The Pahlavi script is one of the two essential characteristics of the Pahlavi system (see above). Its origin and development occurred independently of the various
Middle Iranian languages for which it was used. The Pahlavi script is derived from the
Aramaic script as it was used under the
Sasanians, with modifications to support the phonology of the Iranian languages. It is essentially a typical
abjad, where, in general, only long vowels are marked with
matres lectionis (although short /i/ and /u/ are sometimes expressed so as well), and vowel-initial words are marked with an
aleph. However, because of the high incidence of
logograms derived from Aramaic words, the Pahlavi script is far from always phonetic; and even when it is phonetic, it may have more than one transliterational symbol per sign, because certain originally different Aramaic letters have merged into identical graphic forms – especially in the Book Pahlavi variety. (For a review of the transliteration problems of Pahlavi, see
Henning.) In addition to this, during much of its later history, Pahlavi orthography was characterized by historical or archaizing spellings. Most notably, it continued to reflect the pronunciation that preceded the widespread Iranian
lenition processes, whereby postvocalic voiceless
stops and
affricates had become voiced, and voiced stops had become
semivowels. Similarly, certain words continued to be spelled with postvocalic and even after the consonants had been
debuccalized to in the living language. The Pahlavi script consisted of two widely used forms: Inscriptional Pahlavi and Book Pahlavi. A third form, Psalter Pahlavi, is not widely attested.
Inscriptional Parthian Although the
Parthian Empire generally wrote in
ancient Greek, some of the coins and seals of the Arsacid period (mid-3rd-century BCE to early 3rd century CE) also include inscriptions in the Parthian language. The script of these inscriptions is called inscriptional Parthian. Numerous clay fragments from Arsacid-era Parthia proper, in particular a large collection of fragments from Nisa that date to the reign of Mithridates I (
r. 171–138 BCE), are likewise inscribed in inscriptional Parthian. The bilingual and trilingual inscriptions of the 3rd-century Sasanian Empire include Parthian texts, which were then also rendered in inscriptional Parthian. The Parthian language was a Middle Iranian language of Parthia proper, a region in the north-western segment of the Iranian plateau where the Arsacids had their power base. Inscriptional Parthian script had 22 letters for sounds and 8 letters for numerals. The letters were not joined. Inscriptional Parthian has
its own Unicode block.
Inscriptional Pahlavi Inscriptional Pahlavi is the name given to a variant of the Pahlavi script as used to render the 3rd–6th-century
Middle Persian language inscriptions of the
Sasanian emperors and other notables. Genuine Middle Persian, as it appears in these inscriptions, was the Middle Iranian language of Persia proper, the region in the south-western corner of the Iranian plateau where the Sasanians had their power base. Inscriptional Pahlavi script had 19 characters, which were not joined.
Psalter Pahlavi Psalter Pahlavi derives its name from the so-called "
Pahlavi Psalter", a 6th- or 7th-century translation of a
Syriac book of psalms. This text, which was found at Bulayiq near
Turpan in northwest China, is the earliest evidence of literary composition in Pahlavi, dating to the 6th or 7th century AD. The extant manuscript dates no earlier than the mid-6th century since the translation reflects liturgical additions to the Syriac original by
Mar Aba I, who was
Patriarch of the Church of the East c. 540–552. Its use is peculiar to Christians in
Iran, given its use in a fragmentary manuscript of the Psalms of David. The script of the psalms has altogether 18 graphemes, 5 more than Book Pahlavi and one less than Inscriptional Pahlavi. As in Book Pahlavi, letters are connected to each other. The only other surviving source of Psalter Pahlavi is the inscriptions on a bronze processional cross found at
Herat, in present-day Afghanistan. Due to the dearth of comparable material, some words and phrases in both sources remain undeciphered. Of the 18 characters, 9 connect in all four traditional abjad positions, while 9 connect only on their right or are isolated. Numbers are built from units of 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 20, and 100. The numbers 10 and 20 join on both sides, but the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 only join on the right, and if they are followed by an additional digit, they lose their tail, which is visually evident in their isolated forms. There are 12 encoded punctuation characters, and many are similar to those found in Syriac. The section marks are written in half-red and half-black, and several documents have entire sections in both black and red, as a means of distinction.
Book Pahlavi Book Pahlavi is a smoother script in which letters are joined to each other and often form complicated
ligatures. Book Pahlavi was the most common form of the script, with only 13
graphemes representing 24
sounds. The formal coalescence of originally different letters caused ambiguity, and the letters became even less distinct when they formed part of a ligature. Partly similar phenomena are found in the use of
Sumerograms and Akkadograms in
ancient Mesopotamia and the
Hittite empire, and in the adaptation of
Chinese writing to
Japanese.
Problems in reading Book Pahlavi As pointed out above, the convergence in the form of many of the characters of Book Pahlavi causes a high degree of ambiguity in most Pahlavi writing, and it needs to be resolved by the context. Some mergers are restricted to particular groups of words or individual spellings. Further ambiguity is added by the fact that even outside of ligatures, the boundaries between letters are not clear, and many letters look identical to combinations of other letters. As an example, one may take the fact that the name of God,
Ohrmazd, could equally be read (and, by
Parsis, often was read)
Anhoma. Historically speaking, it was spelt , a fairly straightforward spelling for an
abjad. However, had coalesced with ; had coalesced, in the spelling of certain words, with both and ; and had been reduced, in the spelling of certain words, to a form whose combination with was indistinguishable from a , which in turn had coalesced with . This meant that the same orthographic form that stood for could also be interpreted as (among many other possible readings). The logograms could also pose problems. For this reason, important religious texts were sometimes transcribed into the phonetically unambiguous
Avestan alphabet. This latter system is called
Pazand. ==Literary dialects==