Table of Contents

• DEŽ

  Nasseraddin Parvin

  a weekly of news and politics associated with the Tudeh Party that began publication on 27 May 1943 in Tehran and continued with some interruptions until June 1953.

• DEŽ Ī NEBEŠT

  Mansour Shaki

  (Mid. Pers. diz ī nibišt “fortress of archives,” lit. “writing”), supposedly one of two repositories in which copies of the Avesta and its exegesis (zand) were deposited for safekeeping.

• DEZ River

  Cross-Reference

  See ĀB-E DEZ.

• DEŽ-E BAHMAN

  Aḥmad Tafażżolī

  lit. "fortress of Bahman"; according to legend a fortress in Azerbaijan conquered by the Kayānian king Kay Ḵosrow, son of Sīāvaš and grandson of Kāvūs, king of Iran.

• DEŽ-E GONBADĀN

  Aḥmad Tafażżolī

  lit. "fortress of Gonbadān"; a fortress where the Iranian hero Esfandīār, son of the Kayānian king Goštāsb, was imprisoned.

• DEŽ-E RŪYĪN

  Aḥmad Tafażżolī

  or Rūyīn-dež, lit. "brazen fortress"; castle belonging to the Turanian king Arjāsb and conquered by Esfandīār, son of the Kayanid king Goštāsb.

• DEŽ-E SAFĪD

  Aḥmad Tafażżolī

  lit. "white fortress"; Iranian fortress located near the border with Tūrān and conquered by Sohrāb, son of the Iranian hero Rostam by the Turanian princess Tahmīna.

• DEZFUL

  Multiple Authors

  a town and sub-province in northern Khuzestan province.

• DEZFŪL i. Geography

  Massoud Kheirabadi

  or Dez-pol, lit. "fortress bridge"; šahrestān (subprovincial administrative unit) and city in northern Ḵūzestān province.

• DEZFUL ii. Population, 1956-2011

  Mohammad Hossein Nejatian

  This article deals with the following population characteristics of Dezful: population growth from 1956 to 2011, age structure, average household size, literacy rate, and economic activity status.

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• DEZFŪLĪ AND ŠŪŠTARĪ DIALECTS

  COLIN MACKINNON

  Dezfūlī and Šūštarī are two closely related Persian dialects spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Dezfūl and Šūštar in Ḵūzestān province.

• DEZKŪH

  Farhad Daftary

  or Šāhdez; a medieval mountain fortress situated in central Persia on the summit of Mount Ṣoffa, about 8 km south of Isfahan.

• DHABHAR, BAHMANJI NUSSERWANJI

  Mary Boyce and Firoze M. Kotwal

  (b. 1869, Navsari, d. 1952, Bombay), eminent Parsi scholar of Bhagaria stock.

• DHALLA, DASTUR MANECKJI NUSSERWANJI

  Kaikhusroo M. JamaspAsa

  In 1878 Dhalla came to Karachi with his father, married at the age of nine, and was ordained a priest (navar) in 1890. For a while he abandoned his studies and worked to augment the family’s meagre income, but his scholarly interest never waned.

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• DHĀR, QĀŻĪ KHAN BADR

  Cross-Reference

  See DHĀRVĀL.

• DHĀRAṆĪ

  Hiroshi Kumamoto, Yutaka Yoshida

  magic spells in the Buddhist Mahāyānist and Tantric (esoteric) traditions.

• DHARMAŚARĪRA-SŪTRA

  Hiroshi Kumamoto

  a short Buddhist text belonging to the Mahāyānist tradition.

• DHĀRVĀL, QĀŻĪ KHAN BADR MOḤAMMAD DEHLAVĪ

  M. Saleem Akhtar

  or DHĀR, 15th-century Persian lexicographer in India, so named because he settled in Dhār (hence his nesba Dhārvāl), capital of the Ghurid principality of Malwa.

