Art/Writing obsessed Buffoon

In Pars, the basic social hierarchy is roughly:

Wispuhran — royal family Wuzurgan — high nobility Azatan — knightly / lesser aristocratic class Azat — free commoners Ghulam — slaves

So, to get one important thing out of the way first:

Azat does NOT mean slave in Arslan Senki.

The slaves are Ghulam. Tanaka explicitly distinguishes Azatan cavalry officers, Azat free soldiers, and Ghulam slave soldiers.

Which makes what follows considerably more interesting.

First things first:

Why do we sometimes see Azat/Azatan and sometimes Azad/Azadan?

This isn't simply people misspelling the words.

The older Iranian form is āzāt, while āzād is the later Persian form.

So the final consonant genuinely shifts between t and d depending on period, language and transliteration.

Encyclopaedia Iranica actually heads its article:

ĀZĀD (older ĀZĀT)

and records Middle Persian and Parthian forms including āzātān.

That is why fandom and historical sources can give us combinations such as:

Azat, Azatan, Azad, Azadan

Tanaka's Japanese spellings are アーザート (Āzāto) and アーザーターン (Āzātān), so Azat/Azatan is particularly close to the terminology he chose for Pars.

The historical form more commonly encountered in English scholarship today is often Azad/Azadan.

Same linguistic family; different historical/transliteration conventions.

So what are “Azat” and “Azatan”?

They are not actually two unrelated Persian words.

The historical Iranian word āzād, in its older form āzāt, literally means “free” and came by extension to mean “noble” or “freeborn.”

And historical Middle Persian and Parthian sources also give forms such as āzātān — essentially a plural/collective form referring to the āzāts, “the free/noble ones.”

So very loosely:

āzāt → a free/noble person āzātān → the free/noble ones

And historically these āzāds really were a lesser noble warrior class, associated particularly with cavalry.

Which should immediately make Tanaka's terminology look a little suspicious.

Because in Pars he has taken:

Azat and Azatan

…and made them two separate social classes.

The Azat are ordinary free people.

The Azatan are the privileged knightly caste above them.

In other words, Tanaka appears to have taken two meanings contained within the same historical word—

FREE and NOBLE

—and separated them.

Azat = free

Azatan = the noble/knightly “Free Ones”

Whether he consciously intended this as wordplay is something I cannot prove. I have not found a statement from Tanaka explaining his choice.

But it is an awfully interesting choice, because:

Maybe the real trick is not the plural — but the semantic split

This is the part I find most intriguing.

Historically, āzāt/āzād does not only mean “free.”

It also develops the meaning “noble.”

And those meanings are not unrelated.

A very simplified semantic development would be:

FREE → FREEBORN → NOBLE

Being “free” first distinguishes someone from an enslaved person.

Then “freeborn” can become a marker of respectable birth.

And eventually that status can harden into a recognised social rank.

So what if Tanaka has pulled that semantic development apart?

Azat keeps the basic meaning:

free

while Azatan keeps the historically developed social meaning:

noble / knightly “Free Ones”

If that is what he was doing, then Tanaka has not merely taken a singular and its plural and mistakenly treated them as separate words.

He has taken two historically connected meanings of the same word and institutionalised them as neighbouring social classes.

That would make the distinction much more deliberate than it first appears.

And if we now...

Add Yoshiki Tanaka himself to the equation

This is where I become reluctant to dismiss the whole thing as Tanaka accidentally stumbling over a Persian plural.

Tanaka wasn't approaching historical vocabulary with no academic background whatsoever.

He studied at Gakushūin University and completed a doctorate in Japanese language and literature.

That does not make him a specialist in Iranian linguistics, and I don't want to turn “Tanaka has a doctorate” into “therefore every Persian word must contain a secret linguistic code.”

But it does mean we're talking about an author with substantial academic training in literature and language, who is also demonstrably interested in history and who filled Arslan Senki with deliberately adapted Iranian names, institutions and terminology.

Hiromu Arakawa has even spoken about the considerable amount of Persian historical reference material Tanaka supplied when she began adapting the novels. (@innerchorus: Another question answered! Yes, Tanaka has provided Arakawa with a vast amount of documentation in advance. They've been joking in an interview about it).

So I think it's at least reasonable to ask:

What if the Azat/Azatan distinction is deliberate?

Not necessarily as an elaborate hidden joke.

But perhaps as a very precise piece of historical wordplay.

Because if it is, it is wonderfully ironic.

Imagine translating the distinction conceptually rather than literally.

An Azat is:

a free person.

An Azatan belongs to:

“the Free Ones.”

The first is a legal condition.

The second has become the name of a privileged social estate.

Something rather similar happens in real languages all the time: an ordinary word develops into an institutional title, and eventually speakers stop treating the institutional meaning as identical to the everyday one.

Think less:

one Azat / several Azatan

and more:

someone who is free / someone belonging to the Freemen

And Pars has turned those two ideas into ranks.

Which means Pars has managed to stratify freedom itself.

Look at the hierarchy again:

The Azatan — privileged knightly “the Free Ones” ↓ The Azat — free people ↓ The Ghulam — people who are literally not free at all

That is fascinating.

Because it means that in Pars, freedom is not simply a binary condition.

The Azat possess freedom as a legal status.

The Azatan possess a socially elevated form of “freedom” bound up with ancestry, military privilege and rank.

The Ghulam possess neither.

So you can effectively be:

unfree

free

or

one of “the Free Ones.”

Freedom itself has become hierarchical.

And suddenly the terminology starts looking less like decorative Persian vocabulary and more like a miniature version of the political structure of Pars.

And that makes Pars's social hypocrisy rather beautifully visible in its language.

