"It is with great pleasure that the authors and editors of this collection of essays present this volume to Dieter Weber as a token of our appreciation and gratitude for the many scholarly contributions with which he has enhanced our field of studies. As one of the very few colleagues who have endeavoured to disentangle the extremely ambiguous Pahlavi cursive script he has indeed dedicated a large part of his scholarly work to “deciphering the illegible”, hereby providing access to some of the most significant original documents of the late Sasanian and early Islamic era. ..." (from the Preface to the volume)