The Old Persian font∗

Peter Wilson†
Herries Press

2005/06/17

Abstract
The oldprsn bundle provides a set of fonts for the Old Persian cuneiform
script which was used between about 500 and 350 bc in Persia. This is one
in a series for archaic scripts.

Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 An alphabetic tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 The oldprsn package 2

1 Introduction
The Phoenician alphabet and characters is a direct ancestor of our modern day
Latin alphabet and fonts. The font presented here is one of a series of fonts
intended to show how the modern Latin alphabet has evolved from its original
Phoenician form to its present day appearance.
This manual is typeset according to the conventions of the LATEX doc-
strip utility which enables the automatic extraction of the LATEX macro source
files [GMS94].
Section 2 describes the usage of the package. Commented code for the fonts
and source code for the package is in later sections.

1.1 An alphabetic tree

Scholars are reasonably agreed that all the world’s alphabets are descended from
a Semitic alphabet invented about 1600 bc in the Middle East [Dru95]. The word
‘Semitic’ refers to the family of languages used in the geographical area from Sinai
∗ This file has version number v1.2, last revised 2005/06/17.
† herries dot press at earthlink dot net

1
2 2 The oldprsn package

in the south, up the Mediterranean coast to Asia Minor in the north and west to
the valley of the Euphrates.
The Phoenician alphabet was stable by about 1100 bc and the script was
written right to left. In earlier times the writing direction was variable, and so
were the shapes and orientation of the characters. The alphabet consisted of 22
letters and they were named after things. For example, their first two letters were
called aleph (ox), and beth (house). The Phoenician script had only one case —
unlike our modern fonts which have both upper- and lower-cases. In modern terms
the Phoenician abecedary was:
A B G D E Y Z H Θ I K L M N X O P ts Q R S T
where the ‘Y’ (vau) character was sometimes written as ‘F’, and ‘ts’ stands for
the tsade character.
The Greek alphabet is one of the descendants of the Phoenician alphabet;
another was Aramaic which is the ancestor of the Arabic, Persian and Indian
scripts. Initially Greek was written right to left but around the 6th C bc became
boustrophedron, meaning that the lines alternated in direction. At about 500 bc
the writing direction stabilised as left to right. The Greeks modified the Phoenician
alphabet to match the vocalisation of their language. They kept the Phoenician
names of the letters, suitably ‘greekified’, so aleph became the familar alpha and
beth became beta. At this point the names of the letters had no meaning. Their
were several variants of the Greek character glyphs until they were finally fixed
in Athens in 403 bc. The Greeks did not develop a lower-case script until about
600–700 ad.
The Etruscans based their alphabet on the Greek one, and again modified
it. However, the Etruscans wrote right to left, so their borrowed characters are
mirror images of the original Greek ones. Like the Phoenicians, the Etruscan
script consisted of only one case; they died out before ever needing a lower-case
script. The Etruscan script was used up until the first century ad, even though
the Etruscans themselves had dissapeared by that time.
In turn, the Romans based their alphabet on the Etruscan one, but as they
wrote left to right, the characters were again mirrored (although the early Roman
inscriptions are boustrophedron).
As the English alphabet is descended from the Roman alphabet it has a pedi-
gree of some three and a half thousand years.

2 The oldprsn package

The earliest cuneiform writing, about 2800 bc, was used by the Sumerians in the
Middle East [Wal87, Hea90]. Other cuneiform scripts were used for Akkadian
(2300 bc) and Babylonian (2000 bc). These were partly ideographic and partly
syllabic scripts. The last dated use of a cuneiform script was in 75 ad.
It is claimed that the Old Persian cuneiform script was invented by order
of the Achaemenid Persian king Darius I (521–486 bc) for inscriptions on royal
monuments. In everday use the Persian scribes used the Elamite cuneiform or
Aramaic scripts. Old Persian was abandoned after Ataxerxes III (358–338 bc).
 References 3

The script is a syllabary, with 3 vowels and 33 syllabic glyphs. There are also 5
ideograms, some in multiple forms, for king, country, earth, god, and Ahuramazda.
The last of these is the name of the Persian god. There are also glyphs for
numbers and a word divider. Walker [Wal87] gives general information on how
cuneiform numerals were used to form numbers; for detailed information consult
Ifrah’s magnificent work [Ifr00]. Basically, the writers used a system like the
Romans where large numbers were formed by adding smaller numbers.
Table 1 lists the translitered values of the script and Table 2 lists the
ideographs, numerals, and the word divider.
\copsnfamily This command selects the Old Persian font family. The family name is copsn.
\textcopsn The command \textcopsn{hASCII/commandsi} typesets hASCII/commandsi
in the Old Persian font.
I have provided two means of accessing the Old Persian glyphs: (a) by ASCII
characters, and (b) via commands. These are shown in Tables 1 and 2.
\translitcopsn The command \translitcopsn{hcommandsi} will typeset the transliteration
of the Old Persian character commands (those in the third column of the Tables).
\translitcopsnfont The font used for the transliteration is defined by this macro, which is initialised
to an italic font (i.e., \itshape).

References
[Dav97] W. V. Davies. Reading the Past: Egyptian Hieroglyphs. University of
California Press/British Museum, 1997. (ISBN 0-520-06287-6)
[Dru95] Johanna Drucker. The Alphabetic Labyrinth. Thames and Hudson, 1995.
[Fir93] Richard A. Firmage. The Alphabet Abecedarium. David R. Goodine,
1993.
[GMS94] Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, and Alexander Samarin. The LaTeX
Companion. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.
[Hea90] John F. Healey. Reading the Past: The Early Alphabet. University of
California Press/British Museum, 1990. (ISBN 0-520-07309-6)
[Ifr00] Georges Ifrah. The Universal History of Numbers. John Wiley & Sons,
2000 (ISBN 0-471-37568-3). (Originally published as Histoire universelle
des chiffres. Robert Laffort, Paris, 1994.)
[Wal87] C. B. F. Walker. Reading the Past: Cuneiform. University of California
Press/British Museum, 1987. (ISBN 0-520-06115-2)
4 References

Table 1: The Old Persian syllabary

Old Persian ASCII Command
a a \Oa
i i \Oi
u u \Ou
ka k \Oka
ku K \Oku
xa x \Oxa
ga g \Oga
gu G \Ogu
ca c \Oca
ja j \Oja
ji J \Oji
ta t \Ota
tu T \Otu
tha o \Otha
ça C \Occa
da d \Oda
di P \Odi
du D \Odu
na n \Ona
nu N \Onu
pa p \Opa
fa f \Ofa
ba b \Oba
ma m \Oma
mi w \Omi
mu M \Omu
ya y \Oya
ra r \Ora
ru R \Oru
la l \Ola
va v \Ova
vi V \Ovi
sa s \Osa
ša S \Osva
za z \Oza
ha h \Oha
Index 5

Table 2: The Old Persian ideographs

Old Persian ASCII Command
xšāyathiya X \Oking
dahyāuš q \Ocountrya
dahyāuš Q \Ocountryb
būmiš L \Oearth
baga B \Ogod
Auramazdā e \OAura
Ahuramazda E \OAurb
Ahuramazda F \OAurc
1 1 \Oone
2 2 \Otwo
10 3 \Oten
20 4 \Otwenty
100 5 \Ohundred
| : \Owd

Index
Numbers written in italic refer to the page where the corresponding entry is de-
scribed; numbers underlined refer to the code line of the definition; numbers in
roman refer to the code lines where the entry is used.

C T \translitcopsn . . . . . 3
\copsnfamily . . . . . . . 3 \textcopsn ........ 3 \translitcopsnfont . . 3