Edition of newly found Pahlavi letters of the "Pahlavi Archive" (Banchroft Library, Berkeley, Cal., USA)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Maria Macuch
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 179433110

The Middle Persian letters from the pre-Islamic and early Islamic period in the "Pahlavi Archive" of the Bancroft Library (University of Berkeley, Cal.) are new, hitherto unedited documents written in the difficult Pahlavi cursive script. These texts belong to an archive containing numerous economic and legal documents, discovered in the 1980s of the 20th century in Iran (part of this material belongs to the Institute of Iranian Studies of the FU Berlin, was edited in the DFG-project MA 796/4-1and published in 2008). The documents identified as letters in this archive reflect the Sasanian craft of letter writing in its final stage of development in the 7th and 8th centuries. They stand out against the other documents by a specific structure, also known from other sources, consisting of a set of formulaic phrases in the address, the main and the final parts of the letters. The goal of the project is a complete edition of the letters within the framework of a systematic approach, planning to take all the available material on letter writing in the Sasanian period into consideration and to discuss them in the light of other economic and legal texts of the Archive as well as from other collections. Since only sparse original material has survived from this period, this finding gives us the rare opportunity to complete our knowlege of the language and the script as well as the economic and legal culture of this period from a valuable primary source.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants