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Fārsīgraphy in Zoroastrian Middle Persian Manuscripts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2023

Ibrāhīm Šafiʿī
Ibrāhīm Šafiʿī*
Affiliation:
University of Tehran
*
Email: i.shafiee@ut.ac.ir
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Abstract

The tradition of writing in Iran has a long history, and its continuous development has, from time to time, led to new scripts. A most notable case is that of Perso-Arabic's replacement of Pahlavi script when New Persian replaced Middle Persian, resulting in Zoroastrian priests having difficulties reading and understanding their religious texts. The process of changing scripts is well attested by the tradition of Pāzand. Although Pāzand was considered one of the first types of transliteration in Iran, this tradition was also gradually abandoned due to its reliance on Avestan script, which was and continues to be uncommon. Avestan script is now found in Zoroastrian Middle Persian (Pahlavi) manuscripts, just as Pāzand was traditionally used for earlier texts. Pāzand–i.e., transcription of Middle Persian in the Avestan alphabet–was used for some time, but was eventually abandoned for scripts in common use, i.e., Persian in Persia and Gujarati and Devanagari in India. In this paper, the aim is to identify and categorize this tradition's characteristics in Pahlavi manuscripts, drawing on manuscripts from the fifty-three volumes published by the Asia Institute of the Pahlavi University of Shiraz, as listed in the Appendix.

Keywords

PahlaviPāzandFārsīgraphyArameogramsZoroastrianism
Type
Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2023 , pp. 701 - 720
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Iranian Studies

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