Pahlavi scripts
Encyclopedia
Pahlavi or Pahlevi denotes a particular and exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages
. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are
Pahlavi compositions have been found for the dialects/ethnolects of Parthia
, Parsa
, Sogdiana
, Scythia, and Khotan. Independent of the variant
for which the Pahlavi system was used, the written form of that language only qualifies as Pahlavi when it has the characteristics noted above.
Pahlavi is then an admixture of
Pahlavi may thus be defined as a system of writing applied to (but not unique for) a specific language group, but with critical features alien to that language group. It has the characteristics of a distinct language, but is not one. It is an exclusively written system, but much Pahlavi literature remains essentially an oral literature committed to writing and so retains many of the characteristics of oral composition.
word parthav or parthau, meaning Parthia, a region just east of the Caspian Sea
, with the -i suffix denoting the language and people of that region. If this etymology is correct, Parthav presumably became pahlaw through a semivowel glide
rt (or in other cases rd) change to l, a common occurrence in language evolution (e.g. Arsacid sard became sal, zard→zal, vard→gol, sardar→salar etc.). The term has been traced back further to Avestan pərəthu- "broad [as the earth]", also evident in Sanskrit
pŗthvi- "earth" and parthivi "[lord] of the earth". Common to all Indo-Iranian languages is a connotation of "mighty".
(250 BC) in early Parthian coins with Pahlavi scipts. There are also several Pahlavi texts written during the reign of Mithridates I
(r. 171–138 BC). The cellars of the treasury at Mithradatkird (near modern-day Nisa
) reveal thousands of pottery shreds with brief records; several ostraca that are fully dated bear references to members of the immediate family of the king.
Such fragments, as also the rock inscriptions of Sassanid kings, which are datable to the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, do not however qualify as a significant literary corpus. Although, in theory, Pahlavi could have been used to render any Middle Iranian language and hence may have been in use as early as 300 BC, no manuscripts that can be dated to before the 6th century AD have yet been found. Thus, when used for the name of a literary genre, i.e. Pahlavi literature
, the term refers to Middle Iranian (mostly Middle Persian
) texts dated near or after the fall of the Sassanid empire
and (with exceptions) extending to about AD 900, after which Iranian languages enter the "modern" stage.
The oldest surviving example of the Pahlavi script is from fragments of the so-called "Pahlavi Psalter", a 6th- or 7th-century-AD translation of a Syriac Psalter found at Bulayiq on the Silk Road
, near Turpan in north-west China. It is in a more archaic script than Book Pahlavi.
After the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Pahlavi script was replaced by the Arabic script, except in Zoroastrian sacred literature.
In the present-day, "Pahlavi" is frequently identified with the prestige dialect
of south-west Iran, formerly and properly called Pārsi
, after Pars
(Persia proper). This practice can be dated to the period immediately following the Islamic conquest.
The Pahlavi script is one of the two essential characteristics of the Pahlavi system (see above). Its origin and development occurred independently of the various Middle Iranian languages
for which it was used. The Pahlavi script is derived from the Aramaic script as it was used under the Achaemenids, with modifications to support the phonology of the Iranian languages. It is essentially a typical abjad
, where only long vowels are marked with matres lectionis and vowel-initial words are marked with an aleph
. However, because of the high incidence of logogram
s derived from Aramaic words, the Pahlavi script is far from always phonetic; and even when it is phonetic, it may have more than one transliterational symbol per sign, because certain originally different Aramaic letters have merged into identical graphic forms - especially in the Book Pahlavi variety. (For a review of the transliteration problems of Pahlavi, see Henning.) In addition to this, during much of its later history, Pahlavi orthography was characterized by historical or archaizing spellings: voiceless stops
and affricates continued to be spelt as such even when they had become voiced and, in some cases, had undergone further changes in pronunciation; certain words continued to be spelt with ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ even after they had come to be pronounced with ⟨h⟩ in the living language; etc..
The Pahlavi script consisted of two widely used forms: Inscriptional Pahlavi and Book Pahlavi. A third form, Psalter Pahlavi, is not widely attested.
(r. 171–138 BC). Other early evidence includes the Pahlavi inscriptions of Arsacid era coins and rock inscriptions of Sassanid kings and other notables such as Kartir
. This script contains 19 characters which are not joined.
