Textbooks for Ancient Iranian Languages

One of the most challenging aspects of studying any ancient language is the shortage of teaching materials, textbooks, and dictionaries for students to use. Older forms of Persian (like Pahlavi) certainly has this issue and if you're not familiar with reading linguistic descriptions of grammar, you may be desperate for more simple explanations as to how this language works. As much I loved studying Pahlavi, I struggled with it-- spending up to 5 or 7 hours on 15 lines of text only to come to class with a third or more of it totally wrong. What tripped me up was deciphering the letters. It wasn't until the end of last semester did I discover the textbooks of Prods Oktor Skjærvø-- a Norwegian-born linguist and scholar of Iranian languages at Harvard University (NELC dept). He has written learning materials for Avestan (young and old), Old Persian cuneiform, Middle Persian, and Manichaean Sogdian. All of these publications are free and available for download on his website. The Pahlavi Primer can be downloaded here. Thanks to Dr. Skjærvø for sharing his work with the online community! Here is a short interview with him by Pars Times:

Sassanian Seals

This semester my Middle Persian-Pahlavi language class has decided to finish deciphering a collection of Sassanian seals that was sent to my department for consultation. I'm in charge of providing our group with play-doh in order to 'stamp' the seals which can show us details that are difficult to see on the quartz surface. Many of the seals have Pahlavi inscriptions and our goal is to try to translate them into English. Translating may sound straightforward-- but if anyone has ever looked at the 'modified Imperial Aramaic' alphabet that Pahlavi uses, it's rarely straightforward because the shapes of the letters all look alike and tend to change over time. With play-doh, magnifying glasses, individual reading lights, and an enormous stack of reference books-- we could not look more nerdy. I love it, and below are some examples (from the internet) of what these artifacts look like.

Zoroastrianism: Change and Continuity

Last week the School of Oriental and African Studies in London held the Inaugural Lecture of Zartoshty Professor Almut Hintze, an eminent scholar of the Zoroastrian religion and Indo-Iranian languages. Below is her video-- I suggest starting at 12:30. It's a about an hour long and a good survey of the religion. My favorite part is her discussion of how and why the word 'daeva' became a negative term to describe a class of demons in Zoroastrianism that chose to follow Angra Mainya. The synopsis (at the end of the lecture) was also a nice addition.