Table of Contents
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TAʿĀROF
William Beeman
an Arabic term used in Persian to define a broad complex of behaviors in Iranian life that mark and underscore differences in social status.
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ṬABAQĀT-E NĀṢERI
C. E. Bosworth
an extensive general history composed in Persian by b. Serāj-al-Din Jowzjāni, who for the first part of his career lived in Ḡur under the Ghurid sultans and latterly in Muslim India under the Moʿezzi or Šamsi Delhi sultans.
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ṬABARI, ABU JAʿFAR MOḤAMMAD B. JARIR
Elton L. Daniel
one of the most eminent Iranian scholars of the early Abbasid era, author of a celebrated commentary on the Qorʾān as well as the most important of the classical Arabic historical texts still extant.
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ṬABĀṬABĀʾI, MOḤAMMAD-ḤOSAYN
Louis Medoff
eminent Twelver Shiʿite philosopher and author of a famous exegesis of the Qur’an, al-Mizān.
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TABRIZ v. The city in the 19th century
James D. Clark
Tabriz surpassed Isfahan in population early in the nineteenth century to become the most populous city in Iran. The city was centrally situated relative to the three neighboring regions with which most of its trade was conducted and to which people from the province traveled: the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, and central Iran.
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TABRIZ x. MONUMENTS x(1). The Blue Mosque
Sandra Aube
(Pers. Masjed-e kabud), also known as Masjed-e Moẓaffariya, built during the rule of the Qarā Qoyunlu dynasty (1351-1469) and completed in 1465. The extant tilework documents artistic connections with contemporary architecture in Timurid Khorasan and in the Ottoman Empire.
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TADAYYON, Sayyed Moḥammad Birjandi
Hormoz Davarpanah
(b. Birjand, 1881; d. United States, December 1951), early 20th-century educationist and politician.
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TAḎKERA-YE NAṢRĀBĀDI
Mahmoud Fotoohi
a compilation of short biographical notices on some one thousand poets of the Safavid period.
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TAḎKERAT al-AWLIĀʾ
Mohammad Esteʿlami
(Saints’ Lives), a hagiographic account of the sayings and miraculous deeds (karāmāts) of eminent sufis and other religious figures from the early Islamic centuries.
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TAḎKERAT al-MOLUK
M. Ismail Marcinkowski
(Memorial for kings), Persian manual from the transitional period between the collapse of the Safavid empire at the end of the reign of Shah Solṭān Ḥosayn (r. 1694-1722) and the early Afghan period in Persia.
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TADWIN, AL-
K. Morimoto
a local biographical dictionary of Qazvin in Arabic compiled by ʿAbd-al-Karim Rāfeʿi Qazvini.
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TAFAŻŻOLI, AḤMAD
Philippe Gignoux
On his way back to Iran, Tafazzoli stayed for a few months in Paris, where he conducted research and made acquaintance with Father Jean de Menasce, a noted scholar in Iranian studies, whom he later assisted in his translation of the third book of Dēnkard.
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TAFT
EIr, based on an article submitted by Ali Modarres
town and district in Yazd province.
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TAHERIDS
Elton L. Daniel
(Pers. Āl-e Ṭāher), name of a prominent family of the early Abbasid period and more particularly a line of governors of Khorasan (821-73) from that family. Many of the Taherids, governors, and lesser officials, in Khorasan and in Iraq, were celebrated patrons of the arts, and adab literature is filled with anecdotes about their largesse and their appreciation of wit, wisdom, and bon mots.
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ṬAHMĀSP I
Colin P. Mitchell
(1524-1576), second ruler of the Safavid dynasty. His 52-year reign was the longest of all Safavid rulers.
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TĀJ AL-SALĀṬIN
M. Ismail Marcinkowski
a book in the genre of Mirror for Princes written in Malay by Boḵāri Jawhari (fl. early 17th cent.).
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TĀJ-al-SALṬANA
Afsaneh Najmabadi
(1884-1936), one of the best known daughters of the Qajar king Nāṣer-al-Din Shah (r. 1848-96), due to her memoirs (Ḵāterāt), written in 1914, which were first partially published in 1969 and whose authenticity has been disputed.
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TAJADDOD
Nassereddin Parvin
(Modernity), a newspaper published as the official organ of the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, of which a total of 202 issues appeared in Tabriz.
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TAJIK
Multiple Authors
i. The Ethnonym: Origins and Application. ii. Tajik Persian. iii. Colloquial Tajiki in Comparison with Persian of Iran.
