Middle Persian

The principal literary language of the Sasanian Empire and of Zoroastrian religious tradition, descended from Old Persian through the Parthian period and ancestral to New Persian. Middle Persian was spoken across the Iranian plateau and in the wider Sasanian world from roughly the third century BCE through the early Islamic period, and its written corpus includes royal inscriptions, religious texts of the Zoroastrian and Manichaean traditions, and a substantial body of secular literature. Middle Persian speakers called their language Pārsīg, and called the realm in which it was the language of government Ērānšahr, the country of the Iranians; the name Ērānšahr preserves the older Aryan self-designation that gives rise to the modern name of Iran, distinct from the older Old Persian Pārsa that survives as the regional name Fars.

Middle Persian was written in several related scripts, all descended from Aramaic. Inscriptional Pahlavi served the royal inscriptions of the early Sasanian period; Book Pahlavi was used for the Zoroastrian religious literature and is notable for its high orthographic ambiguity, with several letters representing multiple consonants. Manichaean and Psalter Pahlavi served confessional communities outside the Zoroastrian mainstream and preserve the language in less ambiguous form.

@misc{onomastikon-middle-persian,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Middle Persian},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/middle-persian}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}