Pahlavi script

“ The name Pahlavi was adopted by Europeans from the Parsi use. The language of Western Persia in the time of the Achaemenian kings, as preserved in the cuneiform inscriptions of Persepolis, Behistun, and elsewhere, is nearly akin to the dialects of the Zend-Avesta, and is characterised by a number of inflections agreeing with those of the Avesta and of Sanskrit. ”

“ This distinguished man who only late in life exchanged the faith of his forbears for that of Islam, and who never professed the latter with over much zeal, translated a series of Pahlavi writings into Arabic including the Khoday-Nameh. He was a courtier, and passed for a good Arabic poet and one of the best rhetorical writers of his time. The famous Wazir Ibn Mukla counted him among "the ten most eloquent men." He must consequently have striven to suit his rendering of the book of Persian kings to the taste of his contemporaries. ”

“ The original work has been reflected to us in Tabari and other Arabs as well as Firdausi through a series of intermediate texts. To judge by the express statements and suggestions as also by various features in style and phraseology and further by all that we are aware of touching the circumstances of the literature we can say with certainty that, that original work like all other Persian narrative productions of the Sasanides and of the period of Arab conquest was composed in the written, language of this period, the Pahlavi. ”

“ This Pahlavi version—though no longer extant—escaped the general wreck of Persian literature on the conquest of the country by the Arabs, and was translated, during the reign of the Khalīf Mansur (A.D. 753–774) , into Arabic, from which several versions were made in modern Persian, and also translations into Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and most of the European languages. Perhaps no book of mere human composition ever had such a remarkable literary history and enduring popularity. ”

“ We gather from the contents of the lost Nasks given in the Dinkard that, with the exception of the eleventh Nask, altogether twenty Avestan Nasks, nineteen along with their Pahlavi commentaries and one without it, still existed in the ninth century. The greater part of these works has perished during the unsettled times when Persia fell under the barbarous rule of the Tartars. Pahlavi works on religious subjects that are extant consist of about 446,000 words. ”

“ Between heaven and hell. We learn from Pahlavi works that an intermediary place, situated between earth and the star-region, is reserved for the souls in whose case the records of what may be called the Book of Life show that their good deeds are on a par with their evil deeds. ”

“ The Arabs had their governors in Tabaristan who in the first period minted coins with Sasanian impress and with Pahlavi legends; they were, however, from time to time expelled by the people. These coins struck by the Arabs after the model of the Pahlavi mintage were first deciphered by Olshausen. Ibn Khaldun is compelled to admit that "the Arabs are of all the people the least capable to govern a country." ”

“ From this information we learn that in one of the castles of Fars down to the tenth century there were preserved manuscripts written probably in the Pahlavi language containing narratives from Persian history and illustrated with, portraits after the style of the Sasanian reliefs to be found in the rocks in the district of Sabur. [1] This strong mountain fastness was probably little accessible to the Arabs and afforded an asylum to the mobeds, dehkans and others interested in the past of their country. ”

“ This work which was sufficiently known and made use of in the early Moslem period has not come down to us in the original Pahlavi. We know of the existence of a verse translation of this book in the Arabic made by Belazuri (Fihrist, 113 and 114) . Moreover, this work was considered as a model composition (probably as represented by Belazuri) , and in this connection it was comparable (Fihrist 126, 15-19) to Kalileh wa Dimneh, the Essays of Umar Ibn Hamza, [1] Al Mahanith, [2] the tract called Yatima of Ibn al Mukaffa, and the Essays of Ahmed Ibn Yusuf, secretary of Mamun. ”

“ Arabic literature teems with allusions to the religions, dogma, customs and the court of Sasanian Iran. Once intended for contemporaries equally at home in the Arabic and Persian idioms these references have in course of time grown obscure to copyists who have mutilated Iranian names of persons and places and specific Zoroastrian terms which had become naturalised in the language of the ruling Arabs. It is scholars like Baron Rosen and Rosenberg who have adequately appreciated the value of Arabic texts in which are interwoven verbal translations of celebrated Pahlavi treatises. ”

