An ordinance signed We see this title in its old Persian form, Khshayathiya Khshayathiy, in the cuneiform inscriptions; as Bao-iMwr Bao-nX&ip on the coins of the Arsacides, and as the Pahlavi Malkan MaTha on the coins and in the inscriptions of the Sassanians.
At Surat he succeeded, by perseverance and address in his intercourse with the native priests, in acquiring a sufficient knowledge of the Zend and Pahlavi languages to translate the liturgy called the Vendidad Sade and some other works.
At the same time he produced the official exposition of the Avesla, an exegetical translation in the popular tongue (Pahlavi), and declared its contents binding.
Besides this important monument, which is about twice as large as the Iliad and Odyssey put together, we only possess very scanty relics of the Zend language in medieval glosses and scattered quotations in Pahlavi books.
But there also developed a rather extensive Pahlavi literature, not limited to religious subjects, but containing works in belles letires, modernizations of the old Iranian sagas and native traditions, e.g.
But when they pass beyond this narrow sphere, as particularly in the Gathas, the Pahlavi translator becomes a defective and unreliable interpreter.
Firdousi had been always strongly attracted by the ancient Pahlavi records, and had begun at an early age to turn them into Persian epic verse.
Firdousi's own education eminently qualified him for the gigantic task which he subsequently undertook, for he was profoundly versed in the Arabic language arid 1'itefature and had also studied deeply the Pahlavi or Old Persian, and was conversant with the ancient historical records which existed in that tongue.
From a Pahlavi inscription we learn that he was the son (not, as the Greek authors and Tabari say, the grandson) of Shapur I., and succeeded his brother Hormizd (Ormizdas) I., who had only reigned a year.
He began successfully to decipher the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanian kings (1787-1791).1 In 1792 he retired from the public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages.
He made it doubtless from a Pahlavi version.
Here the poems of the prophet and fragments of ancient religious literature survived, understood by the Magians and rendered accessible to the faithful laity by versions in the modern dialect (Pahlavi).
In the 6th century A.D., a translation into Pahlavi of a number of these old fables was made by a physician at the court of Chosroes I.
It is in any case no doubt identical with the demon Aeshma of the Zend-Avesta and the Pahlavi texts.
Lastly, the numerous other fragments, the quotations in the Pahlavi translation, the many references in the Bundahish to passages of this Avesta not now known to us, all presuppose the existence in the Sassanian period of a much more extensive Avesta literature than the mere prayer-book now in our hands.
Like the history of the founder of the Achaemenian empire, that of Ardashir has from the beginning been overgrown with legends; like Cyrus he is the son of a shepherd, his future greatness is predicted by dreams and visions, and by the calculations of astronomers he becomes a servant at the court of King Artabanus and then flies to Persia and begins the rebellion; he fights with the great dragon, the enemy of god, &c. A Pahlavi text, which contains this legend, has been translated by Noldeke (Geschichte des Artachshir i Papakan, 1879).
On his coins he has the same titles (in Pahlavi).
Only towards the end of the Parthian sasty and after the rise of the Sassanians, under whom the national ditions were again cultivated in Persia, do we recover the lost Ces of the Persian language in the Pahlavi inscriptions and rature.
Pahlavi inscriptions' found on crosses at St Thomas's Mount near Madras and at Kottayam in Travancore, are evidence both of the antiquity of Christianity in these places (7th or 8th century), and for the semi-patripassianism (the apparent identification of all three persons of the Trinity in the sufferer on the cross) which marked the Nestorian teaching.
Pinches is distinguished by its non-mythical character; in particular, the 11 West, Pahlavi Texts (S.B.E.), vol.
Should the evil and the good be equally balanced, the soul passes into an intermediary stage of existence (the Hamestakans of the Pahlavi books) and its final lot is not decided until the last judgment.
Text and translation are often spoken of together in Pahlavi books as Avistak va Zand (" Avesta and Zend "), whence - through a misunderstanding - our word Zend-Avesta.
The church of St John is mainly Perpendicular, 'What the Fihrist (p. 13 seq.) has about various forms of Persian writing certainly refers in part at least to the species of Pahlavi.
The later developments of the Iranian alphabet are the Pahlavi and the Zend, in which the MSS.
The legends are in Aramaic characters and Persian (Pahlavi) language; among them occur Artaxerxes, Darius (from a dynast of this name the town Darabjird, "town of Darius," in eastern Persia seems to derive its name), Narses, Tiridates, Manocihr and others; the name Vahuburz seems to be identical with Oborzos, mentioned by Polyaenus vii.
The need for a translation and interpretation became evident; and under the Later Sassanians the majority of the books, if not the whole of them, were rendered into the current Pahlavi.
The oldest is the Pahlavi Vispered in Copenhagen, dated 1258.
The Pahlavi is properly the alphabet of the Sassanid kings who ruled in Persia from A.D.
The Parsee priest, Neryosangh, subsequently translated a portion of the Pahlavi version into Sanskrit.
The relationship between the Pahlavi and the Aramaic is clearest in the records written in the " Chaldaeo-Pahlavi " characters; the a conclusion which is not invalidated by the fact that some important modifications are found beyond this area, nor by Dr Stein's discovery of a great mass of documents in this alphabet at Khotan in Turkestan, for, according to tradition, the ancient inhabitants of Khotan were emigrants banished in the time of King Agoka from the area to which Buhler assigns this alphabet (see Stein's Preliminary Report, 1901, p. 51).
The truth is that we possess but a trifling portion of a very much larger Avesta, if we are to believe native tradition, carrying us back to the Sassanian period, which tells of a larger Avesta in twenty-one books called nasks or nosks, as to the names of which we have several more or less detailed accounts, particularly in the Pahlavi Dinkard (9th century A.D.) and in the Rivayats.
The value of the Pahlavi interpretation was overrated by Spiegel„ Darmesteter, but wholly denied by Roth.
We possess no other document written in it, and on this account modern Parsee scholars, as well as the older Pahlavi books, speak of the language and writing indifferently as Avesta.
With such materials the cuneiform script could not be used; instead, the Persian language was written in, Aramaic characters, a method which later led to the so-called Pahlavi, i.e.
Zend, again (originally zaintish), is not the name of a language, as Anquetil Duperron supposed, but means interpretation or explanation, and is specially applied to the medieval Pahlavi translation of the Ayes/a.