Ricerc@Sapienza

The linguistic situation in Iran at the beginning of the Islamic era is described in a famous passage going back to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ that has been discussed at length by scholars. Here new evidence based on Middle Persian inscriptions from the northern regions of historical Iran are introduced. These texts show that literacy was comparatively widespread in Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Iran, opening the way for a new understanding of linguistic developments in the years that have been dubbed do qarn-e sokut “two centuries of silence”.

The article presents a new reading of the Middle Persian inscriptions recently found in the Bandian temple in North Khorasan, Iran. Taking into account the previous readings by Gignoux and Bashshash, a complete review of the inscriptions is proposed, leading to an innovative understanding of the monument.

The aim of the present paper is to illustrate as a case study, the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities characterizing the third book of the D?nkard, one of the most authoritative texts in Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature (9th-10th CE). The analysis will consider these features as part of a coherent system, styled to serve the dialectic strategies pursued by the Zoroastrian high priests in response to the pressures their own community was facing in the early Islamic period.

A revision of MacKenzie's transcription of the Pahlavi script is suggested as regards the final sequences ‹-lg› and ‹-lk?›. While MacKenzie reads the two spellings in many different ways, without a clear distributional rule, the suggestion is to read them in two well-defined ways (respectively as [rg] and [rag/lag]), depending on the synchronic morphology, etymology and the outcomes in New Persian.

This paper discusses a passage found in the Middle Persian legal text Haz?r D?dest?n (MHDA) that is crucial to our understanding of pre-Islamic chronological issues. Through a study of the personal names found in the text, the author is able to show that t the chronological discussions and the resulting differences of opinion on pre-islamic iranian chronology that are so widely attested in islamic historiography, were already present in preislamic times, though probably only in restricted intellectual circles.

Il lavoro delinea una nuova ipotesi di lettura delle grafie 'aberranti' proprie delle tarde iscrizioni achemenidi. Apre l'articolo una rassegna delle opinioni più accreditate circa lo status delle grafie tardo-achemenidi. Sulla base degli indizi fonologici e scrittori e tenendo conto delle peculiarità della scrittura sillabica achemenide, si dimostra come determinate scrizioni tardo-achemenidi riflettano la morfofonologia proto-mediopersiana. Viene ricostruito il sistema dell'ergatività scissa propria del medio-persiano che si ritiene funzionasse già in epoca tardo achemenide.

This chapter looks at the long evolution of Persian, which is the only Iranian language to be substantially documented in all three periods of Old, Middle, and New Iranian on account of its close association with the main political centres for most of the time over the centuries: Old Persian with the Achaemenids, Middle Persian with the Sasanians, and New Persian with Islamic powers. The chapter ideally includes two parts, preceded by a brief survey of research on the three stages of the language.