Table of Contents

  • CHINESE-IRANIAN RELATIONS xv. THE LAST SASANIANS IN CHINA

    Matteo Compareti

    Information on those Sasanians who avoided the submission to the Arabs and lived in Central Asia or at the Tang court can be found in the works of Muslim authors and in Chinese sources.

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  • CHINESE-IRANIAN RELATIONS xvi. Impact of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran

    Yidan Wang

    The Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 attracted the attention of the Chinese constitutionalists and revolutionaries immediately upon breaking out.

  • CHINGGIS KHAN

    Cross-Reference

    See ČENGĪZ KHAN.

  • CHINKARA

    Khushal Habibi

    or Chikara (Gazella bennetti, Indian gazelle), a small antelope of slender build; its tawny coat has poorly marked facial and body stripes.

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  • CHIONITES

    Wolfgang Felix

    a tribe of probable Iranian origin that was prominent in Bactria and Transoxania in late antiquity.

  • CHITON

    Cross-Reference

    See CLOTHING i. Median and Achaemenid periods, iii. Sasanian period.

  • CHITRAL

    Nigel J. R. Allan, Georg Buddruss

    The Chitral river drains the eastern Hindu Kush in the north and a spur of the Hindu Raj on the south and east. With its deeply incised bed and braided stream channels it constitutes the upper tract of the Kunar (Konar), which debouches into the Kabul river, a tributary of the Indus.

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  • CHLORITE

    Philip Kohl

    Chlorite ranges in color from light gray to deep green and darkens when exposed to fire; it was highly valued during certain prehistoric periods. Elaborate stone ves­sels carved with repeating designs, both geometric and naturalistic, in an easily recognizable “intercultural style,” were made primarily of chlorite.

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  • CHOAMANI

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    name of an eastern Iranian tribe (perhaps located in western Bactria), mentioned only by Pomponius Mela in an enumeration of the inhabitants of the interior lands.

  • CHOANA

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    the name of two Iranian towns mentioned by Ptolemy.

  • CHOARA

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    or CHOARENE; a town or village in Parthia mentioned by Ptolemy (6.5.3) and called “the most attractive place of Parthia” by Pliny.

  • CHOASPES

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    (or Coaspēs), ancient name of three rivers.

  • CHOBANIDS

    Charles Melville and ʿAbbās Zaryāb

    Although at first the Chobanids maintained the fiction that they were vassals of the ruling house of Hülegü (Hūlāgū), after the collapse of Il-khanid authority they became effectively independent rulers of the areas that they were able to seize. 

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  • CHODŹKO, ALEKSANDER BOREJKO

    Jean Calmard

    (b. 30 August 1804, in Krzywicze, Poland in the Russian Empire [the city is now in Belarus], d. Noisy-le-Sec, near Paris, 19 December 1891), Polish poet and diplomat, the first European scholar to work on Persian folklore.

  • CHOLERA

    Xavier De Planhol, Daniel Balland

    It is possible to extrapolate some general conclusions about the routes by which cholera reached Persia. It arrived three times via Afghanistan, three times overland from the west, only twice through the Persian Gulf (the second time without spreading to the plateau), and perhaps once across the Caspian.

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  • CHORASMIA

    Multiple Authors

    region on the lower reaches of the Oxus (Amu Darya) in western Central Asia.

  • CHORASMIA i. Archeology and pre-Islamic history

    Yuri Aleksandrovich Rapoport

    At the turn of the 3rd millennium b.c.e. the Neolithic Kel’teminar culture flourished in the Chorasmian oasis (Vinogradov, 1968; idem, 1981). Remains of the Bronze Age Suyargan.

  • CHORASMIA ii. In Islamic times

    C. E. Bosworth

    The Islamic history of Ḵᵛārazm begins with the two invasions of Arab troops under the governor of Khorasan Qotayba b. Moslem Bāhelī in 93/712, who intervened in the region on the pretext of internecine strife among members of the native Afrighid dynasty of ḵᵛārazmšāhs

  • CHORASMIA iii. The Chorasmian Language

    D. N. MacKenzie

    Old Chorasmian was written in an indigenous script descended from the Aramaic, brought to the region by the administration of the Achaemenid empire and characterized by heter­ography, that is, the occasional writing of Aramaic words to represent the corresponding Chorasmian.

  • CHORASMIAN COINAGE

    B. I. Vainberg

    In the mid-19th century, coins that had been found in Russia and showed certain similarities to Indo-Parthian and Kushan coinages were for the first time identified as Chorasmian. In 1938, Sergei P. Tolstov (1907-76), who had conducted preliminary archeological fieldwork in the lower basin of the Oxus river, accepted this interpretation.

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