Writing – we take it for granted.It serves us so many purposes – without it we wouldn’t be able to record important information for the future generations to use, expand our knowledge, travel – you name it!
Different civilizations created different writing systems – in this post I want to walk you through the history of modern Persian and explain why Arabic and Persian look so alike but are indeed poles apart. First thing to say they belong to the different language families – Farsi to Indo-European and Arabic to Semitic, let’s explore a bit.
It all started on the banks of the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates with cuneiform script which was invented by Sumerians. Many great empires changed in Mesopotamia region before the first Persian dynasty of Achaemenid.
Take a look at this cylinder – it is the first ever documented set of human rights by Cyrus the Great -Koorosh in Farsi- ( for the first civil and criminal law you would turn to the Code of Hammurabi, written in cuneiform as well).
These small ‘curves’ are actual characters.
Here is an Old Persian language chart ( they used syllables as opposed to actual letters). As the time went by the writing system began to improve and improving usually means simplification. From 100 til 700 AD Persians used the Pahlavi language which is said to be similar to Aramean. Probably a good place to search for the Pahlavi script is to observe the Persian coins in a museum, perhaps?
The script looks definitely much prettier than the cuneiform (See the image of the coin below)
In 651 AD when the last Shah of Sassanid Dynasty was killed the Arabs took over, Islam was spreading and Arabic naturally became the official language of the court and all governmental procedures. Persians started to use Arabic alphabet to write down their language. Of course Arabic alphabet underwent some modifications – Persians added a couple of letters to represent the sounds they needed – like ‘peh’, ‘geh’,’che’ ,’zhe’.
So that was a brief outline of Persian vs Arabic script relation.
If I wasn’t clear enough, just leave a comment below!
ARTnCULTURA 