"Pahlavi Texts" is not the name of a single ancient work, but the title Edward William West gave to his five-volume translation of medieval Zoroastrian literature, published between 1880 and 1897 as part of Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East. Within these volumes sit roughly a dozen genuinely separate works, composed by different hands across several centuries, written in Pahlavi (Middle Persian) — the literary language of Zoroastrian priests in the centuries following the fall of the Sasanian Empire, when a faith once state-sponsored found itself preserving its scripture and law under very different circumstances.

These works range widely in subject and form: cosmological accounts of creation and the end of days, priestly rulings on ritual purity, philosophical dialogues between a sage and the personified Spirit of Wisdom, a sustained apologetic defense of Zoroastrian doctrine, and fragments summarizing the now-lost Avesta texts that this literature was written, in part, to preserve the memory of. Two of West's volumes are not standalone works at all, but his translation of specific books within the Denkard, a vast ninth-century Zoroastrian encyclopedic compilation — itself one of the most important single sources for understanding the religion's own account of its history and scripture.

Historical Context

The texts West gathered into these five volumes were not written at one time or by one hand, and understanding the journey from their original composition to this translation means separating the ancient works from the translation project itself.

Most of these texts reached their written form during the ninth and tenth centuries CE, a period in which Zoroastrian priests worked urgently to commit centuries of oral and partially-written tradition to a fixed text, following the Arab conquest of Persia and the faith's shift from state religion to minority community. The Bundahishn and the Selections of Zad-Sparam both draw on older cosmological tradition reaching back to the Sasanian period, though their surviving written form dates to this later era. The Dadistan-i Dinik and the Epistles of Manushchihr can be dated more precisely, composed by the historically attested ninth-century high priest Manushchihr, around 881 CE. The Sikand-Gumanik Vigar belongs to this same ninth-century milieu. The Dina-i Mainog-i Khirad is harder to date with confidence; some scholars place its core material as early as the late Sasanian period, with its surviving written form considerably later. The Sad Dar, by contrast, is a notable outlier among these texts: composed in Persian rather than Pahlavi, it belongs to a much later medieval period than the rest of this literature. The portions gathered as "Contents of the Nasks" and "Marvels of Zoroastrianism" are West's own translations of specific books within the Denkard, itself compiled in the ninth century and drawing on still older material, including summaries of Avesta texts that no longer survive independently.

West undertook the work of translating all of this into English between 1880 and 1897, as part of Max Müller's fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East series, a Victorian project bringing the scriptures of Asian religions to English-speaking scholarly audiences. West, a civil engineer who became largely self-taught in Avestan and Pahlavi while working in India, produced all five Pahlavi volumes of the series, and his translations remain foundational reference points in Zoroastrian studies today, even as later scholars have refined and revised individual readings. Because Part IV and Part V both consist of extracted sections of the Denkard rather than independent compositions, readers encountering "Contents of the Nasks" and "Marvels of Zoroastrianism" as titles should understand them as West's own organizing labels for specific books within that one larger work, not as separate ancient texts in their own right.