Table of Contents

• ĀBĀN

  Mary Boyce

  Middle Persian term meaning “the waters” (Av. āpō). In Indo-Iranian the word for water is grammatically feminine; the element itself was always characterized as female and was represented by a group of goddesses, the Āpas.

• ABĀN B. ʿABD-AL-ḤAMĪD

  I. Abbas

  late 2nd/8th century poet. He was of a Persian family, originally from Fasā, which had settled (probably at an early date) in Baṣra.

• ĀBĀN MĀH

  Mary Boyce

  The eighth month of the Zoroastrian year, dedicated to the waters, Ābān.

• ĀBĀN YAŠT

  Mary Boyce

  Middle Persian name of the fifth hymn among the Zoroastrian hymns to individual divinities. It is the third longest, with 131 verses.

• ĀBĀNAGĀN

  Cross-Reference

  the name used by Bīrūnī (Āṯār, p. 224) for the Zoroastrian feast-day dedicated to the Waters, which was celebrated on the day Ābān of the month Ābān. See further under ĀBĀN MĀH.

• ĀBĀNDOḴT

  W. L. Hanaway, Jr.

  Character in the prose romance Dārāb-nāma of Abū Ṭāher Moḥammad b. Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Mūsā al-Ṭarsūsī, a storyteller of the Ghaznavid period.

• ABAQA

  Peter Jackson

  (or ABAḠA, “paternal uncle” in Mongolian; ABĀQĀ in Persian and Arabic), eldest son and first successor of the Il-khan Hülegü.

• ʿABAQĀT AL-ANWĀR

  ʿA.-N. Monzavi

  A large Arabic work by Mīr Ḥāmed Ḥosayn b. Moḥammad-qolī b. Moḥammad b. Ḥāmed of Lucknow on the legitimacy of the imamate and the defense of Shiʿite theology.

• ABAR NAHARA

  Cross-Reference

  Aramaic name for the lands to the west of the Euphrates—i.e., Phoenicia, Syria, and Palestine (Parpola, p. 116; Zadok, p. 129; see ASSYRIA ii). These regions apparently passed from Neo-Babylonian to Persian control in 539 B.C.E. when Cyrus the Great conquered Mesopotamia. See EBER-NĀRĪ.

• ABARKĀVĀN

  M. Kasheff

  Late Sasanian name of Qešm island in the Straits of Hormoz.