Stilistik der altpersischen Inschriften

The present study makes the first attempt to put together, in a systematic manner, the figures of speech and other stylistic phenomena attested in the corpus of the Old Persian royal inscriptions. For those texts are different from simple prose in that they show clear traces of a stylization that similarly to using certain words and word forms lend them characteristic features of an artificial language. The phenomena to be treated in that context are presented in transcription according to the author’s text edition (Die altpersischen Inschriften der Achaimeniden, 2009) in form of a list without classifying them according to phonetic, grammatical, lexical, and syntactic criteria. References to comparable phenomena in the related languages (in particular in Avestan) are consciously given only sporadically in order not to distract the reader’s attention from the Old Persian evidence. The comparison with Avestan or within the ancient Indo-Iranian languages, i. e. in form of “Comparative Stylistics of Indo-Iranian”, has to be aimed at only after a comprehensive collection of the testimonies of the individual languages. The present book intends to give a first impetus to this research.