Script - Book Pahlavi

Book Pahlavi is a historical script used primarily for writing Middle Persian texts from the 2nd to 7th centuries CE, predominantly in Zoroastrian religious and administrative documents. As a script value, it represents a cursive, connected writing system derived from Aramaic, where many letters are ligated and some characters have multiple contextual forms depending on their position in a word. Notably, Book Pahlavi lacks a clear distinction between certain consonants and vowels, relying heavily on logograms and ideograms borrowed from Aramaic, which complicates straightforward phonetic reading. Its Unicode encoding covers a specific range of codepoints that preserve the script’s unique structural features, including its right-to-left directionality and its use of distinct letter forms for initial, medial, and final positions. This value aids in digitally representing and analyzing ancient manuscripts, facilitating research in Iranian linguistics and epigraphy.