscription in Old Persian cuneiform, dates from around 520 BCE. Middle Persian was the language of the Sasanian Empire (224 to 651 CE), and New Persian, written in Arabic script, emerged in the 9th century. Today it is spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

Around 520 BCE, Darius the Great had an inscription carved into a limestone cliff at Behistun, in western Iran, about 100 metres above an ancient road. It is written three times over: in Elamite, in Babylonian, and in Old Persian, the oldest recorded form of the language you are learning.

In 1835 a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, climbed that cliff with the help of a local boy and copied the Old Persian lines by hand. His copy helped scholars finally read cuneiform.

So how old is Persian? It has been written for about 2,500 years, and all three of its stages are documented. Old Persian survives in royal inscriptions of the 6th to 4th centuries BCE. Middle Persian, or Pahlavi, was the official language of the Sasanian Empire (224 to 651 CE). New Persian emerged as a written language in the 9th century, in Arabic script, and it is the Farsi, Dari and Tajik spoken today.

That long line of descent explains three things every learner runs into. Why do so many everyday words come from Arabic? Why do Iranians, Afghans and Tajiks call one language by three names? And why does the Farsi in your textbook sound nothing like the Farsi on the street?

Old Persian (550 to 330 BCE)

Old Persian was the language of the Achaemenid kings: Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, the dynasty that built Persepolis. If you have ever wondered what language Cyrus or Xerxes spoke, this is it.

Almost everything we know about Old Persian comes from royal inscriptions. Behistun is the most famous, and it was the first inscription ever written in Old Persian cuneiform.

The wedge-shaped signs look Mesopotamian, but the script was not simply borrowed. Scholars describe it as a deliberate creation of the sixth century BCE, with 36 signs for sounds and 8 for whole words. Like Sanskrit and ancient Greek, Old Persian is an Indo-European language, and its grammar was far heavier than anything in modern Farsi: three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), a case system inherited from older Iranian, which had up to eight cases, and a special "dual" number for exactly two of something.

Some Old Persian words that survive in modern Farsi:

• بوم (bum, "land/earth"), from Old Persian būmi-
• شاه (shâh, "king"), from Old Persian xšāyaθiya-

The word پارس (Pârs, "Persia/Fars") is itself Old Persian: the name of the southwestern province where the Achaemenid dynasty originated. The English word "Persia" comes from Latin, through Greek Pérsēs ("a Persian"), from Old Persian Pārsa.

Middle Persian (224 to 651 CE)

After Alexander's conquest and several centuries of Hellenistic and Parthian rule, the Sasanian dynasty revived Persian identity. Their language was Middle Persian, also called پهلوی (Pahlavi).

Middle Persian shed most of that machinery. Grammatical gender disappeared and the cases shrank to almost nothing, which is why modern Farsi has one pronoun for "he" and "she": او (u).

The writing was stranger still. Middle Persian scribes used Pahlavi, a script taken from Aramaic, and they kept writing some Aramaic words while reading them aloud in Persian. The word for "lord" was written with the Aramaic MRA but spoken as Persian xwadāy, the ancestor of خدا (khodâ, "God"). The script was also ambiguous: the name of the god Ohrmazd could equally be read "Anhoma", and Parsis often did read it that way.

Middle Persian vocabulary is remarkably recognizable to modern Farsi speakers:

• نام (nâm, "name"), Middle Persian nām
• زن (zan, "woman"), Middle Persian zan
• آب (âb, "water"), Middle Persian āb
• مادر (mâdar, "mother"), Middle Persian mādar
• پدر (pedar, "father"), Middle Persian pidar

These core words have changed very little in 1,500 years.

Zoroastrianism was the state religion, and Middle Persian was the language of Zoroastrian religious writing. The اوستا (Avestâ), the Zoroastrian holy book, was composed in a related but distinct language (Avestan), and commentaries on it were written in Middle Persian.

Arabic Words in Persian After the Arab Conquest

After the Arab conquest of the Sasanian Empire in the 7th century, Persians kept speaking Persian. What changed was the vocabulary. Arabic became the language of religion, law and scholarship, and its words flowed into Persian and stayed.

For two to three centuries Arabic was the prestige language of the region, the Latin of the Islamic world. Persian scholars wrote in it: the historian al-Tabari, a native Persian, wrote exclusively in Arabic in the early 10th century.

