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110-627: The Hephthalite–Sasanian Wars were a series of conflicts between the Hephthalites and the Sasanian Empire . The most significant of these occurring in 484 with the death of Shah Peroz I by the Hephthalites. This Iranian history -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Hephthalite Empire The Hephthalites ( Bactrian : ηβοδαλο , romanized:  Ebodalo ), sometimes called

220-492: A Christian Psalter fragment, which still retains all the letter distinctions that Inscriptional Pahlavi had except the one between t and ṭ ; and the Pahlavi found in papyri from the early 7th century CE, which displays even more letter coincidences than Book Pahlavi. The Manichaean script was an abjad introduced for the writing of Middle Persian by the prophet Mani (216–274 CE), who based it on his native variety of

330-576: A brother of Peroz took the Sasanian throne. In 488, a Hepthalite army vanquished the Sasaniana army of Balash, and was able to put Kavad I (488–496, 498–531) on the throne. In 496–498, Kavad I was overthrown by the nobles and clergy, escaped, and restored himself with a Hephthalite army. Joshua the Stylite reports numerous instances in which Kavadh led Hepthalite ("Hun") troops, in the capture of

440-547: A currently more popular one reflecting the Sassanid-era pronunciation, as used by C. Saleman, W. B. Henning and, in a somewhat revised form, by D. N. MacKenzie (1986). The less obvious features of the usual transcription are: A common feature of Pahlavi as well as Manichaean spelling was that the Aramaic letters ṣ and ḥ were adapted to express the sounds /t͡ʃ/ and /h/ , respectively. In addition, both could use

550-474: A different shape from a historical point of view, by under- or overlining them: e.g. the heterogram for andar 'in' is transliterated B YN , since it corresponds to Aramaic byn , but the sign that 'should' have been b actually looks like a g . Within Arameograms, scholars have traditionally used the standard Semitological designations of the Aramaic (and generally Semitic) letters, and these include

660-466: A group of people named Havitaras but it is unclear whether the term denotes Hephthalites. The Indians also used the expression "White Huns" ( Sveta Huna ) for the Hephthalites. According to recent scholarship, the stronghold of the Hephthalites was always Tokharistan on the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush , in what is present-day southern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan . Their capital

770-942: A large number of diacritics and special signs expressing the different Semitic phonemes, which were not distinguished in Middle Persian. In order to reduce the need for these, a different system was introduced by D. N. MacKenzie , which dispenses with diacritics as much as possible, often replacing them with vowel letters: A for ʾ , O for ʿ , E for H , H for Ḥ , C for Ṣ , for example ORHYA for ʿRḤYʾ ( bay 'god, majesty, lord'). For ''ṭ'', which still occurs in heterograms in Inscriptional Pahlavi, Θ may be used. Within Iranian words, however, both systems use c for original Aramaic ṣ and h for original Aramaic ḥ , in accordance with their Iranian pronunciation (see below). The letter l , when modified with

880-569: A less common view is that /x/ and /ɣ/ were uvular instead. Finally, it may be pointed out that most scholars consider the phoneme /w/ as being still a labial approximant, but a few regard it as a voiced labial fricative /v/ . The initial clusters of /s/ and a stop ( /sp-/ , /st-/ , /sk-/ ) had acquired a prosthetic vowel /i/ by the time of the Manichaean Middle Persian texts: istāyišn ( ՙst՚yšn ) 'praise' vs Pahlavi stāyišn ( ՙst՚dšn' ) 'praise'. Stress

990-526: A local tribe of the Tokharistan ( Bactria ) region, with their origin in the nearby Western Himalayas . He also used as an argument the presence of numerous Bactrian names among the Hephthalites, and the fact that the Chinese reported that they practiced polyandry , a well-known West Himalayan cultural trait. According to a recent reappraisal of the Chinese sources by de la Vaissière (2003), only

1100-623: A recent reappraisal of the Chinese sources, suggest that the Hephthalites were initially of Turkic origin, and later adopted the Bactrian language, first for administrative purposes, and possibly later as a native language — according to Rezakhani (2017) , this thesis is seemingly the "most prominent at present". In effect, the Hephthalites may have been a confederation of various people, speaking different languages. According to Richard Nelson Frye : Just as later nomadic empires were confederations of many peoples, we may tentatively propose that

1210-461: A script derived from Aramaic . This occurred primarily because written Aramaic had previously been the written language of government of the former Achaemenids , and the government scribes had carried that practice all over the empire. This practice had led to others adopting Imperial Aramaic as the language of communications, both between Iranians and non-Iranians. The transition from Imperial Aramaic to Middle Iranian took place very slowly, with

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1320-571: A slow increase of more and more Iranian words so that Aramaic with Iranian elements gradually changed into Iranian with Aramaic elements. Under Arsacid hegemony , this Aramaic-derived writing system for Iranian languages came to be associated with the Parthians in particular (it may have originated in the Parthian chancellories ), and thus the writing system came to be called pahlavi "Parthian" too. Aside from Parthian, Aramaic-derived writing

1430-472: A special horizontal stroke that shows that the pronunciation is /l/ and not /r/, is rendered in the MacKenzie system as ɫ . The traditional system continues to be used by many, especially European scholars. The MacKenzie system is the one used in this article. As for Pahlavi, c is used for the transliteration of original Aramaic ṣ and h for the transliteration of original ḥ . Original Aramaic h , on

1540-553: A thousand of these in the Book Pahlavi variety. In addition, their spelling remained very conservative, expressing the pronunciation of the Arsacid period. The two most important subvarieties are: Other known Pahlavi varieties are the early Pahlavi found in inscriptions on coins issued in the province of Pars from the 2nd century BC to the 3rd century CE; the relatively conservative Psalter Pahlavi (6th–8th centuries CE), used in