", a 6th- or 7th-century translation of a Syriac
book of psalms. This text, which was found at Bulayiq near Turpan in northwest China, is the earliest evidence of literary composition in Pahlavi, dating to the 6th or 7th century AD. The extant manuscript dates no earlier than the mid-6th century since the translation reflects liturgical additions to the Syriac original by Mar Aba I, who was Patriarch of the Church of the East c. 540 - 552.
The script of the psalms has altogether 18 graphemes, 5 more than Book Pahlavi and one less than Inscriptional Pahlavi. As in Book Pahlavi, letters are connected to each other. The only other surviving source of Psalter Pahlavi are the inscriptions on a bronze processional cross found at Herat
, in present-day Afghanistan. Due to the dearth of comparable material, some words and phrases in both sources remain undeciphered.
s. The formal coalescence of originally different letters caused ambiguity, and the letters became even less distinct when they formed part of a ligature. In its later forms, attempts were made to improve the consonantary and reduce ambiguity through diacritic
marks.
Book Pahlavi continued to be in common use until about AD 900. After that date, Pahlavi was preserved only by the Zoroastrian clergy.
or conjugated
Aramaic form. For example, tō "you" (singular) was spelt ⟨LK⟩ (Aramaic "to you", including the preposition l-). A word could be written phonetically even when a logogram for it existed (pitar could be ⟨⟩ or ⟨pytr⟩), but logograms were nevertheless used very frequently in texts.
Many huzvarishn were listed in the lexicon Frahang-i Pahlavig
. The practice of using these logograms appears to have originated from the use of Aramaic in the chancelleries
of the Achaemenid Empire
. Partly similar phenomena are found in the use of Sumerograms and Akkadograms
in ancient Mesopotamia and the Hittite empire, and in the adaptation of Chinese writing to Japanese.
, could equally be read (and, by Parsis, often was read) Anhoma. Historically speaking, it was spelt ⟨ʼwhrmzd⟩, a fairly straightforward spelling for an abjad
. However, ⟨w⟩ had coalesced with ⟨n⟩; ⟨r⟩ had coalesced, in the spelling of certain words, with both ⟨n⟩ and ⟨w⟩; and ⟨z⟩ had been reduced, in the spelling of certain words, to a form whose combination with ⟨d⟩ was indistinguishable from a ⟨ʼ⟩, which in turn had coalesced with ⟨h⟩. This meant that the same orthographic form that stood for ⟨ʼwhrmzd⟩ could also be interpreted as ⟨ʼnhwmh⟩ (among many other possible readings). The logograms could also pose problems. For this reason, important religious texts were sometimes transcribed into the phonetically unambiguous Avestan alphabet
. This latter system is called Pazend.
Following the overthrow of the Seleucids, the Parthia
n Arsacids—who considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the Achaemenids—adopted the manner, customs and government of the Persian court of two centuries previously. Among the many practices so adopted was the use of the Aramaic language
("Imperial Aramaic") that together with Aramaic script served as the language of the chancellery. By the end of the Arsacid era, the written Aramaic words had come to be understood as logogram
s, as explained above.
The use of Pahlavi gained popularity following its adoption as the language/script of the commentaries (Zend) on the Avesta
. Propagated by the priesthood, who were not only considered to be transmitters of all knowledge but were also instrumental in government, the use of Pahlavi eventually reached all corners of the Parthian Arsacid empire.
Arsacid Pahlavi is also called Parthian Pahlavi (or just Parthian), Chaldeo-Pahlavi, or Northwest Pahlavi, the latter reflecting its apparent development from a dialect that was almost identical to that of the Medes.
Following the defeat of the Parthian Arsacids by the Persian Sasanians (Sassanids), the latter inherited the empire and its institutions, and with it the use of the Aramaic-derived language and script. Like the Parthians before him, Ardeshir, the founder of the second Persian Empire, projected himself as a successor to the regnal traditions of the first, in particular those of Artaxerxes II, whose throne name the new emperor adopted.
From a linguistic point of view, there was probably only little disruption. Since the Sassanids had inherited the bureaucracy, in the beginning the affairs of government went on as before, with the use of dictionaries such as the Frahang-i Pahlavig
assisting the transition. The royalty themselves came from a priestly tradition (Ardeshir's father and grandfather were both, in addition to being kings, also priests), and as such would have been proficient in the language and script. More importantly, being both Western Middle Iranian languages
, Parthian was closely related to the dialect of the southwest (which was more properly called Pārsi, that is, the language of Pārsā, Persia proper).