How much Arabic is in Persian? It depends on how you count. Encyclopaedia Iranica puts it at about forty percent of an everyday literary vocabulary. In running text the share is far lower: in one study of 1950s prose, Arabic words made up 46.5 percent of the vocabulary but only 19.7 percent of the words actually used.

Persian's return as an official language has a famous scene. When a courtier addressed the ruler Ya'qub ibn al-Layth with a speech in Arabic, Ya'qub, who reportedly did not know Arabic, asked why he was being addressed in a language he could not understand. His secretary, Muhammad ibn Vasif, answered with a poem in Persian. It was during Ya'qub's rule that Persian was introduced as an official language.

The borrowing followed a pattern. Arabic words entered specific domains:

Religion: نماز (namâz, "prayer") is actually Middle Persian, but most religious terms are Arabic: مسجد (masjed, "mosque"), وضو (vozu, "ablution").

Law and governance: قانون (qânun, "law", a Greek word that came through Arabic), حکومت (hokumat, "government"), وزیر (vazir, "minister")

Science and philosophy: علم (elm, "science"), فلسفه (falsafe, "philosophy"), ریاضیات (riyâziyât, "mathematics")

Abstract concepts: عشق (eshq, "love"), عدالت (edâlat, "justice"), آزادی (âzâdi, "freedom"). That last one is native Persian, built from آزاد (âzâd, "free"), a reminder that not all abstract words are Arabic.

The grammar, however, stayed Persian. Arabic plurals, verb patterns and sentence structures didn't replace Persian grammar; they were adapted into it. When Persians borrowed Arabic words, they Persianized them. Arabic broken plurals were sometimes kept (کتب (kotob, "books")) but often replaced with Persian plural suffixes (کتاب‌ها (ketâbhâ, "books")). Arabic verb forms were turned into Persian compound verbs: تحقیق کردن (tahqiq kardan, "to research"), an Arabic noun plus a Persian verb.

The Shahnameh (1010 CE)

Abu'l-Qasim Ferdowsi worked on the شاهنامه (Shâhnâme, "Book of Kings") for about thirty years and finished its final version in 1010: some 50,000 couplets telling the story of Iran from its beginnings to the Arab conquest. Legend says Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni promised a gold coin for every couplet, and a hostile courtier swapped the gold for silver.

Ferdowsi used strikingly few Arabic words: one count finds 706, about 8.8 percent of his vocabulary and only 2.4 percent of the running text. Scholars still argue about how deliberate that was. Iranians often quote this couplet as his proud sign-off:

بسی رنج بردم در این سال سی
عجم زنده کردم بدین پارسی
basi ranj bordam dar in sâl-e si
ajam zende kardam bedin pârsi
"Much suffering I endured in these thirty years / I revived the Persians (ajam) with this Persian language"

He almost certainly never wrote it. According to the Shahnameh scholar Farzad Ghaemi, none of the 11 early manuscripts behind Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh's critical edition of the Shahnameh contains these lines; the earliest copies that do date from the 8th and 9th centuries of the Islamic calendar, roughly three centuries after Ferdowsi. Ghaemi also points out that Ferdowsi never once uses the word عجم (ajam) in the whole poem.

The Shahnameh became a symbol of Persian identity: proof that Persian literature could stand on its own beside Arabic.

Classical New Persian (900 to 1400 CE)

The first great voice of New Persian was Rudaki (c. 858 to 941), a court poet under the Samanids. He reportedly composed more than 180,000 verses, of which only a small portion survives, and he spent his last years in poverty, dying blind and alone in his hometown.

Classical New Persian is also called فارسی دری (Fârsi-ye Dari, "Persian of the court"), a name that, according to a later report by the writer Ibn al-Muqaffa', was already used at the Sasanian court. It became the shared language of a region stretching from Anatolia to India. The Mughal emperors ran their government in Persian, and in British-ruled India Persian stayed the official language until 1837.

The language of this period is what you meet when you read Hafez, Rumi, Sa'di and Khayyam. Grammatically it is recognizably Persian, with SOV word order, the ezafe construction and the compound verb system, but with literary features that modern Farsi has simplified (the literary subjunctive, free word order in poetry, archaic verb prefixes).

The اضافه (ezâfe), the linking vowel that joins a noun to what describes it, goes back to an Old Persian particle, hya, which shrank to ī in Middle Persian. By Classical New Persian it was the main way to link nouns and adjectives.