1650-642: Is -i . When the Arsacids (who were Parthians) came to power in the 3rd-century BCE, they inherited the use of written Greek (from the successors of Alexander the Great ) as the language of government. Under the cultural influence of the Greeks ( Hellenization ), some Middle Iranian languages, such as Bactrian , also had begun to be written in Greek script . But yet other Middle Iranian languages began to be written in

1760-484: Is Middle Persian, i.e. the middle stage of the language of the Persians, an Iranian people of Persia proper , which lies in the south-western highlands on the border with Babylonia . The Persians called their language Parsig , meaning "Persian". Another Middle Iranian language was Parthian , i.e. the language of the northwestern Iranian peoples of Parthia proper , which lies along the southern/south-eastern edge of

1870-406: Is a major difficulty for scholars. It has also been pointed out that the Pahlavi spelling does not express the 3rd century lenitions, so the letters p , t , k and c express /b/ , /d/ , /ɡ/ and /z/ after vowels, e.g. šp' for šab 'night' and hc for az 'from'. The rare phoneme /ɣ/ was also expressed by the same letter shape as k (however, this sound value is usually expressed in

1980-518: Is dated to 483/484 CE. With the Sasanian Empire paying a heavy tribute, from 474, the Hephthalites themselves adopted the winged, triple-crescent crowned Peroz I as the design for their coinage. Benefiting from the influx of Sasanian silver coins , the Hephthalites did not develop their own coinage: they either minted coins with the same designs as the Sasanians, or simply countermarked Sasanian coins with their own symbols. They did not inscribe

2090-432: Is expressed in a synchronic alternation: at least at some stage in late Middle Persian (later than the 3rd century), the consonants /b/ , /d/ , /ɡ/ appear to have had, after vowels, the fricative allophones [ β ] , [ ð ] , [ɣ] . This is slightly more controversial for /ɡ/ , since there appears to have been a separate phoneme /ɣ/ as well. A parallel development seems to have affected /d͡ʒ/ in

2200-580: Is in this particular late form of exclusively written Zoroastrian Middle Persian, in popular imagination the term 'Pahlavi' became synonymous with Middle Persian itself. The ISO 639 language code for Middle Persian is pal , which reflects the post-Sasanian era use of the term Pahlavi to refer to the language and not only the script. In the classification of the Iranian languages, the Middle Period includes those languages which were common in Iran from

2310-399: Is nevertheless often the old pronunciation or a transitional one that is reflected in the Pahlavi spelling. 2. Voiceless stops and affricates, when occurring after vowels as well as other voiced sounds, became voiced: This process is thought not to have been taken place before Sassanid Pahlavi, and it generally is not reflected in Pahlavi spelling. A further stage in this lenition process

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2420-725: Is spelt mtr' . In contrast, the Manichaean spellings are gʾh , ngʾh , šhr , myhr . Some other words with earlier /θ/ are spelt phonetically in Pahlavi, too: e.g. gēhān , spelt gyhʾn 'material world', and čihr , spelt cyhl 'face'. There are also some other cases where /h/ is spelt /t/ after p : ptkʾl for pahikār 'strife', and /t/ may also stand for /j/ in that position: ptwnd for paywand 'connection'. There are some other phoneme pairs besides /j/ and /d͡ʒ/ that are not distinguished: h (the original Aramaic ḥ ) may stand either for /h/ or for /x/ ( hm for ham 'also' as well as hl for xar 'donkey'), whereas

2530-427: Is that Arsacid word-initial /j/ produced Sassanid /d͡ʒ/ (another change that is not reflected in the Pahlavi spelling). The sound probably passed through the phase /ʒ/ , which may have continued until very late Middle Persian, since Manichaean texts did not identify Indic /d͡ʒ/ with it and introduced a separate sign for the former instead of using the letter for their native sound. Nonetheless, word-initial /j/

2640-533: Is unlike that of their kinsmen, nor do they live a savage life as they do; but they are ruled by one king, and since they possess a lawful constitution, they observe right and justice in their dealings both with one another and with their neighbors, in no degree less than the Romans and the Persians The Hephthalites were first known to the Chinese in 456 CE, when a Hephthalite embassy arrived at

2750-597: The Beishi , describing the situation in the first half of the 6th century CE around the time Song Yun visited Central Asia, the language of the Hephthalites was different from that of the Rouran, Gaoju or other tribes of Central Asia, but that probably reflects their acculturation and adoption of the Bactrian language since their arrival in Bactria in the 4th century CE. The Liangshu and Liang Zhigongtu do explain that

2860-518: The Altai region, among the waves of invading Huns. Following their westward or southward expansion, the Hephthalites settled in Bactria , and displaced the Alchon Huns , who expanded into Northern India. The Hephthalites came into contact with the Sasanian Empire , and were involved in helping militarily Peroz I seize the throne from his brother Hormizd III . Later, in the late 5th century,

2970-471: The Caspian sea and is adjacent to the boundary between western and eastern Iranian languages. The Parthians called their language Parthawig , meaning "Parthian". Via regular sound changes Parthawig became Pahlawig , from which the word 'Pahlavi' eventually evolved. The -ig in parsig and parthawig was a regular Middle Iranian appurtenant suffix for "pertaining to". The New Persian equivalent of -ig

3080-664: The First Turkic Khaganate and the Sasanian Empire defeated them. After 560 CE, they established "principalities" in the area of Tokharistan , under the suzerainty of the Western Turks (in the areas north of the Oxus ) and of the Sasanian Empire (in the areas south of the Oxus ), before the Tokhara Yabghus took over in 625. The Imperial Hephthalites, based in Bactria , expanded eastwards to