The Azatan do not merely enjoy freedom. They belong to a class whose historical name derives from the language of freedom and noble status. They possess a privileged version of “freedom” bound up with ancestry, military status and social rank.

The Azat are free too — but they are commoners.

And beneath both exists a vast population whom Pars permits other human beings to own.

So a society whose aristocratic vocabulary effectively contains “the Free Ones” simultaneously maintains institutional slavery.

That is where I think the potential linguistic irony becomes particularly interesting, and arguably Tanaka-esque.

Not because he turned the Persian word azat into “slave” — he didn't.

Something subtler is happening.

Pars has taken a word whose historical semantic field encompasses both freedom and nobility and turned those meanings into different degrees of social privilege — while maintaining an entire class beneath them that is genuinely unfree.

The language itself almost asks:

How free is “free” in a society built on people who are not?

Or perhaps even:

Who gets to define what “freedom” means?

The king?

The aristocracy?

The people whose wealth depends on other people not being free?

And this is where Arslan becomes particularly interesting.

(we're at it already, what's one more additional paragraph, ... right?)

Arslan's abolition of slavery does not abolish the Azatan.

It does not abolish nobility.

It does not make everyone socially equal.

What he attacks is the category beneath the Azat:

Ghulam.

So the movement is essentially:

Ghulam → free person

not:

commoner → noble

And I think that makes his reform more interesting, not less radical.

Arslan is not saying:

Everyone shall now have the same social rank.

He is saying something much more fundamental:

No human being should occupy a social rank defined by being somebody else's property.

The hierarchy can continue above that line.

There can still be kings, nobles, Azatan and commoners.

But freedom itself must cease to be something only some people possess.

Arslan changes the floor of society, not the entire hierarchy.

This may actually be one of the best ways to understand how radical — and how limited — his reform is.

The Azatan can remain knights.

The Wuzurgan can remain nobles.

The Wispuhran can remain royal.

The Azat can remain commoners.

What Arslan changes is the minimum condition under which a human being is permitted to exist within Parsian society.

Before abolition:

royalty nobility knightly “Free Ones” ordinary free people human property

After abolition, at least in principle:

royalty nobility knightly “Free Ones” ordinary free people no legitimate category of human property

Arslan is therefore not flattening the hierarchy.

He is moving its moral boundary.

There can still be differences of wealth, status, rank and birth.

But there should be a point beneath which no human being can legally fall.

And that is a very different kind of revolution from simply declaring everyone equal.

And here's where the possible Azat/Azatan wordplay becomes delicious.

Historically:

āzāt = free / noble āzātān = the free/noble ones

Tanaka's Pars:

Azat = ordinary free people Azatan = privileged knights Ghulam = slaves

Arslan's reform therefore doesn't make everybody equal.

It changes where the bottom of society is allowed to be.

Before:

noble “Free Ones” ordinary free people human property

After abolition, at least in principle:

noble “Free Ones” ordinary free people no legitimate category of human property

And if Tanaka deliberately chose Azat and its historically related collective/plural form Azatan for two neighbouring classes, there is an almost vicious little irony embedded in the vocabulary:

the people who have made “the Free Ones” into a title of privilege live in a kingdom sustained by people who are not free at all.

Arslan doesn't need to destroy the word.

He needs to make its most basic meaning universal.

And that may be where the critique of power really lies.

There is a long history of states, aristocracies and institutions taking morally positive concepts and turning them into language that protects privilege.

“Freedom." “Citizenship.” “Civilisation.” “Order.” “Rights.”

These words can describe genuine ideals while simultaneously being restricted to only certain people.

A ruling class does not always need to redefine a word into its literal opposite.

Sometimes it is enough to decide who is permitted to be included in the word at all.

And that is why I think the Azat/Azatan distinction is potentially more interesting than the idea that Tanaka simply inverted the meaning of Azat.

Pars does not call slavery freedom.

It does something more historically recognisable:

it distributes freedom unequally and then builds that inequality into its social vocabulary.

The Azatan possess privileged freedom.

The Azat possess ordinary freedom.

The Ghulam are excluded from freedom altogether.

In that sense, language does not merely describe the hierarchy.

It helps make the hierarchy seem natural.

Which also changes how I read Arslan’s proclamation.

Arslan’s abolition of slavery can therefore be read not only as an economic and political reform, but as a challenge to the vocabulary through which Pars understands itself.

He is effectively saying:

Freedom cannot remain a status granted to some people and denied to others.

That does not make everyone equal.

But it destroys the most extreme version of the hierarchy:

the idea that some people may exist entirely outside freedom.

And if Tanaka intentionally built Azat and Azatan from two forms of the same historical word, then the irony is almost perfect.

Pars has spent centuries turning different kinds of “freedom” into social rank.

Arslan’s answer is not:

everyone shall have the same rank.

It is:

basic freedom shall no longer be a rank at all.

One important caveat

I want to stress this because fandom meta has an unfortunate tendency to turn “this interpretation makes sense” into “the author confirmed this in an interview in 1989, trust me.”

I have found no statement from Yoshiki Tanaka confirming that the Azat/Azatan distinction is deliberate linguistic irony.

So we can establish:

Azat/āzāt historically means “free” and also developed the meaning “noble.”

Āzātān is a historically attested related plural/collective form.

The historical Azads/Azadan were associated with lesser nobility and cavalry.

Tanaka separates Azat and Azatan into free commoners and knights.

Ghulam, not Azat, are the slaves of Pars.

Tanaka had doctoral-level literary training and made extensive use of historical material.

But:

Did he deliberately split “free” and “noble” into Azat and Azatan as a linguistic comment on Pars's class system?

We don't know.

I just think it's a very compelling possibility.

And if that was the joke—

“free” for the common people, “the Free Ones” for the privileged caste, while slaves aren't permitted freedom at all—