Arsacid Pahlavi did not die out with the Arsacids. It is represented in some bilingual inscriptions alongside the Sassanid Pahlavi; by the parchment manuscripts of Auroman; and by certain Manichaean texts from Turpan. Furthermore, the archaic orthography of Sasanian Pahlavi continued to reflect, in many respects, pronunciations that had been used in Arsacid times (in Parthia as well as Fars) and not its contemporary pronunciation.
Sasanian Pahlavi is also called Sassanid Pahlavi, Persian Pahlavi, or Southwest Pahlavi.
As the language and script of religious and semi-religious commentaries, Pahlavi remained in use long after that language had been superseded (in general use) by Modern Persian and Arabic script had been adopted as the means to render it. As late as the 17th century, Zoroastrian priests in Iran admonished their Indian co-religionists to learn it.
Post-conquest Pahlavi (or just Pahlavi) is also called Zoroastrian Pahlavi.
Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2.
The Unicode block for Inscriptional Pahlavi is U+10B60–U+10B7F:
The Unicode block for Inscriptional Parthian is U+10B40–U+10B5F:
Iranian languages
The Iranian languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn is a subgroup of Indo-European language family. They have been and are spoken by Iranian peoples....
. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are
- the use of a specific Aramaic-derived script, the Pahlavi script;
- the high incidence of Aramaic wordsAramaic languageAramaic is a group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic language phylum. The name of the language is based on the name of Aram, an ancient region in central Syria. Within this family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic family, and more specifically, is a part of the Northwest Semitic subfamily,...
used as logogramLogogramA logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
s (called hozwārishnFrahang-i PahlavigFrahang-i Pahlavig is a dictionary of Aramaic language ideograms with Middle Persian translations and transliterations...
, "archaisms").
Pahlavi compositions have been found for the dialects/ethnolects of Parthia
Parthian language
The Parthian language, also known as Arsacid Pahlavi and Pahlavanik, is a now-extinct ancient Northwestern Iranian language spoken in Parthia, a region of northeastern ancient Persia during the rule of the Parthian empire....
, Parsa
Fars language
Dialects of Fars are a group of southwestern and northwestern Iranian dialects spoken in the central Fars province. The southwestern dialects can be divided to three family of dialects according to geographical distribution and local names: Southwestern , South-central and Southeastern...
, Sogdiana
Sogdian language
The Sogdian language is a Middle Iranian language that was spoken in Sogdiana , located in modern day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan ....
, Scythia, and Khotan. Independent of the variant
Variety (linguistics)
In sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard variety itself...
for which the Pahlavi system was used, the written form of that language only qualifies as Pahlavi when it has the characteristics noted above.
Pahlavi is then an admixture of
- written Imperial Aramaic, from which Pahlavi derives its script, logograms, and some of its vocabulary.
- spoken Middle IranianIranian languagesThe Iranian languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn is a subgroup of Indo-European language family. They have been and are spoken by Iranian peoples....
, from which Pahlavi derives its terminations, symbol rules, and most of its vocabulary.
Pahlavi may thus be defined as a system of writing applied to (but not unique for) a specific language group, but with critical features alien to that language group. It has the characteristics of a distinct language, but is not one. It is an exclusively written system, but much Pahlavi literature remains essentially an oral literature committed to writing and so retains many of the characteristics of oral composition.
Etymology
The term Pahlavi is said to be derived from the Parthian languageParthian language
The Parthian language, also known as Arsacid Pahlavi and Pahlavanik, is a now-extinct ancient Northwestern Iranian language spoken in Parthia, a region of northeastern ancient Persia during the rule of the Parthian empire....
word parthav or parthau, meaning Parthia, a region just east of the Caspian Sea
Caspian Sea
The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed body of water on Earth by area, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea. The sea has a surface area of and a volume of...
, with the -i suffix denoting the language and people of that region. If this etymology is correct, Parthav presumably became pahlaw through a semivowel glide
Semivowel
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...
rt (or in other cases rd) change to l, a common occurrence in language evolution (e.g. Arsacid sard became sal, zard→zal, vard→gol, sardar→salar etc.). The term has been traced back further to Avestan pərəthu- "broad [as the earth]", also evident in Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
pŗthvi- "earth" and parthivi "[lord] of the earth". Common to all Indo-Iranian languages is a connotation of "mighty".
