Old Persian cunieform used for administrative recording
This may be a big deal, if more of such records are found.
For the first time, a text has been found in Old Persian language that shows the written language in use for practical recording and not only for royal display. The text is inscribed on a damaged clay tablet from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, now at the Oriental Institute at The University of Chicago. The tablet is an administrative record of the payout of at least 600 quarts of an as-yet unidentified commodity at five villages near Persepolis in about 500 B.C.
“Now we can see that Persians living in Persia at the high point of the Persian Empire wrote down ordinary day-to-day matters in Persian language and Persian script,” said Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute. “Odd as it seems, that comes as a surprise—a very big surprise.”
Elsewhere on LanguageLog, Bill Poser quoted Tiye, former students of Matthew W. Stolper, who claims that Stolper used to say:
Those scribes had pretty short life spans, so it must not take too long to get good at Akkadian.
Whether an hour would be adequate to learn Old Persian is an empirical question, but Stolper has a point. Writing systems cannot be too hard if it is to be used for writing daily records such as this one.