#arish

My final piece for the @fbczine!

Mi-mai, mon cousin Olivier et sa compagne franco-américaine Bonnie, sont venus me voir. D'où une visite obligatoire au Louvre-Lens :

homme barbu - Chypre, époque achéménide, 450 av. J-C.

bracelet en or - Amrit, Syrie, 400-300 av. J-C.

molosse - Memphis, Basse Epoque, 664-332 av. J-C.

antéfixe - Caere (Cerveteri), Etrurie, 500 av. J-C

coupe à procession dionysiaque - Grèce, 540 av. J-C.

stèle votive de Arish fils de Himilk à Tanit et Ba'al Hammon - Carthage, 814-1 av. J-C.

voir 2

Persian is an Indo-European language spoken by 45-60ish million people natively and up to 120 million as a second language. It’s an official language in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, but has additional speakers not only in surrounding countries such as Uzbekistan, but also in numerous diaspora populations in the U.S. and Europe (most prominently Los Angeles, London/Manchester, Paris, and Frankfurt).

As a member of the Indo-European family it specifically descends from the Iranian branch, where it is the largest member, the others being Pashto, Kurdish, and Balochi. It is also closely related with the Indo-Aryan family, which contains some of the most widely-spoken languages in the Indian Subcontinent such as Hindi/Urdu, Punjabi, and Bengali. Owing to its status as the language of the courts for hundreds of years across vast expanses of territory, Persian has been extremely influential to numerous languages in the region, contributing significant amounts of vocabulary to Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, and more. It is written with a modified version of the Arabic script in Iran and Afghanistan, but in modified Cyrillic in Tajikistan, owing to its status as Soviet territory until the breakup of the U.S.S.R.

While many Iranian languages have only begun to be written in the last couple hundred years, Persian has a literary history extending back to the Behistun inscription—an account of Darius the Great’s reign—carved into Mount Behistun in a variety of cuneiform around 500 BC. After the fall of the Achaemenid dynasty there was a period of little-to-no Persian literature, until the resurgence of the Persian empire in the form of the Sasanian Empire. Here it used a non-cuneiform script most likely descended from Aramaic, and showed a collapse of the Old Iranian case system and a restructuring of the verbal system. Then the Sasanian Empire slowly weakened and was eventually taken over by the Rashidun caliphate to the west. While caliphates tended to show decidedly monolingual policies in the rest of their empire and often led to the extinction of regional languages, the rise of the Samanid empire saw its reinstatement as an official language. This newer variety—fittingly called “New Persian”—used the Arabic script and possessed numerous Arabic loanwords, but was still unmistakably an Iranian language. New Persian developed a significant literary corpus, with some of the world’s most famous poets such as Hafez, Rumi, Sa’adi, and one of the world’s largest epic poems, the Shahname. It is also here where it expanded eastward, and Persian once again established itself as a major regional power.

Though its role as a regional lingua franca has often been superseded by colonial languages such as English, Persian influence is still found everywhere. Learning Persian not only allows one to better understand the countries where it has official status, but also gives a noticeable leg up for other languages in the area due to shared vocabulary. It has an extensive literary tradition spanning over a millennium, and some of the world’s most famous poetry.