3190-613: The Kidarites (who arrived from around 380 CE), but recent studies suggest that instead there may have been a single massive wave of nomadic migrations around 350–360 CE, the "Great Invasion", triggered by climate change and the onset of aridity in the grazing grounds of the Altay region, and that these nomadic tribes vied for supremacy thereafter in their new territories in Southern Central Asia. As they rose to prominence,

3300-699: The Kidarites and by the Alkhon , and succeeded by the Nezak Huns and by the First Turkic Khaganate. All of these Hunnic peoples have often been controversially linked to the Huns who invaded Eastern Europe during the same period, and/or have been referred to as "Huns", but scholars have reached no consensus about any such connection. The stronghold of the Hephthalites was Tokharistan (present-day southern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan ) on

3410-876: The Middle Chinese pronunciation ( IPA [ʔjɛpdɑt] ) better than the modern Mandarin pronunciation, are more consistent with the Greek Hephthalite . Some Chinese chroniclers suggest that the root Hephtha- (as in Yàndàiyílìtuó or Yèdā ) was technically a title equivalent to "emperor", while Huá was the name of the dominant tribe. In ancient India , names such as Hephthalite were unknown. The Hephthalites were part of, or offshoots of, people known in India as Hunas or Turushkas , although these names may have referred to broader groups or neighbouring peoples. Ancient Sanskrit text Pravishyasutra mentions

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3520-696: The Northern Wei (i.e. circa 360 CE) 嚈噠國 ，或云 高車 之別種，或云 大月氏 之別種。其原出於塞北。自金山而南。[...] 至 後魏 文帝 時已八九十年矣 The Gaoju (高車 lit. "High Cart"), also known as Tiele , were early Turkic speakers related to the earlier Dingling , who were once conquered by the Xiongnu . Weishu also mentioned the linguistic and ethnic proximity between the Gaoju and the Xiongnu. De la Vaissière proposes that the Hephthalites had originally been one Oghuric-speaking tribe who belonged

3630-672: The Pahlavi Psalter (7th century); these were used until the beginning of the second millennium in many places in Central Asia , including Turpan and even localities in South India . All three differ minimally from one another and indeed the less ambiguous and archaizing scripts of the latter two have helped to elucidate some aspects of the Sasanian-era pronunciation of the former. The vowels of Middle Persian were

3740-615: The Rouran Khaganate but split from their overlords in the early fifth century. The next time they were mentioned was in Persian sources as foes of Yazdegerd II (435–457), who from 442, fought 'tribes of the Hephthalites', according to the Armenian Elisee Vardaped . In 453, Yazdegerd moved his court east to deal with the Hephthalites or related groups. In 458, a Hephthalite king called Akhshunwar helped

3850-783: The Sasanian Emperor Peroz I (458–484) gain the Persian throne from his brother. Before his accession to the throne, Peroz had been the Sasanian for Sistan in the far east of the Empire, and therefore had been one of the first to enter into contact with the Hephthalites and request their help. The Hephthalites may have also helped the Sasanians to eliminate another Hunnic tribe, the Kidarites : by 467, Peroz I, with Hephthalite aid, reportedly managed to capture Balaam and put an end to Kidarite rule in Transoxiana once and for all. The weakened Kidarites had to take refuge in

3960-649: The Sasanian Empire , but some of them remained as local rulers in the region of Tokharistan for the next 150 years, under the suzerainty of the Western Turks, followed by the Tokhara Yabghus . Among the principalities which remained in Hephthalite hands even after the Turkic overcame their territory were: Chaganian , and Khuttal in the Vakhsh Valley . The Hephthalites were originally vassals of

4070-547: The Tarim Basin , westwards to Sogdia and southwards through Afghanistan , but they never went beyond the Hindu-Kush , which was occupied by the Alchon Huns , previously thought to be an extension of the Hephthalites. They were a tribal confederation and included both nomadic and settled urban communities. They formed part of the four major states known collectively as Xyon (Xionites) or Huna , being preceded by

4180-836: The White Huns (also known as the White Hunas , in Iranian as the Spet Xyon and in Prakrit as the Sveta-huna ), were a people who lived in Central Asia during the 5th to 8th centuries CE, part of the larger group of Eastern Iranian Huns . They formed an empire, the Imperial Hephthalites , and were militarily important from 450 CE, when they defeated the Kidarites , to 560 CE, when combined forces from

4290-477: The Xiongnu ". This massive migration was apparently triggered by climate change , with aridity affecting the mountain grazing grounds of the Altay Mountains during the 4th century CE. According to Amanda Lomazoff and Aaron Ralby, there is a high synchronicity between the "reign of terror" of Attila in the west and the southern expansion of the Hephthalites, with extensive territorial overlap between

4400-658: The imperial variety of the Aramaic alphabet used in the chancelleries of the Achaemenid Empire . As is typical of abjads, they express primarily the consonants in a word form. What sets them apart from other abjads, however, is the use of Heterograms , and more specifically Aramaeograms , i.e. words written in Aramaic (sometimes, in later periods, with distortions) but pronounced in Middle Persian: e.g. LY (Aramaic 'to me') for man 'me, I'. There were about

4510-448: The official language of the Hephthalite elite was East Iranian. In 1959, Kazuo Enoki proposed that the Hephthalites were probably Indo-European (East) Iranians who originated in Bactria / Tokharistan , based on the fact that ancient sources generally located them in the area between Sogdia and the Hindu-Kush , and the Hephthalites had some Iranian characteristics. Richard Nelson Frye cautiously accepted Enoki's hypothesis, while at

