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Xenophon has it that Cyrus “ruled these nations even though they did not speak the same language as either he himself or one another.” Diodorus tells his readers that before the battle of Gaugamela the Achaemenid king “was most concerned lest some confusion should arise in the battle from the numerous people assembled that differed in speech” (Diodorus Siculus 17.53.4). In his Bīsitūn inscription, Darius I commands the diffusion of his text in his subordinates' languages: “Afterwards this inscription I sent off everywhere among the provinces. The people unitedly worked upon it” (iv 91–92). Finally, in Esther 3.12 one may read that an order was to be sent “to every province in its own script and every people in its own language.”

These are only four examples of the multilingual character of the Achaemenid Empire, in which languages of various families were spoken. East Iran has its own languages and dialects (e.g. Arachosian, Bactrian, Sogdian), which was already noticed by Strabo (Geogr., 15.2.8). In the north, northern Iranian languages were spoken, whereas Elamite, Persian, and Median controlled southwest and central Iran. In Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia people continued to speak their own languages: Egyptian, Babylonian, Aramaic, Phrygian, Anatolian languages (Lycian, Lydian), Greek, etc. (see Chapter 54 The Interplay of Languages and Communication).