Pahlavi

During the nineteenth century, the efforts of European scholars to unravel the mysteries of the Pahlavi/ Pārsīg idiom, had been rewarded with little success.  The chief reasons why the results hitherto obtained had proved so little satisfactory to thoughtful scholars, were first, the difficulty of the subject, arising from the ambiguous Pahlavi/ Pārsīg writing and the strange character of the idiom; secondly, the want of sufficient available material; and thirdly, the circumstance that the few scholars who took any interest in Pahlavi, were divided into two parties, one of which investigated only the meagre legends on coins, whilst the other was almost exclusively engaged on the Pahlavi of the books, without studying the inscriptions. The best European scholar of the nineteenth century said about the Pārsīg thus: “The Pahlavi language is one of the most enigmatical language known to have existed.” Martin Haug, Essay on the Pahlavi Language, Stuttgart, 1870, 1-2.

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