Script - Old Persian

Old Persian is an ancient cuneiform writing system used for the Achaemenid Empire’s royal inscriptions, primarily from the 6th to 4th centuries BCE. In character encoding, it represents a distinct script category that includes 50 characters, covering syllabic signs for consonants plus inherent vowels, logograms for words like “king” and “god,” and numeral signs. These characters are encoded in a dedicated block, with each codepoint assigned a unique value that distinguishes it from other scripts. The script’s forms are wedge-shaped, read left to right, and were deciphered in the 19th century by scholars like Henry Rawlinson. Its character set supports the phonetic and ideographic needs of the language, enabling accurate textual representation.