Dr. Irving Finkel

And the old script with its kind of system was pressed into use to write these other languages.

And once in a while, many of the nations adopted the funny writing system.

with the people who had to do it because it was the only thing available to them.

So it spread in a way that you think would be impossible because it was so complicated.

Why didn't they make up their own writing?

But they didn't.

So you have this sort of lingua franca situation where people in different countries use the one writing system for their own language.

that old Persian situation is rather remarkable because of what happened as a result of it.

Because in Mesopotamia, as you say, most bits of cuneiform were written on bits of clay.

This is the standard thing.

Over 3,000 years of time, we have these clay things.

But at the same time, the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, if they wanted to make a big proclamation or a statement like a law code...

or they wanted to decorate their palaces with statements about how marvellous they were, they adapted the signs which are usually pressed into clay that they could be carved into stone.

So there was a long tradition of stone inscriptions running side by side with clay inscriptions in the heyday of Mesopotamian culture.

Now, the old Persian kings...

Darius and co., they decided they wanted to have proclamations of their own kind to write their old Persian language.

And in the mountain situation that you describe, they did it rather splendidly because they had a flattened face of rock where they wrote the same triumphant, boastful description in their old Persian cuneiform and in Babylonian cuneiform and in Elamite cuneiform.

So this was a tour de force.

What's intriguing is that the Persian cuneiform was not like Babylonian or Sumerian cuneiform at all.

Because to write proper cuneiform, you need about a thousand different signs.