History
The earliest attested use of Pahlavi dates to the reign of Arsaces I of ParthiaArsaces I of Parthia
Arsaces I was the founder of the Arsacid dynasty, and after whom all 30+ monarchs of the Arsacid empire officially named themselves. A celebrated descent from antiquity begins with Arsaces.A 1st century AD tradition casts Arsaces as descending from the 5th-century BC Achaemenid monarch...
(250 BC) in early Parthian coins with Pahlavi scipts. There are also several Pahlavi texts written during the reign of Mithridates I
Mithridates I of Parthia
Mithridates or Mithradates I was the "Great King" of Parthia from ca. 171 BC - 138 BC, succeeding his brother Phraates I. His father was King Phriapatius of Parthia, who died ca. 176 BC). Mithridates I made Parthia into a major political power by expanding the empire to the east, south, and west...
(r. 171–138 BC). The cellars of the treasury at Mithradatkird (near modern-day Nisa
Nisa
-Locations:*Nısa - a village in Azerbaijan*Nisa, Portugal - a municipality in the district of Portalegre*Nisa, Turkmenistan - an ancient city , first capital of the Parthians-Organizations:*The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency in Japan....
) reveal thousands of pottery shreds with brief records; several ostraca that are fully dated bear references to members of the immediate family of the king.
Such fragments, as also the rock inscriptions of Sassanid kings, which are datable to the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, do not however qualify as a significant literary corpus. Although, in theory, Pahlavi could have been used to render any Middle Iranian language and hence may have been in use as early as 300 BC, no manuscripts that can be dated to before the 6th century AD have yet been found. Thus, when used for the name of a literary genre, i.e. Pahlavi literature
Pahlavi literature
Middle Persian literature also called Pahlavi literature is Persian literature of the 1st millennium AD, especially of the Sassanid period.- Literature of Pahlavi :Pahlavi Literature can be divided in three parts:...
, the term refers to Middle Iranian (mostly Middle Persian
Middle Persian
Middle Persian , indigenously known as "Pârsig" sometimes referred to as Pahlavi or Pehlevi, is the Middle Iranian language/ethnolect of Southwestern Iran that during Sassanid times became a prestige dialect and so came to be spoken in other regions as well. Middle Persian is classified as a...
) texts dated near or after the fall of the Sassanid empire
Sassanid Empire
The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān in Middle Persian and resulting in the New Persian terms Iranshahr and Iran , was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651...
and (with exceptions) extending to about AD 900, after which Iranian languages enter the "modern" stage.
The oldest surviving example of the Pahlavi script is from fragments of the so-called "Pahlavi Psalter", a 6th- or 7th-century-AD translation of a Syriac Psalter found at Bulayiq on the Silk Road
Silk Road
The Silk Road or Silk Route refers to a historical network of interlinking trade routes across the Afro-Eurasian landmass that connected East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean and European world, as well as parts of North and East Africa...
, near Turpan in north-west China. It is in a more archaic script than Book Pahlavi.
After the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Pahlavi script was replaced by the Arabic script, except in Zoroastrian sacred literature.
In the present-day, "Pahlavi" is frequently identified with the prestige dialect
Prestige dialect
In sociolinguistics, prestige describes the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared to that of other languages or dialects in a speech community. The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics is closely related to that of prestige or class within a society...
of south-west Iran, formerly and properly called Pārsi
Fars language
Dialects of Fars are a group of southwestern and northwestern Iranian dialects spoken in the central Fars province. The southwestern dialects can be divided to three family of dialects according to geographical distribution and local names: Southwestern , South-central and Southeastern...
, after Pars
Pars
Pars may refer to:* Fārs Province, modern Persian language name for Pars Province, central Iranian kingdom of the ancient Persian empire* Pars News Agency and Pars Agency, names of the national Iranian news agency prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979...
(Persia proper). This practice can be dated to the period immediately following the Islamic conquest.
Script
Iranian languages
The Iranian languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn is a subgroup of Indo-European language family. They have been and are spoken by Iranian peoples....
for which it was used. The Pahlavi script is derived from the Aramaic script as it was used under the Achaemenids, with modifications to support the phonology of the Iranian languages. It is essentially a typical abjad
Abjad
An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
, where only long vowels are marked with matres lectionis and vowel-initial words are marked with an aleph
Aleph
* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...
