the new language which originated during the period. These commentaries on the original Avestan texts are called āzainti in Avesta, and zand in Pahlavi. The explanatory texts now came to be known as Avastak-u Zand or the Avesta and the commentaries. Pahlavi was the court language of the Sasanians and it survived the downfall of their empire by at least three centuries. Extensive Pahlavi literature that came into existence under the Sasanians has mostly perished. The works that have reached us were written after the downfall of the Sasanian empire, mostly during the Abbasid period. The compilation of the most important work of the period, the Dinkard, for example, was commenced by the learned high-priest Atarfarnbarg Farokhzad in the beginning of the ninth century and completed by one of his successors, Adarbad Hemed, towards the end of the ninth century. The Dinkard, Vijirkard-i Dinik, and the Persian Rivayets give us summaries of the lost Nasks. We gather from the contents of the lost Nasks given in the Dinkard that, with the exception of the eleventh Nask, altogether twenty Avestan Nasks, nineteen along with their Pahlavi commentaries and one without it, still existed in the ninth century. The greater part of these works has perished during the unsettled times when Persia fell under the barbarous rule of the Tartars. Pahlavi works on religious subjects that are extant consist of about 446,000 words.[1]
With the invention of the modern Persian alphabet, Pahlavi fell into the background. An admixture of Aryan and Semitic make up the Pahlavi language as written. It was later simplified by the elimination of all Semitic words and replacing them with their Iranian equivalents. The original Avestan texts were explained and interpreted by the Pahlavi commentary which, as we saw, was called Zand. A further need was felt to make explanatory versions of the Pahlavi texts themselves. This further explanation and added commentary is called Pazand from the Avestan word paiti zainti. Short benedictory prayers are composed in Pazend as supplementary prayers to the original Avestan prayers. The Pazend texts were written in Avestan script. With the introduction of the Arabic script in Persia, the Pahlavi script fell into disuse.
Zoroastrian works came to be written in the modern Persian
- ↑ See West, GIrPh. 2, 90, 91.
