Читать книгу A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set - Группа авторов - Страница 56

Almost all of the Elamite royal inscriptions are versions of texts that were also displayed in Old Persian and in Akkadian. In the nineteenth century, when these trilingual inscriptions provided the basis for the modern decipherment of the cuneiform writing systems, the consequent study of Elamite, like the study of Akkadian, led to a wider and deeper corpus of pre‐Achaemenid records that documents centuries of previously unknown history. The Elamite corpus, however, proved to be much smaller, less diverse, less dense, and less continuous than the Akkadian corpus. It was also much less tractable. While the early study of Old Persian and Akkadian benefited from flourishing comparative and historical research on related Indo‐Iranian and Semitic languages, early attempts to identify and exploit known languages connected to Elamite were vain or misleading. Evidence from the other versions of the multilingual inscriptions was fundamental to the interpretation of Elamite lexicon and grammar.

Almost all Achaemenid Elamite administrative documents come from two groups excavated at Persepolis in 1933–1934 and 1936–1939. This large corpus differs from the royal inscriptions in contents, in rhetorical register and purpose, in syntactic and stylistic complexity, and in grammatical and orthographic variation. From the late twentieth century on, these practical texts have provided a rich context both for internal analysis of Achaemenid Elamite language and for understanding of contact between Elamite and other written and spoken languages around the Achaemenid courts.