Berliner Pahlavi-Dokumente: Zeugnisse spatsassanidischer Brief- und Rechtskultur aus fruhislamischer Zeit.

• Author: Yakubovich, Ilya
• Position: Book review

Berliner Pahlavi-Dokumente: Zeugnisse spatsassanidischer Brief- und Rechtskultur aus fruhislamischer Zeit. By DIETER WEBER, with contributions of MYRIAM KRUTZSCH and MARIA MACUCH. Iranica, vol. 15. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2008. Pp. xxxi + 286, 46 plates. [euro]68.

The book under review represents the first edition of a cohesive group of Middle Persian documents on leather and linen, written in the cursive variety of Pahlavi, emanating from Early Islamic Iran, but presumably reflecting administrative traditions of the Late Sasanian period. They had apparently been found in the vicinity of Qom in uncontrolled excavations, emerged on the antiquities market, and the majority were acquired by the Free University of Berlin. Smaller collections of related texts, published in the same volume, remain in private possession in Los Angeles, Tehran, and other places. A larger group of texts, which likely comes from the same archive, was acquired by the Bancroft Library of the University of California in Berkeley, and scholars are looking forward to its publication by Philippe Gignoux.

As a more remote parallel to this recently emerged archive one can mention the Pahlavi papyri, which stem from the time of the Sasanian occupation of Egypt in the early seventh century A.D., and Pahlavi ostraca from roughly the same period, some of which come from Iran proper. These documents, too, are written in the developed Pahlavi cursive and have predominantly administrative character, but the ostraca tend to be very short, while the papyri are mostly fragmentary. In addition, parts of the Vienna collection of Pahlavi papyri, probably the largest and the most significant one, went to Russia in 1945 as questionable war trophies and remain generally unavailable for scholarly study. Therefore the discovery of longer, well-preserved, and easily accessible texts has the potential for dramatically improving our understanding of Late Sasanian bureaucratic practices.

The core of the volume (pp. 1-201) is the edition, with commentary, of forty Berlin documents, nine documents from Tehran, and six documents from Los Angeles (the first edition of the last group of texts had already been undertaken by Philippe Gignoux). All the documents are published as photographic plates and provided with transliteration and transcription. The remaining part of the volume includes general palaeographic and linguistic notes (pp. 203-28), synopses of datings (pp. 229-34) and personal names...