. However, because of the high incidence of logogram
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
s derived from Aramaic words, the Pahlavi script is far from always phonetic; and even when it is phonetic, it may have more than one transliterational symbol per sign, because certain originally different Aramaic letters have merged into identical graphic forms - especially in the Book Pahlavi variety. (For a review of the transliteration problems of Pahlavi, see Henning.) In addition to this, during much of its later history, Pahlavi orthography was characterized by historical or archaizing spellings: voiceless stops
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...
and affricates continued to be spelt as such even when they had become voiced and, in some cases, had undergone further changes in pronunciation; certain words continued to be spelt with ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ even after they had come to be pronounced with ⟨h⟩ in the living language; etc..
The Pahlavi script consisted of two widely used forms: Inscriptional Pahlavi and Book Pahlavi. A third form, Psalter Pahlavi, is not widely attested.
Inscriptional Pahlavi
Inscriptional Pahlavi is the earliest attested form, and is evident in clay fragments that have been dated to the reign of Mithridates IMithridates I of Parthia
Mithridates or Mithradates I was the "Great King" of Parthia from ca. 171 BC - 138 BC, succeeding his brother Phraates I. His father was King Phriapatius of Parthia, who died ca. 176 BC). Mithridates I made Parthia into a major political power by expanding the empire to the east, south, and west...
(r. 171–138 BC). Other early evidence includes the Pahlavi inscriptions of Arsacid era coins and rock inscriptions of Sassanid kings and other notables such as Kartir
Kartir
Kartir Hangirpe was a highly influential Zoroastrian high-priest of the late 3rd century CE and served as advisor to at least three Sassanid emperors....
. This script contains 19 characters which are not joined.
Psalter Pahlavi
Psalter Pahlavi derives its name from the so-called "Pahlavi PsalterPahlavi Psalter
The Pahlavi Psalter is the name given to a 12-page non-contiguous section of a Middle Persian translation of a Syriac book of psalms.The Pahlavi Psalter was discovered in 1905 by the second German Turpan expedition under Albert von Le Coq....
", a 6th- or 7th-century translation of a Syriac
Syriac language
Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
book of psalms. This text, which was found at Bulayiq near Turpan in northwest China, is the earliest evidence of literary composition in Pahlavi, dating to the 6th or 7th century AD. The extant manuscript dates no earlier than the mid-6th century since the translation reflects liturgical additions to the Syriac original by Mar Aba I, who was Patriarch of the Church of the East c. 540 - 552.
The script of the psalms has altogether 18 graphemes, 5 more than Book Pahlavi and one less than Inscriptional Pahlavi. As in Book Pahlavi, letters are connected to each other. The only other surviving source of Psalter Pahlavi are the inscriptions on a bronze processional cross found at Herat
Herat
Herāt is the capital of Herat province in Afghanistan. It is the third largest city of Afghanistan, with a population of about 397,456 as of 2006. It is situated in the valley of the Hari River, which flows from the mountains of central Afghanistan to the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan...
, in present-day Afghanistan. Due to the dearth of comparable material, some words and phrases in both sources remain undeciphered.
Book Pahlavi
Book Pahlavi is a smoother script in which letters are joined to each other and often form complicated ligatures. Book Pahlavi was the most common form of the script, with only 12 or 13 graphemes (13 when including aleph) representing 24 soundSound
Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...
s. The formal coalescence of originally different letters caused ambiguity, and the letters became even less distinct when they formed part of a ligature. In its later forms, attempts were made to improve the consonantary and reduce ambiguity through diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
marks.
Book Pahlavi continued to be in common use until about AD 900. After that date, Pahlavi was preserved only by the Zoroastrian clergy.
Logograms
In both Inscriptional and Book Pahlavi, many common words, including even pronouns, particles, numerals, and auxiliaries, were replaced by their Imperial Aramaic equivalents, which were used as logograms. For example, the word for "dog" was written as (Aramaic kalbā) but pronounced sag; and the word for "bread" would be written as Aramaic () but understood as the sign for Iranian nān. These words were known as huzvarishn. Such a logogram could also be followed by letters expressing parts of the Persian word phonetically, e.g. ⟨⟩ for pitar "father". The grammatical endings were usually written phonetically. A logogram did not necessarily originate from the lexical form of the word in Aramaic, it could also come from a declinedDeclension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
or conjugated
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
Aramaic form. For example, tō "you" (singular) was spelt ⟨LK⟩ (Aramaic "to you", including the preposition l-). A word could be written phonetically even when a logogram for it existed (pitar could be ⟨⟩ or ⟨pytr⟩), but logograms were nevertheless used very frequently in texts.