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4620-481: The w and n have the same graphic appearance. Furthermore, letters used as part of Aramaic heterograms and not intended to be interpreted phonetically are written in capitals: thus the heterogram for the word ān is rendered ZK , whereas its phonetic spelling is transliterated as ʾn' (the final vertical line reflects the so-called 'otiose' stroke, see below ). Finally, there is a convention of representing 'distorted/corrupt' letters, which 'should' have appeared in

4730-442: The "old" language (i.e. Middle Persian) and Aramaic-derived writing system. In time, the name of the writing system, pahlavi "Parthian", began to be applied to the "old" Middle Persian language as well, thus distinguishing it from the "new" language, farsi . Consequently, 'pahlavi' came to denote the particularly Zoroastrian, exclusively written, late form of Middle Persian. Since almost all surviving Middle Persian literature

4840-412: The 10th–11th centuries, Middle Persian texts were still intelligible to speakers of Early New Persian. However, there are definite differences that had taken place already by the 10th century: Texts in Middle Persian are found in remnants of Sasanian inscriptions and Egyptian papyri , coins and seals, fragments of Manichaean writings , and Zoroastrian literature , most of which was written down after

4950-792: The 7th-century, the Sassanids were overthrown by the Arabs. Under Arab influence, Iranian languages began to be written in Arabic script (adapted to Iranian phonology ), while Middle Persian began to rapidly evolve into New Persian and the name parsik became Arabicized farsi . Not all Iranians were comfortable with these Arabic-influenced developments, in particular, members of the literate elite, which in Sassanid times consisted primarily of Zoroastrian priests. Those former elites vigorously rejected what they perceived as ' Un-Iranian ', and continued to use

5060-420: The Aramaic distinctions between ḥ and h and between k and q were not always maintained, with the first often replacing the second, and the one between t and ṭ was lost in all but Inscriptional Pahlavi: thus YKTLWN (pronounced о̄zadan ) for Aramaic yqṭlwn 'kill', and YHWWN (pronounced būdan ) for Aramaic yhwwn 'be', even though Aramaic h is elsewhere rendered E . In the rest of this article,

5170-488: The Aramaic script of Palmyrene origin. Mani used this script to write the known book Šābuhrāgān and it continued to be used by Manichaeans until the 9th century to write in Middle Persian, and in various other Iranian languages for even longer. Specifically the Middle Persian Manichaean texts are numerous and thought to reflect mostly the period from the 3rd to the 7th centuries CE. In contrast to

5280-447: The Arsacid sound values, but is known from the more phonetic Manichaean spelling of texts from Sassanid times. As a result of these changes, the voiceless stops and affricates /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , /t͡ʃ/ rarely occurred after vowels – mostly when geminated, which has protected them from the lenition (e.g. waččag , sp. wck' 'child'), and due to some other sound changes. Another difference between Arsacid and Sassanid-era pronunciation

5390-498: The Avesta also retain some old features, most other Zoroastrian Book Pahlavi texts (which form the overwhelming majority of the Middle Persian corpus as a whole) are linguistically more innovative. In view of the many ambiguities of the Pahlavi script, even its transliteration does not usually limit itself to rendering merely the letters as written; rather, letters are usually transliterated in accordance with their origin regardless of

5500-579: The Bandian complex in 484 CE. In 456–457 a Hephthalite embassy arrived in China, during the reign of Emperor Wen of the Northern Wei . By 458 they were strong enough to intervene in Persia . Around 466 they probably took Transoxianan lands from the Kidarites with Persian help but soon took from Persia the area of Balkh and eastern Kushanshahr . In the second half of the fifth century they controlled

5610-495: The Chinese court of the Northern Wei . The Chinese used various names for the Hephthalites, such as Hua (滑), Ye-tha-i-li-to (simp. 厌带夷栗陁, trad. 厭帶夷粟陁) or more briefly Ye-da (嚈噠). Ancient imperial Chinese chronicles give various explanations about the origins of the Hephthalites: Kazuo Enoki made a first groundbreaking analysis of the Chinese sources in 1959, suggesting that the Hephthalites were

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5720-599: The European Huns , but may have been causally related with their movement. The tribes in question deliberately called themselves "Huns" in order to frighten their enemies. On the contrary, de la Vaissière considers that the Hepthalites were part of the great Hunnic migrations of the 4th century CE from the Altai region that also reached Europe, and that these Huns "were the political, and partly cultural, heirs of

5830-564: The Gaoju/Tiele confederation. This and several later Chinese chronicles also report that the Hephthalites may have originated from the Da Yuezhi , probably because of their settlement in the former Da Yuezhi territory of Bactria . Later Chinese sources become quite confused about the origins of the Hephthalites, and this may be due to their progressive assimilation of Bactrian culture and language once they settled there. According to

5940-436: The Hephthalites displaced the Kidarites and then the Alchon Huns , who expanded into Gandhara and Northern India. The Hephthalites also entered into conflict with the Sasanians. The reliefs of the Bandian complex seem to show the initial defeat of the Hephthalites against the Sasanians in 425 CE, and then their alliance with them, from the time of Bahram V (420-438 CE), until they invaded Sasanian territory and destroyed

6050-435: The Hephthalites expanded into vast areas of Central Asia , and occupied the Tarim Basin as far as Turfan , taking control of the area from the Rourans , who had been collecting heavy tribute from the oasis cities, but were now weakening under the assaults of the Chinese Northern Wei dynasty . There have been several theories regarding the origins of the Hephthalites, with the Iranian and Altaic theories being

