A dictionary of Aramaic ideograms in Pahlavi.

• Author: Shaked, Shaul
• Position: Henrik Samuel Nyberg's 'Frahang i Pahlavik'

The late H. S. Nyberg's work on the Frahang i Pahlavik (abbreviated here FrPhl) was pursued over many years, and its publication has been eagerly awaited for a long time. It has now appeared, many years after the author's death, thanks to the efforts of his former students, the Iranian scholar Bo Utas and the Semitist Christopher Toll. They are to be congratulated for the energy and time invested in this work of love, but some disturbing questions cannot be avoided. As the manuscript was not ready for print, it was decided to publish the extant notes while supplying the commentary to the text from lecture notes taken by students of Nyberg. It is doubtful whether this does justice to the late master. If he had lived to put his hypotheses and conjectures on paper, he might have wanted to reconsider some of them. They do contain a great many untenable, sometimes fantastic, speculations. It is arguable that in deference to the memory of a great scholar it might have been better to leave the incomplete manuscript unpublished. The user of the book must at any rate be wamed that many of the statements, however confidently expressed, should be treated with some caution. This applies to the Semitic as well as to the Iranian aspects of the work.

The book is extremely complex to work on, and its layout as printed does not make its use any easier. The text bristles with problems of reading and interpretation, in addition to problems of manuscript transmission. It might have been a useful service to indicate which ideograms are actually encountered in epigraphic texts or in Book Pahlavi, and which figure only in the Frahang i Pahlavik. It must, however, be obvious that the occurrence of ideograms in the extant literature is not the only yardstick for deciding whether they are genuine. Ideograms that correspond to known Aramaic words are undoubtedly also part of the repertory, even though they are still unattested in Pahlavi outside the Frahang; and others may still tum up in Aramaic literature, and should not all be dismissed as spurious.(1) It does not seem plausible that recent scribes could or would invent Aramaic forms at the time in which the book was compiled. The store of ideograms listed here, with all their numerous corruptions and incongruities, must have largely come down in school traditions from an earlier date, when they were still in use. They were most probably diligently memorized by students over many centuries.

There is a problem with the history of the FrPhl. It

exists only in very late manuscripts, from the seventeenth century onwards, with a great many effors of transmission and many variants, which make it almost as fluid as oral transmission. The book may have been treated to some extent as an open-ended notebook, in which copyists and users could make additional remarks, or introduce their own lists. This would account for the lack of homogeneity in its composition, for the fact that genuine ideograms are listed side by side with variant spelling of the same Iranian word, and other similar features.

Another problem that besets the exploration of the ideograms is that of the existence of several variant...