Many huzvarishn were listed in the lexicon Frahang-i Pahlavig
Frahang-i Pahlavig
Frahang-i Pahlavig is a dictionary of Aramaic language ideograms with Middle Persian translations and transliterations...
. The practice of using these logograms appears to have originated from the use of Aramaic in the chancelleries
Chancellor
Chancellor is the title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the Cancellarii of Roman courts of justice—ushers who sat at the cancelli or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the...
of the Achaemenid Empire
Achaemenid Empire
The Achaemenid Empire , sometimes known as First Persian Empire and/or Persian Empire, was founded in the 6th century BCE by Cyrus the Great who overthrew the Median confederation...
. Partly similar phenomena are found in the use of Sumerograms and Akkadograms
Sumerogram
A Sumerogram is the use of a Sumerian cuneiform character or group of characters as an ideogram or logogram rather than a syllabogram in the graphic representation of a language other than Sumerian, such as Akkadian or Hittite....
in ancient Mesopotamia and the Hittite empire, and in the adaptation of Chinese writing to Japanese.
Problems in reading Book Pahlavi
As pointed out above, the convergence in form of many of the characters of Book Pahlavi causes a high degree of ambiguity in most Pahlavi writing and it needs to be resolved by the context. Some mergers are restricted to particular groups of words or individual spellings. Further ambiguity is added by the fact that even outside of ligatures, the boundaries between letters are not clear, and many letters look identical to combinations of other letters. As an example, one may take the fact that the name of God, OharmazdAhura Mazda
Ahura Mazdā is the Avestan name for a divinity of the Old Iranian religion who was proclaimed the uncreated God by Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism...
, could equally be read (and, by Parsis, often was read) Anhoma. Historically speaking, it was spelt ⟨ʼwhrmzd⟩, a fairly straightforward spelling for an abjad
Abjad
An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
. However, ⟨w⟩ had coalesced with ⟨n⟩; ⟨r⟩ had coalesced, in the spelling of certain words, with both ⟨n⟩ and ⟨w⟩; and ⟨z⟩ had been reduced, in the spelling of certain words, to a form whose combination with ⟨d⟩ was indistinguishable from a ⟨ʼ⟩, which in turn had coalesced with ⟨h⟩. This meant that the same orthographic form that stood for ⟨ʼwhrmzd⟩ could also be interpreted as ⟨ʼnhwmh⟩ (among many other possible readings). The logograms could also pose problems. For this reason, important religious texts were sometimes transcribed into the phonetically unambiguous Avestan alphabet
Avestan alphabet
The Avestan alphabet is a writing system developed during Iran's Sassanid era to render the Avestan language.As a side effect of its development, the script was also used for Pazend, a method of writing Middle Persian that was used primarily for the Zend commentaries on the texts of the Avesta...
. This latter system is called Pazend.
Literary dialects
From a formal historical and linguistic point of view, the Pahlavi script does not have a one to one correspondence with any Middle Iranian language: none was written in Pahlavi exclusively, and inversely, the Pahlavi script was used for more than one language. Still, the vast majority of surviving Pahlavi texts are in Middle Persian, hence the occasional use of the term "Pahlavi" to refer to that language.Arsacid Pahlavi
Following the overthrow of the Seleucids, the Parthia
Parthia
Parthia is a region of north-eastern Iran, best known for having been the political and cultural base of the Arsacid dynasty, rulers of the Parthian Empire....
n Arsacids—who considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the Achaemenids—adopted the manner, customs and government of the Persian court of two centuries previously. Among the many practices so adopted was the use of the Aramaic language
Aramaic language
Aramaic is a group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic language phylum. The name of the language is based on the name of Aram, an ancient region in central Syria. Within this family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic family, and more specifically, is a part of the Northwest Semitic subfamily,...
("Imperial Aramaic") that together with Aramaic script served as the language of the chancellery. By the end of the Arsacid era, the written Aramaic words had come to be understood as logogram
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
s, as explained above.
