The Achaemenid inscription in the Kharg Island is an important inscription from the
Achaemenid Empire that was discovered in 2007 while constructing a road. It is located on
Kharg Island
Kharg or Khark Island ( fa, جزیره خارک) is a continental island in the Persian Gulf belonging to Iran. The island is located off the coast of Iran and northwest of the Strait of Hormuz. Its total area is . Administered by the adjacen ...
,
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
. This inscription is written in
Old Persian language with
Old Persian cuneiform alphabet. The height and the width of this inscription is around one meter. The inscription was etched around 400 BC.
The inscription contains five lines and six Old Persian words, five of which were unknown at the time it was discovered. The inscription reads as “The not irrigated land was happy
ith
The Ith () is a ridge in Germany's Central Uplands which is up to 439 m high. It lies about 40 km southwest of Hanover and, at 22 kilometres, is the longest line of crags in North Germany.
Geography
Location
The Ith is immediatel ...
my bringing out
f water.
The linguist
Habib Borjian Habib Borjian is a linguist who specializes in a wide variety of matters, including historical linguistics, language documentation, philology and Iranian languages and literature. He was educated at Columbia University, the University of Tehran and ...
explains that if the inscription is authentic, combined with the island's known history of ''
kariz'' usage, "which came about under the Achaemenid rule in the
Near East (550–330 BCE)", it can be suggested that there was a
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
colonisation of Kharg under the Achaemenids.
The Iranian dialect of the Persian settlers of the Achaemenid period may have in turn been the ancestor of the
Khargi language, with Borjian adding that "there is no contradicting evidence to make this hypothesis implausible".
Some
Arab states of the Persian Gulf have unsuccessfully tried to show that the inscription is forged.
In 2008, the inscription was severely vandalized and now 70 percent of the text is destroyed and only one line of inscription survived. Kharg island is an important island belonging to Iran and a license is needed for travel to the island. The
of Iran said that "This inscription is an evidence to the
name of Persian Gulf".
References
External links
سنگنبشته خارک: گزارش مقدماتی از خوانش کتیبه نویافته در جزیره خارک
{{Persian literature
4th-century BC inscriptions
2007 archaeological discoveries
2007 in Iran
Archaeology of the Achaemenid Empire
Achaemenid inscriptions
History of the Persian Gulf
Kharg
Archaeological discoveries in Iran
Bushehr County