132 
LANGUAGES OF PERSIA. 
found refuge at the court of the king of Tartary ; and that mo¬ 
narch, generously placing him at the head of 30,000 of his brave 
Transoxanian troops, restored him to his inheritance and em¬ 
pire. It is not unlikely that this very rude kind of coin, (for it 
is the roughest I have seen,) may have been the work of some 
of the Tartar artists in his suite, and struck hastily on his enter¬ 
ing his kingdom. 
These nine coins, being of six princes of the Sassanian dy¬ 
nasty, commencing with Ardashir Babigan, its founder, (who 
began his reign A. D. 223,) and going on to Khosroo Purviz, 
who flourished four hundred years afterwards, shew the state of 
that branch of the arts, for so many centuries in Persia. The 
inscriptions on them all are in the Pehlivi; the written language 
of the country, until the Mahomedan conquest. It has been 
said, that when the Arabian caliphs took possession of the em¬ 
pire, they found three languages in Persia; the Pars or Farsee, 
the Deri, and the Pehlivi. The Pars, now mixed with Arabic, 
is the common language of the kingdom ; and, as its name im¬ 
plies, was the original tongue of Persis or Fars. The Deri, 
which implies polished to perfection, was the court-dialect, and 
spoken from the time of the Kaianian dynasty till its final 
extinction in the last of the Sassanian race. The Pehlivi is sup¬ 
posed to have received its name from Pehleh, the ancient no¬ 
mination of part of Irak Ajem, where it might be first used ; 
but almost all Persian works appear to have been written of old, 
in that character. The Zund, or Zend, is the holy language in 
which the Zend-a-vesta was composed; and being deemed too 
sacred for common eyes, a translation was made from it into 
the Pehlivi. Sir John Malcolm considers these differently named 
languages, as merely varied dialects of one original tongue, 