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TAJIK i. THE ETHNONYM: ORIGINS AND APPLICATION
John Perry
The Tajiks are an Iranian people, speaking a variety of Persian, concentrated in the Oxus Basin, the Farḡāna valley (Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan) and on both banks of the upper Oxus.
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TAJIK ii. TAJIK PERSIAN
John Perry
Tajiki Persian is the variety of New Persian used in Central Asia. From the 1920s it was officially fostered in the USSR as the national literary language of the Tajik SSR (since 1991, the Republic of Tajikistan). It is also spoken in parts of Uzbekistan, notably in the cities of Bukhara and Samarqand.
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TAJIK iii. COLLOQUIAL TAJIKI IN COMPARISON WITH PERSIAN OF IRAN
Bahriddin Aliev and Aya Okawa
Fārsi of Iran (here called “Farsi” for short), Tajiki, and Dari are distinct branches of the Persian language, and within each branch a wide variety of local dialects exist.
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TAJIKISTAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Habib Borjian
Tajikistan’s leading research institution for coordinating and conducting theoretical and applied research projects.
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TAJIKISTAN i. STATUS OF ISLAM SINCE 1917
Muriel Atkin
Tajikistan’s population, which numbered slightly more than six million in the year 2000, consists overwhelmingly of ethnic groups which have historically been Muslim.
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TAJIKISTAN v. DICTIONARIES AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS
Habib Borjian
The alphabet change to Roman and then to Cyrillic (1928 and 1940) coupled with vernacularization of Tajik Persian, called for independent lexicography in Tajikistan.
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TAKLAMAKAN
Alain Cariou
The Taklamakan stretches over 337,000 square kilometers in the centre of the Tarim basin. The vast depression runs nearly 1,200 km from west to east, and is 400 km wide from north to south. It forms an elliptical, semi-open basin in the Lop Nur marsh.
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TAḴT-E SOLAYMĀN
Dietrich Huff
outstanding archeological site with substantial Sasanian and Il-khanid ruins in Azerbaijan, between Bijār and Šāhin-dež, about 30 km north-northeast of Takāb. Up to the early Islamic time the geographical name of the place and the region was Šiz.
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TAḴTI, Ḡolām-Reżā
Houchang E. Chehabi
(b. Tehran, 20 Šahrivar 1309 Š./27 August 1930; d. Tehran, 27 Ordibehešt 1347 Š./7 June 1968), freestyle wrestling champion, and Persia’s most popular athlete of the 20th century.
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ṬĀLEB
Cross-Reference
Poet and physician (d. 1015/1606-07). See ABU ṬĀLEB TABRIZI.
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ṬĀLEB ĀMOLI
Paul Losensky
Persian poet of the early 17th century (b. Mazandaran, ca. 1580; d. India, 1626-7).
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ṬĀLEBUF, ʿABD-AL-RAḤIM
Cyrus Masroori
(1834-1911), intellectual and author of several influential works, including Ketāb-e Aḥmad. The fact that the book went through several reprints both inside and outside Iran testifies to its popularity. Its style and design made it a textbook of choice in the modern schools of Tabriz.
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TĀLEŠ DISTRICT
Marcel Bazin
altogether stretches north from the Safidrud, which cuts through the western Alborz mountains in western Gilān, to the the Araxes-Kura plain in the south of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
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ṬĀLEŠ DULĀB
Cross-Reference
one of the five traditional Ṭāleš khanates (Ḵamsa-ye Ṭavāleš) in western Gilān.
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TAʿLIM O TARBIAT
Nassereddin Parvin
monthly periodical published by the Ministry of Culture (April 1925-March 1927, April 1934-July 1938).
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TALMUD ii. RABBINIC LITERATURE and MIDDLE PERSIAN TEXTS
Yaakov Elman
Jews and Persians had coexisted in Mesopotamia, mostly peaceably, for some 700 years by the time that the first generation of prominent Babylonian talmudic rabbis was born in the third quarter of the 2nd century.
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TALMUD, PERSIAN ELEMENTS IN
Jacob Neusner
Persian influence on Judaism through the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) is by no means negligible. The Bavli is full of Iranian words and motifs.
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TAMIŠA WALL
Hamid Omrani Rekavandi and Eberhard W. Sauer
an at least 11-km-long Sasanian wall west of present-day Sarkālata village in Gorgān, crossing the coastal corridor at the southeast corner of the Caspian Sea.
