Dr. Yahyā Māhyār Navvābī, who recently passed away at the age of 88, was an eminent authority on ancient Iranian languages, an untiring scholar and an influential educator. He will be long remembered by his many students and academic friends inside and outside Iran. He was a professor both at Tabriz and Tehran universities.Māhyār Navvābī was born in Shiraz in 1912, where he spent his childhood and had his early education. He moved to Tehran for his secondary schooling and then went on to Tehran University, where eventually he graduated in 1946 with a Ph.D. degree in literature, having written his dissertation on the Achaemenid inscriptions of Bistftn ("the Bistūn Rock"). After teaching for two years at Tabriz University, he had the chance to continue his linguistic studies abroad, first at SOAS in London with Professor Henning and later at Gottingen, in Sweden.Māhyār Navvābī 's academic career continued as a full professor at Tabriz University; several years later he moved to the capital, where he was offered the chair of ancient Iranian languages at Tehran University. After his retirement from Tehran University in 1973, he moved to the University of Shiraz, where he actively participated in editing and publishing the Asia Institute's research journal as well as a series of Pahlavi texts in facsimile.He was a prolific author who wrote numerous scholarly papers, in Persian and English, on linguistic and lexicographic questions. These have been collected in two volumes and published in Shiraz, in 1974 and 2000 respectively. Some of the topics in which Professor Navvābi was especially interested were the following:1) Obscure and problematic words, found in Ferdowsī's Šāhnāme and other early Persian texts.2) The early language of Azerbaijan.3) The local dialect spoken in Shiraz up to the 9th/15th century.4) The House of Vesāl of Shiraz, whose members were prominent poets, painters and calligraphers in the Qajar period.Another major undertaking by Professor Māhyār Navvābī, which was an ongoing life-long project, is A Bibliography of Iran, which he compiled in ten volumes, nine of which have been published so far. These include about one hundred thousand entries, including both books and articles written by Iranologists all over the world on Persian/Iranian history, culture, religions and art.Professor Māhyār Navvābī died in Sweden of cardiac arrest on 2 October 2000 while visiting his daughter.