The coins of the later Sassanid kings, of the princes of Tabar istan, and of some governors in the earlier Arab period, exhibit an alphabet very similar to Pahlavi mss. On the older coins the several letters are more clearly distinguished, and in good specimens of well-struck coins of the oldest Sassanians almost every letter can be recognized with certainty. The same holds good for the inscriptions on gems and other small monuments of the early Sassanian period ; but the clearest of all are the rock inscriptions of the Sassanians in the 3rd and 4th centuries, though in the 4th century a tendency to cursive forms begins to appear. Only r and v are always quite alike. In details there are many differences between the Pahlavi of inscriptions and the books. Persian endings added to words written in Semitic form are much less common in the former, so that the person and number of a verb are often not to be made out. There are also orthographic variations; e.g., long a in Persian forms is always expressed in book-Pahlavi, but not always in inscriptions. The unfamiliar contents of some of these inscriptions, their limited number, their bad preservation and the imperfect way in which some of the most important of them have been published leave many things still obscure in these monuments of Persian kings; but they have done much to clear up both great and small points in the history of Pahlavi. It was De Sacy who began the decipher ment of the inscriptions.
Some of the oldest Sassanian inscriptions are accompanied by a text known as Chaldae-Pahlavi, and belonging to the same system of writing, but with many variations in detail, and an alphabet which, though derived from the same source with the other Pahlavi alphabets (the old Aramaic), has quite different forms. It was soon replaced entirely by Sassanian Pahlavi.
The name Pahlavi suggests 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. 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 Pahlavi side by side at the beginning of the Sassanian period would be inexplicable.
The Pahlavi literature embraces the translations of the holy books of the Zoroastrians, dating probably from the 6th century, and certain other religious books, especially the Minoi-Khiradh and the Bundahish. The Bundahish dates from the Arab period. Zoroastrian priests continued to write the old language as a dead tongue and to use the old character long after the victory of a new empire, a new religion, a new form of the language (New Persian) and a new character. There was once a not quite incon siderable profane literature, of which a good deal is preserved in Arabic or New Persian versions or reproductions, particularly in historical books about the time before Islam. Very little profane literature still exists in Pahlavi.
See E. W. West, "Pahlavi Literature," in Geiger and Kuhn's Grundriss der iranischen Philologie (1896), vol. ii. ; "The Extent, Language and Age of Pahlavi Literature," in Sitzungsber. der k. b. Akad. der wiss., Phil. u. hist. Klasse, pp. (Munich, 1888), and his Pahlavi Texts in Sacred Books of the East (188o-97). The fullest grammar is Mittelpersisch by C. Salemann in vol. i. of the Grundriss.
Of glossaries, that of West (Bombay and London, 1874) is to be recommended; the large Pahlavi, Gujarati, and English lexicon of Jamaspji Dastur Minocherji (Bombay and London, 1877-82) is very full, but must be used with much caution. (Tn. N. ; E. J. T.)