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TANG-E SARVAK
Ernie Haerinck
(Gorge of the cypresses), an archeological site in eastern Ḵuzestān province, southwestern Iran. It is located in a gorge in the mountainous area approx. 50 km north of Behbahān. At an altitude of ca. 1200 m, it is only reached after a long climb.
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TANNING, RUBBER, AND FOOTWEAR INDUSTRIES
Willem Floor
Tanning was an economic activity traditionally practiced all over Iran, not only in the large towns, but also (for local consumption) in small towns and large villages, and it was practiced on a small scale by the nomads.
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TAQIYA
Multiple Authors
dissimulation; the practice, commonly regarded as distinctively Shiʿite, of hiding beliefs or rituals in times of imminent harm to one.
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TAQIYA i. In Shiʿism
Louis Medoff
The foundations of taqiya can be traced back to certain Qurʾanic verses, perhaps the most explicit of which is Qurʾan 3:28. Taqiya holds an exceptional degree of legitimacy in Shiʿism owing to the abundant Hadith in its praise from the Imams. In Shiʿite exegesis there are several taqiya related intepretations of Qurʾanic verses.
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TAQIYA ii. AMONG BABIS AND BAHAIS
Kamran Ekbal
Dissimulation of the faith was widespread among Babis and Bahais until the early years of the ministry of Shoghi Effendi (1921-57), when he, in a number of messages starting in 1927, prohibited its practice.
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TAQIZADEH, SAYYED ḤASAN
Multiple Authors
(1878-1970), distinguished statesman, constitutionalist, and scholar.
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TAQIZADEH, SAYYED ḤASAN i. To the end of the Constitutional Revolution
Iraj Afshar and EIr
(1878-1970), distinguished statesman, constitutionalist, and scholar.
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TĀRIḴ-E QOM
Andreas Drechsler
(The History of Qom), an early local history (comp. 378/988) from medieval Persia by Ḥasan b. Moḥammad Qomi, which has been preserved in an early 9th/15th-century Persian translation.
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TĀRIḴ-E SISTĀN
C. E. Bosworth
an anonymous local history in Persian of the eastern Iranian region of Sistān, the region that straddles the modern Iran-Afghanistan border. It forms a notable example of the flourishing genre of local histories in the pre-modern Iranian lands.
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ṬARZI, MAḤMUD
May Schinasi
(1865-1933), writer, journalist, politician, and a prominent figure in Afghanistan in the first quarter of the 20th century. Tarzi was hailed as the "father of journalism" and oversaw the bi-monthly Serāj al-aḵbār, for which he wrote most of the articles, and was a translator of Turkish, an essayist, and a poet.
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TAṢNIF
Margaret Caton
a type of vocal composition in classical Persian music.
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TAVADIA, JEHANGIR C.
Firoze M. Kotwal and Jamsheed K. Choksy
Parsi scholar of ancient Iranian languages and Zoroastrianism.
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TAVALLALI, Fereydun
Kāmyār ʿĀbedi
(1919-1985), noted poet and writer. His literary career paralleled the dominant social, political, and literary trends of the middle decades of 20th century Iran.
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TAVERNIER, JEAN-BAPTISTE
Pierre-François Burger
merchant, traveler, and author of Les six voyages and other works.
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TAʿZIA
Peter Chelkowski
a term used for the Shiʿite passion play performed in Persia. It is the sole form of serious drama to have developed in the world of Islam, with the exception of contemporary theater, which was introduced to Islamic countries in the mid-19th century.
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TEA
Cross-Reference
See ČĀY.
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TEDESCO, PAUL MAXIMILIAN
Rüdiger Schmitt
(1898-1980), Austrian scholar of Indo-Iranian studies.
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TEHRAN i. A PERSIAN CITY AT THE FOOT OF THE ALBORZ
Xavier de Planhol
At the northern borders of Iran’s arid central plateau, the southern foothills of the Alborz chain, which have the advantage of major precipitations, are particularly suitable for human settlements.
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TEHRĀNI, Ḥosayn
Morteżā Ḥoseyni Dehkordi
(1911-1973) well-known master performer of the tonbak.
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TEKIŠ B. IL ARSLĀN
C. Edmund Bosworth
(r. 1172-1200), ʿAlāʾ-al-Donyā wa’l-Din Abu’l-Moẓaffar, a ruler of the branch of Khwarazmshahs who descended from the Great Saljuq slave commander (ḡolām) Anuštigin Ḡarčāʾi.