Modern Persian in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan

Modern Persian emerged gradually from Classical New Persian. The grammar simplified further, spoken and written forms drifted apart, and the language split, politically rather than linguistically, into three official varieties.

Iranian Persian (فارسی, Fârsi)

The standard taught in textbooks and used in Iranian media. Based on the Tehran dialect, it is the most widely studied variety. What sets it apart from classical Persian: simpler verb forms; heavy contractions in speech, so that می‌روم (miravam) becomes می‌رم (miram), "I go"; and a large influx of European loanwords, especially French in the 19th and 20th centuries and English more recently.

The فرهنگستان (Farhangestân), the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, chooses Persian equivalents for foreign words. The official word for "computer" is رایانه (râyâne), approved by the Academy in 2001; the loanword is کامپیوتر (kâmpyuter).

Afghan Dari (دری, Dari)

The official name for Persian in Afghanistan. Apart from a few basic words, written Dari and written Iranian Persian differ very little, and speakers understand each other. The bigger difference is in pronunciation. Dari keeps some sounds apart that Tehran does not: in Tehran speech there is little or no difference between ق (q) and غ (gh), while Dari keeps them distinct.

Tajik (тоҷикӣ, Tojiki)

The Persian of Tajikistan. It was written in a modified Latin alphabet from 1926 to 1939 and switched to Cyrillic in 1939 and 1940, so today the same language looks completely different on the page. Tajik has also taken many loanwords and calques from Russian.

A Tajik speaker, an Afghan Dari speaker and an Iranian Farsi speaker can understand each other with some effort. The grammar is the same and most core vocabulary is shared; accent, slang and borrowed words create friction, not walls.

Written and Spoken Persian

Persian has always had a gap between its written and spoken forms. This gap is directly inherited from the language's history.

The written standard preserves classical grammar, Arabic vocabulary, and formal structures from the literary tradition. The spoken form, especially Tehran colloquial Farsi, has simplified drastically: dropped vowels, contracted verbs, replaced formal vocabulary with slang.

When you learn Farsi and wonder why the textbook teaches می‌خواهم (mikhâham) but Iranians say می‌خوام (mikhâm), you are feeling a tension that has been building for centuries. The written form is conservative. It holds onto history. The spoken form is innovative. It moves forward.

Knowing this history tells you which register to use when, and it explains why formal Persian has so much Arabic vocabulary while casual speech uses more "pure" Persian words.

How Persian Survived

Persian outlasted Greek, Arab, Mongol and Turkic rulers. The Mongols show how: the Mongol rulers of Iran went on to sponsor manuscript copies of the Shahnameh, the epic of Iran's pre-Islamic kings.

For a learner, this means every Persian word comes with a date stamp. آب (âb, "water") goes back to Middle Persian; عشق (eshq, "love") arrived with Arabic; رایانه (râyâne) is the Academy's official word for "computer". If you are curious how Persian compares with its neighbours, start with Farsi vs Urdu. Our app, ZabanYar, is coming soon.

Timeline of the Persian Language

Persian Language Age, Script and Arabic: FAQ

Want to hear 2,500 years of history in a real conversation? I teach modern Farsi on Preply and explain why you say what you say. If you are already past the basics, the advanced Farsi fluency guide is the next step.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica: "Bisotun iii. Darius's Inscriptions", "Cases", "Eżāfa", "Arabic Language v. Arabic Elements in Persian", "Šāh-nāma iii. Arabic Words", "Ferdowsi i. Life", "Darī", "Farhangestān", "Iran vi. Iranian Languages and Scripts", "Tajik ii. Tajik Persian", "Tajik iii. Colloquial Tajiki" (iranicaonline.org)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Persian language" and "Persian literature"
• Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia (cgie.org.ir), 19 Dey 1400, and ISNA, 18 Dey 1400: interviews with Farzad Ghaemi on the couplets attributed to Ferdowsi
• Wikipedia: "Arabic", "Behistun Inscription", "Old Persian", "Pahlavi scripts", "Ya'qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar", "Shahnameh", "Ferdowsi", "Rudaki", "Persian language in the Indian subcontinent", "Dari"; Wiktionary: "خدا"

Get it wrong and the worst that happens is a warm laugh and a story they’ll tell for years. Get it right — refuse the tea twice, accept on the third — and you’ll watch a face open up. You didn’t just speak Persian. You played the game.