“ Zend is the name which has been commonly applied, for more than a hundred years to that dialect of the ancient Iranian (or Persian) language in which the Avesta or Sacred Books of Zorastrianism or the old Persian religion are written. The application of the name in this way was quite erroneous, as the word Zand when used alone in the Parsi books indicates a 'commentary or explanation,' and is in fact applied only to some Pahlavi translation, commentary, or gloss. If the name Zend were now to be used as the designation of any language it would more justly apply to the Pahlavi itself. ”

“ It would not be rash, to assume that some copies of the work contained additional matter taken from other Pahlavi books like the Romance of Bahram. Bahram the high priest of the city of Shapur collected, according to Hamza, more than 20 manuscripts of the Khoday-Nameh and from their divergence made out another independent recension. Musa Ibn Isa Kesravi complains of the variants in the copies of the work; the latter author who speaks of defects in translation has in view only the Arabic redactions. ”

“ But the 'Nights' cannot be a translation from the Persian; for the other two books mentioned by Masudi are in the Arabic collection. Lane supposes the relationship to be that of the 'Æneid' to the 'Odyssey.' But it is probably closer: one fifth of the collection which, according to Payne, is common to all manuscripts, will doubtless be found to be based on the Pahlavi original. That the dependence is not greater is evident from the absence of the great heroes of the Persian Epos--Feridun, Zer, Isfandyar, etc. The heroes are all Arabs; the life depicted is wholly Arabic. ”

“ The district of Persis, also, became independent soon after the time of Antiochus IV., and was ruled by its own kings, who perpetuated the Achaemenian traditions, and on their coins—which bear the Persian language in Aramaic characters, i.e. the so-called Pahlavi—appear as zealous adherents of Zoroastrianism and the Fire-cult (see Persis) . They were forced, however, to acknowledge the suzerainty of Parthia, to which they stood in the same position as the Persians of Cyrus and his forefathers to the Median Empire (cf. Strabo xv. 728, 733, 736; Lucian, Macrob. 15) . ”

“ In another portion of his book Istakhri describes the inhabitants as thin, with little growth of hair and of brown colour. "In the colder tracts," he continues, "the people are of a taller stature with a thick growth of hair and very fair. They speak three languages,—the Parsi, which everybody speaks and which is employed in their letters and their literature; the Magians who dwell among them use the Pahlavi in their writings, but it needs for a thorough understanding an explanation in Parsi ”

“ Our knowledge respecting the Magian religion which the Bactrian* prophet founded, is built, with the exception of the notices in Greek and Latin authors, already quoted, upon the work known as the Avesta. This is written in a language called Zand,** and there are within it parts, which are written in another tongue, to which the name of Pahlavi has been given, and from these the sacred books of the Parsees have been translated into French by Anquetil du Perron, into German by Spiegel, and into English by Haug. ”

“ Literary Iran has known him as her arch-enemy, and the Pahlavi writers have branded him 'accursed,' 'evil-destined,' and an envoy of Ahriman. After a long period of darkness, following his ill-destined invasion of Persia, Iran once more recovered her political autonomy, but she never regained, in their pristine fulness, the holy works of her great prophet.
Zoroastrianism thrives better under the Parthians than under the Seleucids. The premature death of the great conqueror brought the end of his ambition of hellenizing Persia. ”

“ Long after the Sasanian dynasty had fallen, and the rest of Persia had been subdued by the Arabs the Ispahabeds continued to strike their Pahlavi coinage and maintained the religion of Zoroaster in the mountains and forests of Tabaristan; and their struggles with the Arabs only ended about A.D. 838 by the capture and cruel execution of the gallant Maziyar, son of Qaren, son of Wanda-Hurmuz. ”

