Parallel texts

Alignment

A bilingual provides a known-language anchor when the texts refer to the same event or decree. The Rosetta Stone carries a priestly decree in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek versions. Bīsotūn carries the proclamation of Darius in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Neither monument is an interlinear dictionary: versions can differ in wording, additions and divisions. First align episodes, titles, names and repeated formulas; only then test smaller sign groups.

The Bīsotūn versions have different numbers of paragraph-opening formulas, as the Encyclopaedia Iranica account explains. This is a direct warning against assigning one sign to one Greek or Persian word by position alone. If a name recurs in one version, locate every corresponding passage in the other version and check whether the candidate sign sequence recurs in the expected places.

A worked alignment

The Old Persian royal formulae at Persepolis provide a compact comparison described by Encyclopaedia Iranica. One identifies Darius as king and son of Vištāspa, without calling his father king; another identifies Xerxes as king and son of Darius the king. The change in the father’s title constrains segmentation: a repeated group associated with “king” should occur beside Darius in the second formula but not beside Vištāspa in the first. This is a positional prediction before assigning every sound.

The names are independently known from historical and linguistic sources; the pattern becomes evidence when the graphic groups and their positions agree. It would remain possible to have selected the wrong boundary or a conventional spelling. Recheck the original sign sequences and additional royal inscriptions before claiming a complete phonetic reading.

Practice

Using the cited Iranica epigraphy article, mark the two formulae as ruler | title | father | title. Which title slot is absent for Vištāspa? Predict where the sign group for “king” should recur in a third comparable inscription. Then inspect whether the source confirms the prediction.