6160-458: The Hephthalites originally had no written language and adopted the hu (local, "Barbarian") alphabet, in this case, the Bactrian script . Overall, de la Vaissière considers that the Hephthalites were part of the great Hunnic migrations of the 4th century CE from the Altai region that also reached Europe and that these Huns "were the political, and partly cultural, heirs, of the Xiongnu ". The Hepthalites appear in several mural paintings in

6270-417: The Hephthalites were Hephthal , Hep't'al & Tetal and sometimes identified with the Kushans . To the Persians, Hephthalites are Hephtal, Hephtel, & Hēvtāls. To Arabs, Hephthalites were Haital , Hetal , Heithal , Haiethal , Heyâthelites , (al-)Hayaṭila ( هياطلة ), and sometimes identified as Turks . According to Zeki Velidi Togan (1985), the form Ha y tal in Persian and Arabic sources in

6380-407: The Hephthalites"). The seal is dated to the end 5th century- early 6th century CE. The ethnic name "Ebodalo", and title "Ebodalo Yabghu", have also been discovered in contemporary Bactrian documents of the Kingdom of Rob describing administrative functions under the Hephthalites. Byzantine Greek sources referred to them as Hephthalitae ( Ἐφθαλῖται ), Abdel or Avdel . To the Armenians,

6490-462: The Huns and the Hephthalites in Central Asia. The 6th-century Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea (History of the Wars, Book I. ch. 3), related them to the Huns in Europe, but insisted on cultural and sociological differences, highlighting the sophistication of the Hephthalites: The Ephthalitae Huns, who are called White Huns [...] The Ephthalitae are of the stock of the Huns in fact as well as in name, however, they do not mingle with any of

6600-412: The Huns known to us, for they occupy a land neither adjoining nor even very near to them; but their territory lies immediately to the north of Persia [...] They are not nomads like the other Hunnic peoples, but for a long period have been established in a goodly land... They are the only ones among the Huns who have white bodies and countenances which are not ugly. It is also true that their manner of living

6710-423: The Manichaean script and a maximally disambiguated transliterated form of Pahlavi do not provide exhaustive information about the phonemic structure of Middle Persian words, a system of transcription is also necessary. There are two traditions of transcription of Pahlavi Middle Persian texts: one closer to the spelling and reflecting the Arsacid-era pronunciation, as used by Ch. Bartholomae and H. S. Nyberg (1964) and

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6820-409: The Northern Wei ( Weishu ) as quoted in the later Tongdian , reports that they migrated southward from the Altai region circa 360 CE: The Hephthalites are a branch of the Gaoju (高車, "High Carts") or the Da Yuezhi , they originated from the north of the Chinese frontier and came down south from the Jinshan ( Altai ) mountains [...] This was 80 to 90 years before Emperor Wen (r. 440–465 CE) of

6930-560: The Pahlavi scripts, it is a regular and unambiguous phonetic script that expresses clearly the pronunciation of 3rd century Middle Persian and distinguishes clearly between different letters and sounds, so it provides valuable evidence to modern linguists. Not only did it not display any of the Pahlavi coalescences mentioned above, it also had special letters that enabled it to distinguish [p] and [f] (although it didn't always do so), as well as [j] and [d͡ʒ] , unique designations for [β] , [ð] , and [ɣ] , and consistent distinctions between

7040-468: The Pahlavi spellings will be indicated due to their unpredictability, and the Aramaeograms will be given priority over the 'phonetic' alternatives for the same reason. If a word expressed by an Arameogram has a grammatical ending or, in many cases, a word-formation suffix, these are generally expressed by phonetic elements: LYLYA ʾn for šab ʾn 'nights'. However, verbs in Inscriptional Pahlavi are sometimes written as 'bare ideograms', whose interpretation

7150-429: The Sasanian era. The language of Zoroastrian literature (and of the Sasanian inscriptions) is sometimes referred to as Pahlavi – a name that originally referred to the Pahlavi scripts , which were also the preferred writing system for several other Middle Iranian languages. Pahlavi Middle Persian is the language of quite a large body of literature which details the traditions and prescriptions of Zoroastrianism , which

7260-431: The Turkic Gaoju origin of the Hephthalites should be retained as indicative of their primary ethnicity, and the mention of the Da Yuezhi only stems from the fact that, at the time, the Hephthalites had already settled in the former Da Yuezhi territory of Bactria , where they are known to have used the Eastern Iranian Bactrian language . The earliest Chinese source on this encounter, the near-contemporary chronicles of

7370-412: The appellation of "Tokharistan school of art", or the "Hephthalite stage in the History of Central Asia Art". The paintings of Tavka Kurgan , of very high quality, also belong to this school of art, and are closely related to other paintings of the Tokharistan school such as Balalyk tepe , in the depiction of clothes, and especially in the treatment of the faces. This "Hephthalite period" in art, with

7480-449: The area of Gandhara . Later, however, from 474 CE, Peroz I fought three wars with his former allies the Hephthalites. In the first two, he himself was captured and ransomed. Following his second defeat, he had to offer thirty mules loaded with silver drachms to the Hephthalites, and also had to leave his son Kavad as a hostage. The coinage of Peroz I in effect flooded Tokharistan, taking precedence over all other Sasanian issues. In

7590-412: The area of Tokharistan , especially in banquet scenes at Balalyk tepe and as donors to the Buddha in the ceiling painting of the 35-meter Buddha at the Buddhas of Bamyan . Several of the figures in these paintings have a characteristic appearance, with belted jackets with a unique lapel of their tunic being folded on the right side, a style which became popular under the Hephthalites, the cropped hair,

