The Middle-Persian Corpus and Dictionary (MPCD) is a collaborative research infrastructure developed by the Institute of Iranian Studies (Freie Universität Berlin), the Center for Religious Studies (CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum), and the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) at the University of Cologne, funded as long-term project by the German research foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). The project aims to create a corpus-driven dictionary of Zoroastrian Middle Persian that integrates lexicographic, morphosyntactic, and semantic analysis with full manuscript context. Central to the project is an agile, user-centered development process in which philologists act as primary stakeholders, ensuring that technical design decisions directly support concrete research questions.

The philological research conducted within MPCD addresses fundamental issues in Middle Persian studies, including the interpretation of heterograms in Book Pahlavi (Cantera 2023), verbal morphology and passive constructions (Cantera 2024), and the interaction between Avestan source texts and their Middle Persian Zand interpretations (Musavi 2024). A substantial part of the corpus consists of morphosyntactically and semantically annotated editions of Zoroastrian texts such as Dādestān ī dēnīg, Wizīdagīhā ī zādspram, Greater Bundahišn, and several Riwāyats, often represented by multiple manuscript witnesses (Jügel 2023, 2024, 2025; Musavi 2024; Colditz 2023, 2024). These annotated texts serve as the empirical basis for research on syntactic structure, lexical semantics, textual variation, and the transmission of religious and legal knowledge in Zoroastrian communities from the Sasanian to the early Islamic period (Colditz 2023; Rezania 2023, 2024).