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TELEGRAPH i. FIRST TELEGRAPH LINES IN PERSIA
Soli Shahvar
The initiator of introducing the electric telegraph in Persia was Mirzā Malkom Khan. In 1858 he carried out two successful telegraphic experiments for Nāṣer-al-Din Shah.
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TENTS in Iran
Multiple Authors
A portable dwelling characteristic of certain nomad groups. It consists of a canopy of cloth or skin supported by upright posts and anchored to the ground by means of pegs and ropes.
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TENTS i. General Survey
Jean-Pierre Digard
The most common type of tent in Iran and Afghanistan is the “black tent” (constructed of bands of woven goat hair stitched together), which is known from Mauritania to India.
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TENTS ii. Variety, Construction, and Use
Peter Alford Andrews
Both of the basic tent types used by nomads elsewhere in the Middle East are present in Iran and Afghanistan: the black, goat-hair tent and the felt tent.
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TEPE HISSAR
Robert H. Dyson
Sixteen hundred graves were recorded; of these 782 from 1932 formed the basis of the 1937 tabular presentation of burial data. Generally, bodies were buried on their sides in a flexed position in simple pits. In period II, however, rare brick cist graves appear.
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TEPE YAHYA
D. T. Potts
(Tappe Yaḥyā), archeological site in the Soḡun valley, Kerman province, ca. 220 km south of Kerman and 130 km north of the Straits of Hormuz.
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TERKEN ḴĀTUN
C. Edmund Bosworth
title of the wife of the Khwarazmshah Tekiš b. Il-Arslān (r. 1172-1200) and mother of ʿAlāʾ-al-Din Moḥammad (r. 1200-20).
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TETRADRACHM
Cross-Reference
“four drachmas,” or stater, a denomination of silver coinage; see DIRHAM.
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TEXTILE INDUSTRY IN IRAN
Willem Floor
Textile production in Iran dates back to the 10th millennium BCE. The first European-style factories in Persia were established in the 1850s and were among the first establishments in the country to use modern technology.
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THAILAND-IRAN RELATIONS
M. Ismail Marcinkowski
Iran’s cultural and trade relations with Southeast Asia date back far into the pre-Islamic period. Official diplomatic relations between the two regions become traceable only during the Safavid period (1501-1722).
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THEOPHYLACT SIMOCATTA
Michael Whitby
Greek historian and author of Histories, a work mainly concerned with late sixth-century Byzantine warfare in the Balkans and against Persia.
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TIGER
Cross-Reference
See BABR.
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TIGRAN II
N. Garsoian
THE GREAT, king of Armenia (r. 95-55 BCE), the most distinguished member of the so-called Artašēsid/Artaxiad dynasty.
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TIGRIS RIVER
Daniel T. Potts
major river arising in the Taurus mountains of eastern Turkey, fed mainly by snow melt, which flows about 2,032 km through eastern Turkey and Iraq to the Persian Gulf.
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TILLA BULAK
Kai Kaniuth
The site’s stratigraphy is marked by two main building horizons, of which the earlier one was destroyed in a conflagration that apparently engulfed the entire hamlet. From rooms of this phase, complete household inventories have been recovered which will be of enormous help in understanding the rural economic system.
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TIŠTRYA
Antonio Panaino
(Pahl. Tištar, NPers. Teštar), an important Old Iranian astral divine being (yazata-), to whom the eighth hymn (Tištar Yašt) of the Later Avestan corpus was dedicated (Panaino, 1990).
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TOBACCO
Willem Floor
Modes of use, cultivation, and cultural connotations of Tobacco in Iran. Persian sources imply that the use of tobacco was already known in Persia before its introduction into Europe in the 1550s.
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TOCHARIAN LANGUAGE
Michaël Peyrot
the conventional name for two closely related Indo-European languages that were spoken in northwest China, in the north of the Tarim Basin in present-day Xīnjiāng.
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TOḠA TIMUR
Peter Jackson
(1336-1353), the last of the Mongol Il-Khans of Iran.
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TOḤFAT AL-AḤBĀB
Solomon Bayevsky
(Gift for friends), a Persian dictionary of the early Safavid period, compiled by Ḥāfeẓ Solṭān-ʿAli Owbahi Heravi in 936/1529-30.
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TOḤFAT AL-SAʿĀDA
Solomon Bayevsky
An early 16th-century Persian dictionary of 14,000 entries by Maḥmud b. Shaikh Żiāʾ-al-Din Moḥammad, a poet of northern India.