7700-443: The caftans with a triangular collar folded on the right, the particular cropped hairstyle, the crowns with crescents, have been found in many of the areas historically occupied and ruled by the Hephthalites, in Sogdia , Bamyan (modern Afghanistan ), or in Kucha in the Tarim Basin (modern Xinjiang , China ). This points to a "political and cultural unification of Central Asia " with similar artistic styles and iconography, under

7810-427: The city of Theodosiupolis of Armenia in 501–502, in battles against the Romans in 502–503, and again during the siege of Edessa in September 503. Middle Persian "Middle Iranian" is the name given to the middle stage of development of the numerous Iranian languages and dialects . The middle stage of the Iranian languages begins around 450 BCE and ends around 650 CE. One of those Middle Iranian languages

7920-429: The cluster *θr in particular), but it had been replaced by /h/ by the Sassanid period: The phoneme /ɣ/ (as opposed to the late allophone of /ɡ/ ) is rare and occurs almost only in learned borrowings from Avestan and Parthian , e.g. moγ (Pahlavi mgw or mwg 'Magian'), maγ (Pahlavi mγ ) 'hole, pit'. The sound /ʒ/ may also have functioned as a marginal phoneme in borrowings as well. The phoneme /l/

8030-411: The coinciding forms: thus, even though Book Pahlavi has the same letter shapes for original n , w and r , for original ʾ and ḥ and for original d , g and y , besides having some ligatures that coincide in shape with certain individual letters, these are all transliterated differently. For instance, the spelling of gōspand 'domestic animal' is transliterated gwspnd in spite of the fact that

8140-527: The deserts of Turkmenistan as far as the Caspian Sea and possibly Merv . By 500 they held the whole of Bactria and the Pamirs and parts of Afghanistan . In 509, they captured Sogdia and they took 'Sughd' (the capital of Sogdiana ). To the east, they captured the Tarim Basin and went as far as Urumqi . Around 560 CE their empire was destroyed by an alliance of the First Turkic Khaganate and

8250-531: The early Middle Persian of the Arsacid period (until the 3rd century CE) and the Middle Persian of the Sassanid period (3rd – 7th century CE) is due to a process of consonant lenition after voiced sounds that took place during the transition between the two. Its effects were as follows: 1. Voiced stops, when occurring after vowels, became semivowels : This process may have taken place very early, but it

8360-623: The fall of the Achaemenid Empire in the fourth century BCE up to the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century CE. The most important and distinct development in the structure of Iranian languages of this period is the transformation from the synthetic form of the Old Period ( Old Persian and Avestan ) to an analytic form: The modern-day descendants of Middle Persian are New Persian and Luri . The changes between late Middle and Early New Persian were very gradual, and in

8470-569: The first period was a clerical error for Ha b tal , as Arabic -b - resembles -y - . In Chinese chronicles, the Hephthalites are called Yàndàiyílìtuó ( Chinese : 厭帶夷栗陀 ), or in the more usual abbreviated form, Yèdā 嚈噠 or in the 635 Book of Liang as the Huá 滑 . The latter name has been given various Latinisations , including Yeda , Ye-ta , Ye-tha ; Ye-dā and Yanda . The corresponding Cantonese and Korean names Yipdaat and Yeoptal ( Korean : 엽달 ), which preserve aspects of

8580-479: The following: It has been doubted whether the Middle Persian short mid vowels /e/ and /o/ were phonemic , since they do not appear to have a unique continuation in later forms of Persian and no minimal pairs have been found. The evidence for them is variation between spelling with and without the matres lectionis y and w , as well as etymological considerations. They are thought to have arisen from earlier /a/ in certain conditions, including, for /e/ ,

8690-402: The hair accessories, their distinctive physionomy and their round beardless faces. The figures at Bamyan must represent the donors and potentates who supported the building of the monumental giant Buddha. These remarkable paintings participate "to the artistic tradition of the Hephthalite ruling classes of Tukharistan ". The paintings related to the Hephthalites have often been grouped under

8800-467: The later forms are an (Manichaean ՚n ), and meh (Pahlavi ms and Manichaean myh ); indeed, some scholars have reconstructed them as monosyllabic any , mahy even for Middle Persian. Middle Persian has been written in a number of different scripts. The corpora in different scripts also exhibit other linguistic differences that are partly due to their different ages, dialects and scribal traditions. The Pahlavi scripts are abjads derived from

8910-496: The letter p to express /f/ , and ṣ to express z after a vowel. The widespread use of Aramaeograms in Pahlavi, often existing in parallel with 'phonetic' spellings, has already been mentioned: thus, the same word hašt 'eight' can be spelt hšt or TWMNYA . A curious feature of the system is that simple word stems sometimes have spellings derived from Aramaic inflected forms: the spellings of verb stems include Aramaic inflectional affixes such as -WN , -TWN or -N and Y- ;

9020-455: The main ones. The most prominent theory at present seems to be that the Hephthalites were initially of Turkic origin, and later adopted the Bactrian language. According to most specialist scholars, the Hephthalites adopted Bactrian as their official language, just as the Kushans had done, following their settlement in Bactria / Tokharistan . Bactrian was an Eastern Iranian language , but

9130-521: The middle of the 6th century, the Sasanian Empire paid tribute to the Hephthalites. Bactria came under formal Hephthalite rule from that time. Taxes were levied by the Hephthalites over the local population: a contract in the Bactrian language from the archive of the Kingdom of Rob , has been found, which mentions taxes from the Hephthalites, requiring the sale of land in order to pay these taxes. It

9240-473: The name of their ruler, contrary to the habit of the Alchon Huns or the Kidarites before them. Exceptionally, one coin type deviates from the Sasanian design, by showing the bust of a Hepthalite prince holding a drinking cup. Overall, the Sasanians paid "an enormous tribute" to the Hephthalites, until the 530s and the rise of Khosrow I . Following their victory over Peroz I, the Hepthalites became protectors and benefactors of his son Kavad I , as Balash ,

