Middle Persian (Pahlavi)

When the Sasanian king Shapur I recorded his victories over Rome on the stone tower at Naqsh-e Rostam known as the Ka‘ba-ye Zartosht, he had the text carved in three languages: Greek, Parthian and his own, Middle Persian. Its speakers called it Pārsīg; Western scholars usually call it Pahlavi, though strictly that name belongs to the script, and to Parthian before it. It is the middle link in a single chain: descended from Old Persian, ancestor of the Persian spoken today.

Middle Persian had lost most of the endings of Old Persian and looks, to a modern Persian reader, oddly familiar. Pidar and mādar are father and mother; dil is the heart; a king is shāh. It was the language of the Sasanian court and of the Zoroastrian church from the third century until the Arab conquest of the seventh, and of Zoroastrian priests for centuries afterwards.

A script that says one thing and means another

The Pahlavi script grew from the Aramaic alphabet used by Achaemenid scribes, and over the centuries several of its letters merged into identical shapes, so that one sign might stand for w, n or r. Stranger still, scribes kept writing hundreds of common words in their old Aramaic spelling while reading them in Persian. A word written MLKA, Aramaic ‘king’, was read shāh; one written LḤMA, ‘bread’, was read nān. These borrowed spellings, called huzvārishn, make Pahlavi one of the hardest scripts in the world to read. Manichaean and Christian writers wrote Middle Persian in their own, clearer alphabets.

Books that survived

Most surviving Middle Persian literature was written down in the ninth and tenth centuries, after the conquest, by Zoroastrian priests preserving their tradition: the encyclopaedic Dēnkard; the Bundahishn, an account of creation; and the Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, a priest’s journey through heaven and hell. Smaller pieces are livelier: the Kārnāmag ī Ardashīr, a romance of the founder of the dynasty, and the Draxt ī Āsūrīg, a verse debate between a goat and a date palm about which is more useful.

Much was lost but lived on in translation. The Khwadāy-nāmag, the ‘Book of Lords’, a Sasanian history of the kings of Iran, does not survive, but its stories passed through Arabic and Persian versions into Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The animal fables of Kalila and Dimna travelled from Sanskrit into Middle Persian and then, through Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, into Arabic; medieval Arab writers believed that a Persian Hazār Afsān, ‘A Thousand Tales’, lay behind the Thousand and One Nights. In Zoroastrian homes in Yazd and Mumbai, priests still study Pahlavi texts, and a few keep alive the craft of reading them aloud.