Sasanian Pahlavi inscriptions: A concordance

Abstract

THE TERM Pahlavi, originally meaning "Parthian," was applied to the Middle Persian language of the Sasanian era (A.D. 226-651) after the language had gone through a considerable evolution on its way to the so-called New Persian. By this time the term Pahlavi had attained the significance of "heroic" and was applied to anything reminiscent of the Persian past glory, including the official language of the Sasanian empire. The origins of Middle Persian, however, go back to about 300 B.c., or about five and a quarter centuries before Ardashir founded the dynasty. Like Old Persian of the Achaemenian period (546-330 B.C.), Middle Persian is a Western Iranian language, as opposed to the ancient Avestan of the Zoroastrian scripture and a host of other languages which form the Eastern division of the Iranian languages. All the extant textual literatures in Pahlavi are, however, from the post-Sasanian period, committed to writing from oral traditions or occasionally copied from older manuscripts which have not survived. The Sasanian inscriptions dealt with in this project are therefore the oldest extant Pahlavi data. European interest in Pahlavi can be said to have started with the memoirs of Anquetil-Dupperon in 1763,1 although copies of some of the inscriptions had been made by other European travelers at least one century before that date.2 As the official language of the Sasanian kings and the written language of Zoroastrian priests in Iran, Pahlavi has been of lively interest to the Parsis in India from the time of their emigration until the present day. Unlike the Indians and Greeks, the Iranian people did not produce grammarians of their own language; the few grammars written by Persian scholars during the early period of Arab dominance were in Arabic and on the Arabic language. Middle Iranian is particularly poor in grammatical studies; the few references mentioned in this paper are out of print, lack sufficient details, or both. Apart from infrequent publications on particular aspects of the Pahlavi language (mainly notes on vocabulary) and notes and comments on editions of individual texts and inscriptions, the Pahlavi language and literature in g neral has been dealt with by Haug (1870), West (1896), Salemann (1930), and more recently by Henning (1958) and Boyce (1968). The Pahlavi inscriptions gathered in our collection, together with the book-Pahlavi texts, provide the middle link in the chain of linguistic continuity between Old Pe sian and New Persian. For this reason, Pahlavi is often referred to as Middle Persian. This textual material is significant for both historical and linguistic reasons. For historical purposes, the inscriptions provide a firsthand record of an era when Persia, as a major power, was a principal in the struggle for world supremacy between the East and the West.3 T linguistic significance cannot be exaggerated. Persian is a rare language that provides direct continuity in recorded texts from before five centuries B.C. to the present day. The importance of this material for historical linguistics, linguistic change, Indo-European studies, and other linguistic studies is obvious. The collected volume contains all the known inscriptions in Pahlavi or Middle Persian of the Sasanian era, which extended over four centuries from about A.D. 226 until the dynasty was routed by the Muslim Arabs in A.D. 651. The inscriptions are records sponsored by various rulers of the dynasty, including its founder, concerning their wars, conquests, administration, names of the nobles and lords serving under them, and so forth. The lists of names reveal the social structure and the protocol of the early Sasanian period. Of particular interest are inscriptions of the chief priest of the early period, Kartir, who served under four or five kings. Although he was unknown to history until the discovery and deciphering of his inscriptions in relatively recent times, they make clear that he