“ The name of the four people who executed the work for the son of Abdar Razzak are all genuinely Persian; which indicates that they were all adherents of the ancient religion and that they had actully a Pahlavi original before them. To transfer an Arabic version into Modern Persian would not have required four men. Moreover, Firdausi's poem occasionally betrays that his sources had not flowed to him through Arabic. Of those men one only is met with again, Shahzan son of Barzin. ”

“ The name Pahlavī means Parthian, Pahlav being the regular Persian transformation of the older Parthava. [11] This fact points to the conclusion that the system of writing was developed in Parthian times, when the great nobles, the Pahlavans, ruled and Media was their main seat, “the Pahlav country.” Other linguistic, graphical and historical indications point the same way; but it is still far from clear how the system was developed. We know, indeed, that even under the Achaemenids Aramaic writing and speech were employed far beyond the Aramaic lands, even in official documents and on coins. ”

“ Incorrect translations from Pahlavi.]
And says Abu Mashar, the astronomer:—The majority of their [Iranian] histories are interpolated and corrupt, and there is the corruption because they have come down from a great many years ago and because they have been translated from one writing into another and from one tongue into another and hence there have been mistakes of either excess or defect.
"And the Persians start their assertion from the Book which was brought to them by Zaradusht and which was called Avesta. ”

“ Pehlvi or Pehlevi.
Iranic: extinct dialect of Old Persian, belonging to the Pahlav district of Western Iran or Media, but with large Semitic infusion. It is the language of the Sassanian coins, of several inscriptions of early Sassanian kings, and of the earliest comments on the Avesta, closely allied to the Zend and Old Persic; it is also called Huzvaresh, a suggestion of Spiegel’s. See Spiegel’s “Grammatik der Huzvareschen Sprache;” Haug’s Old Pahlavi-Pazand Glossary, by Asa, Bombay, 1870.
Pehuenche.
American: tribes of Araucans. ”

“ Law, in the sense in which we understand it, as the avenger of wrong and the sublimely impartial protector of individual rights and liberties, has no existence at all in Persia.
The curse of the country is venal mal-administration. It meets one at every turn, and in protean shapes. There is no official conscience, and no public opinion to act as a check upon official unscrupulousness. Of Government as an institution for the good of the governed there is no conception. ”

“ The Iranians had no convenient character, and might borrow the Aramaic letters as naturally as they subsequently borrowed those of the Arabs. But this does not explain the strange practice of writing Semitic words in place of so many Persian words which were to be read as Persian. It cannot be the invention of an individual, for in that case the system would have been more consistently worked out, and the appearance of two or more kinds of Pahlavī side by side at the beginning of the Sassanian period would be inexplicable. ”

“ But with respect to a pashalik like that of Baghdad, any son of the present Pasha is the very last person on whom the Padishah would think of conferring it at his death. In one or two generations a clever family might gain the allegiance of the whole province, and succeed in detaching it from the empire. It would be the height of folly to permit such a thing. No, our young friend Azim Bey will be only a private person, or if he wishes for public office, he will have to make his way, like the sons of your own viceroys and governor-generals. ”

“ I have mentioned the prerogative of the Shah to raise whomsoever he chooses from the lowest to the highest position, except under restrictions in the military tribes. This quite falls in with the democratic spirit which lies dormant among the people, ready to be displayed in willingness to accept a Sovereign of signal power who springs from the lower ranks of life. The social equality which Islam grants to all men was nothing new to Persia in forming ideas regarding a popular leader and elected King. ”

“ Would that His Majesty the Sháh of Persia—may God perpetuate his sovereignty—would inquire from the Consuls of the honored Persian Government who have been in this country, that he might become acquainted with the activities and behavior of this Wronged One. Briefly, they have incited a great many such as Akhtar and others, and are busying themselves in spreading calumnies. It is clear and evident that they will surround with their swords of hatred and their shafts of enmity the one whom they know to be an outcast among men and to have been banished from one country to another. ”