9350-495: The northern slopes of the Hindu Kush , and their capital was probably at Kunduz , having come from the east, possibly from the area of Pamir . By 479 the Hephthalites had conquered Sogdia and driven the Kidarites eastwards, and by 493 they had captured parts of Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin (in present-day Northwest China ). The Alchon Huns , formerly confused with the Hephthalites, expanded into Northern India as well. The sources for Hephthalite history are sparse and

9460-803: The opinions of historians differ. There is no king-list, and historians are not sure how the group arose or what language they initially spoke. They seem to have called themselves Ebodalo (ηβοδαλο, hence Hephthal ), often abbreviated Eb (ηβ), a name they wrote in the Bactrian script on some of their coins. The origin of the name "Hephthalites" is unknown, it may stem either from a Khotanese word *Hitala meaning "Strong", from hypothetical Sogdian * Heβtalīt , plural of * Heβtalak , or from postulated Middle Persian *haft āl "the Seven Al ". The Hephthalites called themselves ēbodāl ( Bactrian : , Greek script: [ηβοδαλο] Error: {{Lang}}: invalid parameter: |3= ( help ) ) in their inscriptions, which

9570-437: The other hand, is sometimes rendered as ẖ . For original ṭ , the sign ṯ is used. The special Manichaean letters for /x/ , /f/ , [β] , /ɣ/ and [ð] are transcribed in accordance with their pronunciation as x , f , β , γ and δ . Unlike Pahlavi, the Manichaean script uses the letter Ayin also in Iranian words (see below) and it is transliterated in the usual Semitological way as ՙ . Since, like most abjads, even

9680-597: The pairs [x] – [h] and [r] – [l] . Since knowledge of Pahlavi decreased after the Muslim conquest of Iran , the Zoroastrians occasionally transcribed their religious texts into other, more accessible or unambiguous scripts. One approach was to use the Avestan alphabet , a practice known as Pazand ; another was to resort to the same Perso-Arabic script that was already being used for New Persian , and that

9790-479: The presence of a following /n/ , sibilant or front vowel in the next syllable, and for /o/ , the presence of a following labial consonant or the vowel /u/ in the next syllable. Long /eː/ and /oː/ had appeared first in Middle Persian, since they had developed from the Old Persian diphthongs /ai/ and /aw/ . The consonant phonemes were the following: A major distinction between the pronunciation of

9900-457: The rule of the Hephthalites. The Hephthalites were a vassal state to the Rouran Khaganate until the beginning of the 5th century. There were close contacts between them, although they had different languages and cultures, and the Hephthalites borrowed much of their political organization from Rourans. In particular, the title " Khan ", which according to McGovern was original to the Rourans,

10010-503: The ruling groups of these invaders were, or at least included, Turkic-speaking tribesmen from the east and north, although most probably the bulk of the people in the confederation of Chionites and then Hephhtalites spoke an Iranian language. In this case, as normal, the nomads adopted the written language, institutions, and culture of the settled folks. According to Martin Schottky, the Hephthalites apparently had no direct connection with

10120-442: The same position, possibly earlier; not only was it weakened to a fricative [ʒ] , but it was also depalatalised to [z] . In fact, old Persian [d͡ʒ] and [ʒ] in any position also produced [z] . Unlike the case with the spirantisation of stops, this change is uncontroversially recognised for Sassanid times. The lenition of voiceless stops and affricates remained largely unexpressed in Pahlavi spelling, which continues to reflect

10230-578: The same time stressing that the Hephthalites "were probably a mixed horde". According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica and Encyclopaedia of Islam , the Hephthalites possibly originated in what is today Afghanistan . A few scholars, such as Marquart and Grousset proposed Proto-Mongolic origins. Yu Taishan traced the Hephthalites' origins to the Xianbei and further to Goguryeo . Other scholars such as de la Vaissière , based on

10340-411: The spellings of pronouns are often derived from Aramaic prepositional phrases ( tо̄ 'you' is LK , originally Aramaic lk 'to you', о̄y 'he' is OLE , originally Aramaic ʿlh 'onto him'); and inalienable nouns are often noun phrases with pronominal modifiers ( pidar 'father' is ABYtl , originally Aramaic ʾby 'my father', pāy 'foot' is LGLE , originally Aramaic rglh 'his foot'). Furthermore,

10450-522: The state of affairs in living Middle Persian only indirectly. The surviving manuscripts are usually 14th-century copies. Other, less abundantly attested varieties are Manichaean Middle Persian , used for a sizable amount of Manichaean religious writings, including many theological texts, homilies and hymns (3rd–9th, possibly 13th century), and the Middle Persian of the Church of the East , evidenced in

10560-596: The third battle, at the Battle of Herat (484) , he was vanquished by the Hepthalite king Kun-khi, and for the next two years the Hephthalites plundered and controlled the eastern part of the Sasanian Empire. Perozduxt, the daughter of Peroz, was captured and became a lady as the Hephtalite court, as Queen of king Kun-khi. She became pregnant and had a daughter who would later marry her uncle Kavad I . From 474 until

10670-451: The transition of /θ/ to /h/ in some words (in front of /r/ this reflex is due to Parthian influence, since the Middle Persian reflex should have been /s/ ). In such words, the spelling may have s or, in front of r – t . For example, gāh 'place, time' is spelt gʾs (cf. Old Persian gāθu ) and nigāh '(a) look' is spelt nkʾs ; šahr 'country, town' is spelt štr' (cf. Avestan xsaθra ) and mihr 'Mithra, contract, friendship'

