Ricerc@Sapienza

This article aims to offer a historical overview of the discovery of Book Pahlavī or Zoroastrian Middle Persian between the last decades of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century; it is a topic which has never been studied since Carl Salemann's brief introduction to the chapter devoted to Middle Persian in Geiger and Kuhn's "Grundriss der iranischen Philologie". From Anquetil Duperron onwards, European scholars acquired the knowledge of this language through the Pārsīs of North-Western India and started reading the logographic stock of Pahlavī script according to their traditional use. Actually, this way of reading (whose origins can probably be traced back to the middle of the 15th century) was totally invented and detached form any historically grounded approach. As a matter of fact, during the first half of the 19th century German and British comparative philologists such as Haug, Spiegel, West, Müller were deeply convinced that the Pahlavī script reflected a kind of mixed language, which was apparently the bizarre result of an interference between Iranian and Aramaic varieties. Thus, despite some resistances, the ancient Pārsī reading was progressively abandoned in favor of a more "sémitisant" one, so to speak. Nöldeke and Salemann, almost simultaneously around the 1870's, were the first Iranists to interpret correctly the function of Aramaic words in Pahlavī: these "words" were employed as true logograms and had to be transcribed accordingly. The Semitic "masks" were finally read as Persian words and not as Aramaic loanwords, e.g. was no longer read /malka/, but /ʃaːh/, "king". Thanks to this discovery, Pahlavī ceased to be an invented language and became a full fledged historical object.