Achaemenid Persian

The Achaemenid Persian conquest in 539 BCE ends the political independence of Mesopotamia. The land between the rivers becomes a province — a wealthy and important one, but a province — of an empire whose centres lie at Susa, Persepolis, and Ecbatana, far to the east. Aramaic, written in alphabetic letters on parchment and ostraca, becomes the new administrative lingua franca across the Persian world. Cuneiform, written in wedge-marks on clay, begins a long decline.

But it does not die. For another six centuries, in the temples of Babylon, Uruk, and Borsippa, the Babylonian priesthood continues to write. They write astronomical observations. They write ritual instructions. They write copies of the old literature, recopied yet again — the Gilgamesh epic, the Enuma Elish, the lexical lists, the omen series. They write economic records of temple estates. The cuneiform tradition narrows from its old breadth into a specialist literature, kept alive by a shrinking community of scholar-priests.

The astronomy is the great achievement of the period. Babylonian astronomers under the Persians, and later under the Seleucids and Parthians, accumulate continuous nightly observation records — the so-called Astronomical Diaries — for over five hundred years, from the seventh century BCE into the first century BCE. They develop arithmetical methods for computing planetary positions that the Greek scientific tradition will absorb (Hipparchus in the second century BCE is openly indebted to Babylonian results). They predict eclipses with high accuracy. They divide the zodiac into twelve equal signs, an innovation we still use.

Politically, Mesopotamia drifts through successive empires. Persian rule ends with Alexander the Great's conquest in 331 BCE; Alexander dies in Babylon a few years later. The Seleucid Greeks rule from Antioch and from Seleucia-on-Tigris (a new Greek city deliberately built to outshine Babylon, just across the river). The Parthians, an Iranian people, displace the Seleucids in the second century BCE. Babylon shrinks but is never quite abandoned.

The last datable cuneiform tablet known to us comes from 75 CE, an astronomical text. It is not the end of cuneiform in some grand, final way; it is just the last tablet that happens to survive. Somewhere, some Babylonian priest was probably still writing on clay for years after that. But the tradition fades. Aramaic and then Greek and then Arabic take over.

What survives in cuneiform from these late centuries is the most technical, the most internal, the most professional. It is the writing of a community keeping faith with three thousand years of its own tradition, even as the world around it forgets what the wedges mean.

The tablets we read from this period are the last whispers of the language that built Sumer.