فهرست مطالب seyed ahmadreza qaem-maqami

These notes discuss several words and expressions in the Shahnameh that have been subjects of debate among scholars of the text. In each case, the current understanding by literary experts remains incomplete. The words and expressions in question are: “Shahr-e Iran”, “Bargvā”, “Rakhteh”, and “Sūgvār”. Referring to texts and documents from pre-Islamic languages can shed more light on the meanings of these terms.

Scholars are slowly trying to re-edit the Shahnama and in this, they sometimes ask for help from pre-Islamic languages ​​and documents. It is natural to find in the Shahnama reflections of the conditions of the Sassanid era and administrative terms common in that period. In this article, an attempt has been made to identify a Sasanian title, which seems not to have been recognized by the editors, by examining some letters from Sasanian kings or addressed to them, recorded in the Shahnama, in which several titles and epithets are repeated in a formulaic form. For this purpose, it has been tried to check the manuscripts of the Shahnama carefully and to show the origin of the title in the Sasanian documents. This title is “Bay rāmšahr”, recorded in the best editions of the Shahnama, especially in Khaleghi’s edition as “padrām-shahr”. At the end of the discussion, an attempt has been made to prove that “mahast”, which is repeated in the same letters next to “bay rāmšahr”, again in a formulaic form, is nothing but a corruption of the term “mazdēsn”. But this corruption is not from Ferdowsi or the scribes of the Shahnama. This happened most probably long before the composition of the Shahnama in the transmission of Sasanian documents to Arabic and Persian script and with the same form found its way to Abu Mansuri’s and Ferdowsi’s Shahnama.

The main achievement of this extensive and comprehensive dictionary of Pahlavi texts, published over a span of six years and considered the most detailed Pahlavi dictionary available, is that it claims to include all the vocabulary of Pahlavi texts. The introduction of the book contains the author's method of work and a history of Pahlavi lexicography, although not always accurate. The author states that while he has included all the words from Pahlavi texts, he has omitted unreadable and ambiguous words (vol. 1, p. 13). Furthermore, he mentions that his dictionary is not a frequency dictionary, but he refers to several texts when it comes to frequently used words to some extent indicating their frequency. He also acknowledges variations in readings if a word has been read differently by previous Pahlavi scholars and philologists (vol. 1, p. 14). Although it may not have been necessary to include etymologies of words or mention their non-Iranian cognates, the author has included etymologies of words, albeit sometimes inaccurately, using primarily the etymological dictionaries written by Western researchers for Iranian languages, but with occasional incorrect entries beneath the headwords. Another advantage of this dictionary is that it sometimes includes synonyms and antonyms of words.