10780-635: The transliteration). Similarly, the letter d may stand for /j/ after a vowel, e.g. pʾd for pāy 'foot' – this is no longer apparent in Book Pahlavi due to the coincidence of the shapes of the original letters y , d and g , but is already clearly seen in Inscriptional and Psalter Pahlavi. Indeed, it even appears to have been the general rule word-finally, regardless of the word's origins, although modern transliterations of words like xwadāy ( xwtʾd ) and mēnōy ( mynwd ) do not always reflect this analogical / pseudo-historical spelling. Final īy

10890-475: The use of original Aramaic h is restricted to heterograms (transliterated E in MacKenzie's system, e.g. LGLE for pāy 'foot'). Not only /p/ , but also the frequent sound /f/ is expressed by the letter p , e.g. plhw' for farrox 'fortunate'. While the original letter r is retained in some words as an expression of the sound /r/ , especially in older frequent words and Aramaeograms (e.g. štr' for šahr 'country, town', BRTE for duxt 'daughter'), it

11000-529: Was adopted for at least four other Middle Iranian languages, one of which was Middle Persian. In the 3rd-century CE, the Parthian Arsacids were overthrown by the Sassanids , who were natives of the south-west and thus spoke Middle Persian as their native language. Under Sassanid hegemony, the Middle Persian language became a prestige dialect and thus also came to be used by non-Persian Iranians. In

11110-511: Was borrowed by the Hephthalite rulers. The reason for the migration of the Hephthalites southeast was to avoid a pressure of the Rourans. The Hephthalites became a significant political entity in Bactria around 450 CE, or sometime before. It has been commonly assumed that the Hephthalites formed a third wave of migrations into Central Asia, after the Chionites (who arrived circa 350 CE) and

11220-432: Was commonly abbreviated to ( ηβ , "Eb") in their coinage. An important and unique seal, held in the private collection of Professor Dr. Aman ur Rahman and published by Nicholas Sims-Williams in 2011, shows an early Hepthalite ruler with a round beardless face and slanted almond-shaped eyes, wearing a radiate crown with a single crescent, and framed by the Bactrian script legend ηβοδαλο ββγο ("The Lord [ Yabghu ] of

11330-419: Was on the last syllable. That was due to the fact that any Old Persian post-stress syllables had been apocopated : It has been suggested that words such as anīy 'other' (Pahlavi spelling AHRN , AHRNy d , Manichaean ՚ny ) and mahīy 'bigger' (Manichaean mhy ) may have been exceptionally stressed on the first syllable, since the last one was apocopated already in the course of the Middle Persian period:

11440-471: Was probably at Kunduz , which was known to the 11th-century scholar al-Biruni as War-Walīz , a possible origin of one of the names given by the Chinese to Hephthalites: 滑 ( Middle Chinese ( ZS ) * ɦˠuat̚ > standard Chinese : Huá ). The Hephthalites may have come from the East, through the Pamir Mountains , possibly from the area of Badakhshan . Alternatively, they may have migrated from

11550-457: Was referred to as Pārsī. Since these methods were used at a relatively late linguistic stage, these transcriptions often reflect a very late pronunciation close to New Persian. In general, Inscriptional Pahlavi texts have the most archaic linguistic features, Manichaean texts and the Psalter exhibit slightly later, but still relatively early language stages, and while the Pahlavi translations of

11660-425: Was regularly written y d . In the same way, (w)b may also correspond to a w in the pronunciation after a vowel. The fortition of initial /j/ to /d͡ʒ/ (or /ʒ/ ) is not reflected either, so y can express initial /d͡ʒ/ , e.g. yʾm for ǰām 'glass' (while it still expresses /j/ in the learned word y z dt' for yazd 'god'). Some even earlier sound changes are not consistently reflected either, such as

11770-555: Was retained/reintroduced in learned borrowings from Avestan . Furthermore, some forms of Middle Persian appear to have preserved ǰ (from Proto-Iranian /d͡ʒ/ or /t͡ʃ/ ) after n due to Parthian influence, instead of the usual weakening to z . This pronunciation is reflected in Book Pahlavi, but not in Manichaean texts: Judging from the spelling, the consonant /θ/ may have been pronounced before /r/ in certain borrowings from Parthian in Arsacid times (unlike native words, which had /h/ for earlier *θ in general and /s/ for

11880-446: Was still relatively rare as well, especially so in Manichaean texts, mostly resulting from Proto-Iranian *rd, *rz and, more rarely, *r. It also occurred in the combination /hl/ , which was a reflex of Old Persian /rθ/ and /rs/ (cf. the words 'Pahlavi' and 'Parthian'). The sound /xw/ may be viewed as a phoneme or merely as a combination of /x/ and /w/ . Usually /x/ , /xw/ and /ɣ/ are considered to have been velar ;

11990-502: Was the state religion of Sasanian Iran (224 to c. 650) before the Muslim conquest of Persia . The earliest texts in Zoroastrian Middle Persian were probably written down in late Sasanian times (6th–7th centuries), although they represent the codification of earlier oral tradition. However, most texts date from the ninth to the 11th century, when Middle Persian had long ceased to be a spoken language, so they reflect

12100-646: Was written in the Greek alphabet , a remnant of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in the 3rd–2nd century BCE. Bactrian , beyond being an official language, was also the language of the local populations ruled by the Hephthalites. The Hephthalites inscribed their coins in Bactrian , the titles they held were Bactrian, such as XOAΔHO or Šao, and of probable Chinese origin, such as Yabghu , the names of Hephthalite rulers given in Ferdowsi 's Shahnameh are Iranian, and gem inscriptions and other evidence shows that

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