Origin Developed from the Aramaic script and used for Middle Persian; the primary script of surviving Zoroastrian religious literature until the adoption of the Arabic script.
Book Pahlavi is the cursive script used to write Middle Persian for the religious and literary corpus of Sasanian and post-Sasanian Zoroastrianism, the Denkard, the Bundahishn and the Zand commentaries on the Avesta among them. Its consonantal signs fell together so heavily through the manuscript tradition that several distinct sounds could share one shape, and a scribe often relied on stock spellings and context to read a word rather than on the letters alone. That very ambiguity is what the Avestan alphabet was devised to fix: it was built directly on the Book Pahlavi hand but split its merged signs apart and added vowel letters of their own, so that the Avesta itself could be written down and read back exactly.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodDeveloped from the Aramaic script and used for Middle Persian; the primary script of surviving Zoroastrian religious literature until the adoption of the Arabic script. 1 Place of OriginSasanian Persia, in continued use for Zoroastrian religious literature into the post-Sasanian centuries. 1 Identity
Script TypeA cursive abjad in which many consonant signs merged into shared shapes over the course of the manuscript tradition. 1 Script type (class) Connections
Belongs to Tradition
The script of the Zoroastrian Middle Persian religious and literary corpus.
Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Originates in Language
Source Book Pahlavi (Wikipedia)
Related To
The Avestan alphabet was built directly on the Book Pahlavi hand, splitting its merged consonant signs apart and adding vowel letters to fix the ambiguity Book Pahlavi carried.
Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996the chapter on Pahlavi scriptsView the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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