This past semester (fall 2025), three ambitious Pitt students studied a rare religion (Zoroastrianism) through the prism of a challenging, dead language: Middle Persian / Pahlavi.
Over the course of a single semester, Kimiya Ghadimi, Zaina Khan, and Laith Alabdulwahed made rapid progress to the point that they were able to access historical manuscripts in the original, handwritten Aramaic script. Only a handful of universities in the world offer instruction in Pahlavi literature: for one semester, at least, Pitt was one of them. Zaina Khan explained the value of this niche field thusly:
The “Persian empire” as we think of it has transformed multiple times over the course of history. Our iteration of interest is the Sassanian Empire. Its language—Middle Persian, or Pahlavi—developed from Old Persian, and languages we use today like Modern Persian, Dari, and Urdu descended from it. The Sassanian Empire directly preceded the first Islamic empire, so Pahlavi is very similar to Modern Persian without the Arabic loanwords.
The Pahlavi texts we have today provide a unique window into Sassanian life and Zoroastrian heritage since not many texts survive; the ones that do tend to be those which priests and scholars in the remaining Zoroastrian communities worked to preserve.
The students were drawn to this challenge by prior coursework in the department's Islam cluster.