THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITYThis will provide clues to the strengths and weaknesses of the argument
and alert the reader to the linguistic significance of such terms without
unduly cluttering the text. Terms will be defined the first time they
are used and any term which is used more than once is included in
the glossary. Among the Iranian languages, Avestan was used for the
oldest of the Magian religious writings; Middle Persian was the official
administrative and main literary language under the Sasanians, who
used it in their inscriptions and documents; and New Persian was the
spoken language in western Iran and Iraq by the late Sasanian period.
Among the Semitic languages other than Arabic and Hebrew, Syriac
and Mandaic exist as forms of Aramaic. Pahlavi and Kufic refer to
scripts, not to languages. Middle Persian was written in the Pahlavi
script, Arabic in the Kufic script. Both the Pahlavi and Kufic scripts
were derived from scripts which were used to write the Aramaic lan-
guage. In transliterating Syriac names and terms, when the consonant
b stands for the Syriac soft b it will be transliterated as bh to reflect
the orthography, but it should be pronounced as v.
The way in which loan words circulated among all of these languages
is, in itself, a feature of the kind of multilingual, religiously diverse
society that existed in Iraq. However, there is a tendency to rely on
philology in cultural history, to look to the etymology of loanwords,
and to see their significance as evidence of cultural transmission or
inheritance. For instance, the fact that the term akkar, which is used
for a sharecropper in early Arabic, is derived ultimately from the
ancient Sumerian term en gar suggests an important aspect of conti-
nuity in indigenous Mesopotamian labor arrangements. But the main
fallacy in such an approach lies in assuming that such terms have
always meant the same thing and were used in the same way. This
sort of approach seems to work best when such terms are accompanied
by patterns of behavior, values, or institutions, which are more im-
portant than the terms themselves, after all.
Terms which circulated among several languages usually changed
their form according to the rules of the language in which they were
used. For instance, the Middle Persian term for a Magian priest was
magopat. This term occurs in Syriac texts as mohpata, but the New
Persian form, mobadh, is used in Arabic texts. Similarly, the Middle
Persian word for a landlord or administrator of a rural subdistrict is
dehkan. Its Middle Persian plural is dehkanan, but in Syriac texts it
occurs as dahqane, which is the Syriac plural form; in Arabic texts,
it is given the form of an Arabic broken plural, as dahaqtn. Likewise,