If this etymology is correct, Parθava presumably became Pahlav through a semivowel glide rt (or in other cases rd) change to l, a common occurrence in language evolution (e.g. sāl < sard, zāl < zard, gul < vard, sālār < sardar, mīlād < mihrdāt, etc.).

[6] The cellars of the treasury at Mithradatkird near Nisa, Turkmenistan revealed thousands of pottery sherds with brief records; several ostraca that are fully dated bear references to members of the immediate family of the king.

[7] Such fragments, as well as the rock inscriptions of Sasanian emperors, which are datable to the 3rd and 4th centuries, do not qualify as a significant literary corpus.

Although in theory Pahlavi could have been used to render any Middle Iranian language and hence may have been in use as early as 300 BC, no manuscripts that can be dated to before the 6th century have yet been found.

[9][10] In the present day, "Pahlavi" is frequently identified with the prestige dialect of southwest Iran, formerly and properly called Fārsi, after Fars province.

However, because of the high incidence of logograms derived from Aramaic words, the Pahlavi script is far from always phonetic; and even when it is phonetic, it may have more than one transliterational symbol per sign, because certain originally different Aramaic letters have merged into identical graphic forms – especially in the Book Pahlavi variety.

This text, which was found at Bulayiq near Turpan in northwest China, is the earliest evidence of literary composition in Pahlavi, dating to the 6th or 7th century AD.

[13] The extant manuscript dates no earlier than the mid-6th century since the translation reflects liturgical additions to the Syriac original by Mar Aba I, who was Patriarch of the Church of the East c.

The only other surviving source of Psalter Pahlavi are the inscriptions on a bronze processional cross found at Herat, in present-day Afghanistan.

Book Pahlavi is a smoother script in which letters are joined to each other and often form complicated ligatures.

[12] In its later forms, attempts were made to improve the consonantary and reduce ambiguity through diacritic marks.

In both Inscriptional and Book Pahlavi, many common words, including even pronouns, particles, numerals, and auxiliaries, were spelled according to their Aramaic equivalents, which were used as logograms.

[17] Partly similar phenomena are found in the use of Sumerograms and Akkadograms in ancient Mesopotamia and the Hittite empire, and in the adaptation of Chinese writing to Japanese.

Following the overthrow of the Seleucids, the Parthian Arsacids—who considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the Achaemenids—adopted the manner, customs and government of the Persian court of two centuries previously.

[4][18] Propagated by the priesthood, who were not only considered to be transmitters of all knowledge but were also instrumental in government, the use of Pahlavi eventually reached all corners of the Parthian Arsacid empire.

[3] Following the defeat of the Parthian Arsacids by the Persian Sasanians (Sassanids), the latter inherited the empire and its institutions, and with it the use of the Aramaic-derived language and script.

Like the Parthians before him, Ardašēr, the founder of the Sasanian empire, projected himself as a successor to the regnal traditions of the first, in particular those of Artaxerxes II, whose throne name the new emperor adopted.

Since the Sasanian had inherited the bureaucracy, in the beginning the affairs of government went on as before, with the use of dictionaries such as the Frahang ī Pahlavīg assisting the transition.

It is represented in some bilingual inscriptions alongside the Sasanian Pahlavi; by the parchment manuscripts of Auroman; and by certain Manichaean texts from Turpan.

It is between 1787 and 1791 that Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings.

[19][20] Following the Islamic conquest of the Sassanids, the term Pahlavi came to refer to the (written) "language" of the southwest (i.e. Pārsi).

There have been three main proposals for encoding Book Pahlavi,[23][24][25] but as of October 2024 it remains unsupported by Unicode.