A Dictionary of Aramaic Ideograms in Pahlavi

Abstract

THE LATE H. S. NYBERG's WORK on the Frahang i Pahlavik (abbreviated here FrPhl) was pursued over many years, and its publication has been eagerly awaited for a long time. It has now appeared, many years after the author's death, thanks to the efforts of his former students, the Iranian scholar Bo Utas and the Semitist Christopher Toll. They are to be congratulated for the energy and time invested in this work of love, but some disturbing questions cannot be avoided. As the manuscript was not ready for print, it was decided to publish the extant notes while supplying the commentary to the text from lecture notes taken by students of Nyberg. It is doubtful whether this does justice to the late master. If he had lived to put his hypotheses and conjectures on paper, he might have wanted to reconsider some of them. They do contain a great many untenable, sometimes fantastic, speculations. It is arguable that in deference to the memory of a great scholar it might have been better to leave the incomplete manuscript unpublished. The user of the book must at any rate be warned that many of the statements, however confidently expressed, should be treated with some caution. This applies to the Semitic as well as to the Iranian aspects of the work. The book is extremely complex to work on, and its layout as printed does not make its use any easier. The text bristles with problems of reading and interpretation, in addition to problems of manuscript transmission. It might have been a useful service to indicate which ideograms are actually encountered in epigraphic texts or in Book Pahlavi, and which figure only in the Frahang i Pahlavik. It must, however, be obvious that the occurrence of ideograms in the extant literature is not the only yardstick for deciding whether