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MPCD : Zoroastrian Middle Persian Corpus and Dictionary

The project “Zoroastrian Middle Persian: Corpus and Dictionary” (MPCD) aims to present the bulk of the Zoroastrian literature in Middle Persian (Pahlavi) language in the form of an annotated digital corpus, based directly on the most authoritative manuscripts of each text. On the basis of this annotated corpus, MPCD will produce a first comprehensive dictionary of Pahlavi.

MPCD is a collaborative project between Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Freie Universität Berlin and Universität zu Köln. It is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and designed as a “Langfristvorhaben” (2021–2030).
Within the larger framework of MPCD, the Institute of Iranian Studies at FU Berlin is responsible for the processing of the following groups of Pahlavi texts:

  • Zand texts: Pahlavi translations (with commentaries) of Avestan texts. We focus on the older Zand texts with roots in the Sasanian era (Pahlavi Yasna & Visperad, Pahlavi Vidēvdād, Hadōxt Nask, also Pursišnīhā).
  • Nērangs: Pahlavi ritual directions in Avestan manuscripts.
  • Meta-ritual tractates (broadly speaking): Nērangestān, Hērbedestān, Šāyist-nē-Šāyist, Zand ī Pargard ī J̌ud-dēw-dād.
  • Pahlavi texts that summarize extant as well as lost parts of the Avesta (Dēnkard 8 and 9).

Besides being annotated according to the usual MPCD standards, the Zand texts receive a word-by-word interlinkage with their Avestan originals as presented in the Corpus Avesticum Berolinense (CAB). On the web platform of the MPCD corpus, the Zand texts will be presented in an interlinear fashion with their Avestan base texts. In the MPCD dictionary, information about the Avestan lemmata will be supplied from the CAB database.

Alongside the preparation of the texts for the corpus, we aim to build an exhaustive collection of Avestan quotations, Avestan loan words and eventually also Avestan calques in the Pahlavi corpus.
The MPCD work at the Institute of Iranian Studies at Freie Universität Berlin is carried out by Benedikt Peschl as a research associate in collaboration with the MPCD teams in Bochum and Cologne and with members of the CAB project at our institute. Alberto Cantera serves as one of the Principal Investigators of MPCD. The textual and lexical data from his forthcoming edition of the Nērangs will be incorporated into the MPCD database.

 

Segment of Yasna 59.18–19 in manuscript 400_Pt4 of the Pahlavi Yasna. The Avestan recitation text (unmarked) is followed by the Pahlavi translation (here marked in green) on a sentence-by-sentence, sometimes clause-by-clause or phrase-by-phrase basis. The segment shown here also shows the addition of a Nērang (ritual direction), marked in yellow.