The use of Pahlavi gained popularity following its adoption as the language/script of the commentaries (Zend) on the Avesta
Avesta
The Avesta is the primary collection of sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language.-Early transmission:The texts of the Avesta — which are all in the Avestan language — were composed over the course of several hundred years. The most important portion, the Gathas,...
. Propagated by the priesthood, who were not only considered to be transmitters of all knowledge but were also instrumental in government, the use of Pahlavi eventually reached all corners of the Parthian Arsacid empire.
Arsacid Pahlavi is also called Parthian Pahlavi (or just Parthian), Chaldeo-Pahlavi, or Northwest Pahlavi, the latter reflecting its apparent development from a dialect that was almost identical to that of the Medes.
Sasanian Pahlavi
Following the defeat of the Parthian Arsacids by the Persian Sasanians (Sassanids), the latter inherited the empire and its institutions, and with it the use of the Aramaic-derived language and script. Like the Parthians before him, Ardeshir, the founder of the second Persian Empire, projected himself as a successor to the regnal traditions of the first, in particular those of Artaxerxes II, whose throne name the new emperor adopted.
From a linguistic point of view, there was probably only little disruption. Since the Sassanids had inherited the bureaucracy, in the beginning the affairs of government went on as before, with the use of dictionaries such as the Frahang-i Pahlavig
Frahang-i Pahlavig
Frahang-i Pahlavig is a dictionary of Aramaic language ideograms with Middle Persian translations and transliterations...
assisting the transition. The royalty themselves came from a priestly tradition (Ardeshir's father and grandfather were both, in addition to being kings, also priests), and as such would have been proficient in the language and script. More importantly, being both Western Middle Iranian languages
Iranian languages
The Iranian languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn is a subgroup of Indo-European language family. They have been and are spoken by Iranian peoples....
, Parthian was closely related to the dialect of the southwest (which was more properly called Pārsi, that is, the language of Pārsā, Persia proper).
Arsacid Pahlavi did not die out with the Arsacids. It is represented in some bilingual inscriptions alongside the Sassanid Pahlavi; by the parchment manuscripts of Auroman; and by certain Manichaean texts from Turpan. Furthermore, the archaic orthography of Sasanian Pahlavi continued to reflect, in many respects, pronunciations that had been used in Arsacid times (in Parthia as well as Fars) and not its contemporary pronunciation.
Sasanian Pahlavi is also called Sassanid Pahlavi, Persian Pahlavi, or Southwest Pahlavi.
Post-conquest Pahlavi
Following the Islamic conquest of the Sassanids, the term Pahlavi came to refer to the (written) "language" of the southwest (i.e. Pārsi). How this came to pass remains unclear, but it has been assumed that this was simply because it was the dialect that the conquerors would have been most familiar with.As the language and script of religious and semi-religious commentaries, Pahlavi remained in use long after that language had been superseded (in general use) by Modern Persian and Arabic script had been adopted as the means to render it. As late as the 17th century, Zoroastrian priests in Iran admonished their Indian co-religionists to learn it.
Post-conquest Pahlavi (or just Pahlavi) is also called Zoroastrian Pahlavi.
Unicode
Inscriptional Pahlavi and Inscriptional Parthian were added to the UnicodeUnicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2.
The Unicode block for Inscriptional Pahlavi is U+10B60–U+10B7F:
The Unicode block for Inscriptional Parthian is U+10B40–U+10B5F:
External links
- Language and literature:
- Pahlavi (farvardyn.com) Includes extracts from West and Kent.
- SIL classification of Pahlavi
- Lessons in Pahlavi-Pazend by S.D.Bharuchī and E.S.D.Bharucha (1908) at the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
- Part 1 and 2 (partly outdated) - Manuel du Pehlevi des livres religieux et historiques de la Perse : Grammaire, anthologie, lexique by Charles de Harlez (1880, in French) at the Internet Archive (partly outdated)
- Middle Persian Pahlavi texts on TITUS
- Writing system:
- Pahlavi script (ancientscripts.com)
- Michael EversonMichael EversonMichael Everson is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media...
and Roozbeh Pournader's Proposal for encoding the Inscriptional Parthian, Inscriptional Pahlavi, and Psalter Pahlavi scripts in Unicode - Everson and Pournader's Preliminary proposal for encoding Book Pahlavi in Unicode
- Pahlavi fonts (part of the Ancient Iranian Font Project) at St Catherine University