Pahlavi Scripts

A family of abjads descended from the Aramaic script, used to write Middle Persian across several centuries and settings: Inscriptional Pahlavi on royal and religious monuments from the Parthian and early Sasanian periods, Psalter Pahlavi in a Christian psalm fragment, and the cursive Book Pahlavi that became the standard script of later Sasanian and early Islamic-era Zoroastrian religious literature. Book Pahlavi is notoriously difficult to read because many originally distinct Aramaic letters collapsed into identical or near-identical shapes over centuries of cursive simplification, so scribes relied heavily on a set of frozen Aramaic spellings (called huzvarishn) read aloud as native Persian words, a convention modern readers must learn separately from the script's individual letter values.