Offered by the University of Washington’s Persian and Iranian Studies Program, this workshop is meant to provide a brief, public-oriented introduction and overview of the Middle Persian language and its sources. In use roughly over the course of the 1st millennium CE, Middle Persian (pārsīg)—the ancestor of what we know today as New Persian (fārsī)—was the main language of the Sasanian empire's public monuments and administration, the vehicle of classical Zoroastrian literature, and one of the primary languages of Manichaeism. In addition, traces survive in other types of literature, such as poetry and epic history. Participants will be introduced to the basics of Middle Persian grammar, the standard reference works, and sample short extracts.

Adam Benkato is Assistant Professor, and holder of the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Iranian Studies, in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research investigates a wide variety of textual and audio sources through the lenses of material philology, sociolinguistics, and archive studies. Although his training was largely in philology and dialectology, Adam has developed interests in a number of other fields and methodologies, including codicology, postcolonialism, and aural/sonic studies. You may access his work on his website www.adambenkato.com.