Ricerc@Sapienza

The main purpose of this project is to investigate the Parthian language and script and their use in the multilingual context of the Arsacid Commonwealth. These research topics will be addressed by combining the methodological approaches of both historical linguistics and sociolinguistics with appropriate recourse to philological and epigraphic methods. There is considerably less general interest in `Arsacid sources¿ than in post-Arsacid and Manichaean Parthian documents, and scholarly research on the former remains comparatively limited. On the other hand, Parthian sources of the Arsacid period provide a challenging area of research regarding the study of: a) the Parthian language at this stage; b) the transition from pure Aramaic to aramaeographically written Parthian; c) multilingualism in the Parthian world. To discover more about the Parthian language and its role in the linguistic dynamics of the Arsacid period, it is necessary to (re-)assess the different types of sources, direct and indirect, as well as the appropriate use of philological and sociolinguistic methods. Indeed, only an analysis integrating different fields of study (archaeology, the history of art, epigraphy) allows us to improve our knowledge of the use of the Parthian language in a multilingual context.