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TONB ISLANDS
Guive Mirfendereski
(GREATER and LESSER), two tiny islands of arguable strategic importance in the eastern Persian Gulf, south of the western tip of Qešm island.
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TOPKAPI PALACE
Zeren Tanındı
and its Persian holdings. The Topkapı Palace, which was known as the Yeni Saray (New Palace) until the 19th century, served the Ottoman sultans for almost 380 years as the imperial residence and center of command.
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TORTURE IN THE ACHAEMENID PERIOD
Bruno Jacobs
Torture is here taken as defined in the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), Art. 1.1.
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TOWFIQ (TAWFIQ) NEWSPAPER
Hasan Javadi
a satirical and political weekly newspaper published intermittently in Tehran between 1923 and 1971.
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TOYUL
Cross-Reference
one of the terms for “land grant.” See EQṬĀʿ.
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TRAGACANTH
Cross-reference
For gum tragacanth, see KATIRĀ.
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TRAJAN
Erich Kettenhofen
Marcus Ulpius Traianus, Roman emperor (98-117 CE), born probably in 53 CE, and died in early August 117. During his reign, the Imperium Romanum stretched to its widest extent, but only for a short period.
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TREE
Cross-Reference
See DERAḴT.
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TRIBE
Cross-Reference
For the Persian terms used and an overview of tribal groups, see ʿAŠĀYER.
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ṬUBĀ VA MAʿNĀ-YE ŠAB
Houra Yavari
novel (1987) by Shahrnush Parsipur, fiction writer and essayist, generally regarded as one the first instances of magical realism in modern Iran. The novel’s creative use of magical realism is colored by a distinctly mystical tone and has borrowed much of its flavor from Iran’s Illuminationist Philosophy.
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TUMANSKIǏ, Aleksandr Grigor’evich
Jahangir Dorri
(1861-1920), Russian orientalist, major-general of the Russian Imperial Army. He belonged to an ancient aristocratic family which had originated from the Great Duchy of Lithuania.
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TUP
F. Farrokh
(tr. by Fariydoun Farrokh as The Cannon, Washington D. C., 2009), the first full-length novel by Gholam-Hosayn Sa’edi.
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ṬURĀN
C. E. Bosworth
(ṬOVARĀN), the mediaeval Islamic name for the mountainous district of east-central Baluchistan lying to the north of the mediaeval coastal region of Makrān, what was in recent centuries, until 1947, the Aḥmadzay Khanate of Kalat.
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TURFAN EXPEDITIONS
Werner Sundermann
Turfan (also Uigur Turpan, Chin. Tulufan) in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) is the largest oasis (ca. 170 square kilometers) on the ancient northern Silk Road.
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TURKEY
Cross-Reference
See BŪQALAMŪN.
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TURKIC LANGUAGES OF PERSIA: AN OVERVIEW
Michael Knüppel
Only in few other regions (Caucasus and Southern Siberia) one can find a nearly comparable diversity of Turkic languages as in Persia. The number of their speakers varies from several thousands to several millions.
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TURKIC LOANWORDS IN PERSIAN
Michael Knüppel
Turkic-Iranian language contacts, as well as reciprocal loaning/borrowing of words, go back to the era of the Old Turkic language.
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TURKIC-IRANIAN CONTACTS i. LINGUISTIC CONTACTS
John R. Perry
Speakers of Iranian and Turkic languages have been in contact since pre-Islamic times, notably along the Inner Asian commercial corridors known collectively as the Silk Road.
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TURKIC-IRANIAN CONTACTS ii. CHAGHATAY
Andras J. E. Bodrogligeti
Chaghatay has been strongly influenced by Islamic prestige languages, especially Persian and Arabic, in all segments: phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, and cultural content. In the hands of the educated elite it became a tool wielded impressively.
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TURKMENS OF PERSIA ii. LANGUAGE
Michael Knüppel
Geographical location and the “tribal affiliation” of the speakers form the background of the dialectal variety. The dialects of Turkmen are spoken in their respective areas, where the members of the corresponding “tribes” live.
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TURKO-SOGDIAN COINAGE
Larissa Baratova
issues of the khaqans (ḵāqāns) of the Western Turkic khanate in Central Asia between the 6th and 8th centuries CE, so called because the Turkic rulers issued them with Sogdian inscriptions.
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TURNIP
Shamameh Mohammadifar
a biennial shrub of the Cruciferae family with edible fleshy thick root, hairy rosette leaves, grape inflorescence and siliques fruits.