When Aderbat revised the canon it had long ceased to be spoken. But there were already translations of the sacred books into the later forms which the language of Iran had received in the time of the Parthians, or at any rate such translations were made after the revision of the canon.[108] Masudi informed us that the Avesta was composed in the old Persian language, which at that time (tenth century A.D.) was no longer understood. Ibn Haukal, who travelled in Persia in the same century, tells us: "In Fars three languages are in use; the Farsi, in which the inhabitants converse with each other; the Pehlevi, which was the language of the ancient Persians, and in which the Magians wrote their historical books, but which in our time is no longer understood by the inhabitants of Fars without a translation; and the Arabian.[109]" When Aderbat revised the Avesta in the middle of the fourth century B.C., the Parsi (Farsi), _i.e._ the later Middle Persian, was still in formation; the older Middle Persian or Pehlevi was still intelligible, but translations of the Avesta into this language did not make clear to every one the meaning of the ancient language in which the scriptures were composed. In the time of the Parthian empire the old mode of writing was given up in the West as well as in the East of Iran, and exchanged for new methods. In the West a cuneiform character derived from the writing of Babylon and Assyria had been adopted; the East used the Arian alphabet. Under the Arsacids the Pehlevi became common. Like the old Persian cuneiform this is borrowed from a Semitic pattern. The chief city of the Parthians lay on the Tigris in the midst of a Semitic population. The cursive character of the Aramæans, as we find it on the coins of the satraps of the Achæmenids of the fourth century B.C., with a few modifications, forms the base of the Pehlevi; and the earlier shapes of this character are seen in the coins of the Arsacids of the first century A.D. But it is not the character which forms the peculiar mark of Pehlevi. Along with the Aramaic letters the Parthians took the Aramaic vocabulary; they wrote the Aramaic word instead of the Persian, and to this they attached the termination or case-ending of the corresponding Persian word; the reader must understand Aramaic and substitute the Persian word for the Aramaic when reading.[110] Hence Pehlevi was in reality a secret mode of writing, intended exclusively for the learned, _i.e._ for the priests. It is a proof of the close connection between the priests of the East and West that this character, which arose in the West out of the contact with the Aramaic population on the Euphrates and Tigris, spread to the East also and was adopted by the scholars there. Nor was this all. The variations in the Eastern dialect brought about certain modifications in the forms of the letters, and thus there arose an Eastern alphabet of Pehlevi beside the Western alphabet.