• DHŪTA-SŪTRA

  Yutaka Yoshida

  name of a Buddhist Sogdian text discovered at Tun-huang.

• DHYĀNA TEXT

  Yutaka Yoshida

  designation of a Buddhist Sogdian text of 405 lines discovered at Tun-huang.

• DĪA

  Khalid Abu El Fadl

  the prescribed blood money or wergild paid in compensation for a wrongful death or certain other physical injuries.

• DIAKONOFF, Igor’ Mikhaĭlovich

  Muhammad Dandamayev

  Diakonoff established international contacts and participated in organizing important scholarly projects. In particular, he took an active part in the organization of the 25th International Congress of Orientalists held in Moscow in 1960 (he was the Executive Secretary of the Organizing Committee).

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• DĪĀLA

  Cross-Reference

  river. See ARVAND-RŪD.

• DIALECTOLOGY

  GERNOT L. WINDFUHR

  the terms dialect and language overlap; in general, language refers to the more or less unified system of the phonology, grammar, and lexicon that is shared by the speakers of a country, or geographic region, or a socially defined group, whereas dialect (Pers. lahja, gūyeš) focuses on varieties of a language.

• DĪĀRBAKR

  Cross-Reference

  See AMIDA.

• DIASPORA

  Mary Boyce, Fariba Zarrinbaf-Shahr, H. Hakimian, Yitzhak Nakash, Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh, Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Grant Farr, Čangīz Pahlavān

  Iranian. i. In Pre-Islamic times. ii. Persians in India. iii. Persians in Southeast Asia. iv. Persians in Ottoman Turkey. v. Persians in the Caucasus and Central Asia in the late 19th and early 20th century. vi. Persians in Iraq. vii. Persians in Southern ports of the Persian Gulf. viii. In the Post-revolutionary period. ix and x. Afghan refugees. 

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• DIATESSERON

  Cross-reference

  Persian translation of the four Gospels, based on a Syriac original. See BIBLE vii. Persian Translations.

• DĪBĀ

  Cross-Reference

  See ABRĪŠAM.

• DĪBĀ, MAḤMŪD KHAN

  Cross-Reference

  See ʿALĀʾ-al-MOLK.

• DIBĪR

  Cross-Reference

  See DABĪR.

• DICHŌR

  Erich Kettenhofen

  city conquered by Šāpūr I (240-70) during his second campaign against Rome in 253, as recorded in his inscription at Kaʿba-ye Zardošt.

• DICKSON, MARTIN BERNARD

  Kathryn Babayan

  (b. Brooklyn, 22 March 1924, d. Princeton, 14 May 1991), Iranist and Central Asianist who specialized in Safavid history.

• DICTIONARIES

  ʿAlī Ašraf Ṣādeqī, John R. Perry, Ḥosayn Sāmeʿī

  The first extant Persian dictionary is Lōḡat-e fors of the poet Asadī Ṭūsī (q.v.). Entries are arranged according to their final letters and illustrated by examples from poetry. Over ten manuscripts are known to have reached us, all of which differ in the number of entries and verses as well as the entry definitions.

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• DIDYMA

  Rüdiger Schmitt

  (Gk. tà Dídyma, probably of Carian origin), district ca. 20 km south of the Ionian Miletus and site of a pre-Greek sanctuary of Apollo, to which a famous oracle was attached.

• DIEU, LOUIS (LUDOVICUS) DE

  J.T.P. de Bruijn

  (b. Vlissingen, Flushing, April 7, 1590; d. Leiden, Dec. 23, 1642), Dutch orientalist.

• DIEULAFOY, JANE HENRIETTE MAGRE

  Jean Calmard

  (b. Toulouse, 29 June 1851, d. Château de Langlade, Haute-Garonne, 25 May 1916), French archeologist, explorer, folklorist, novelist, playwright, and journalist.

• DIEULAFOY, MARCEL-AUGUSTE

  Pierre Amiet

  (b. Toulouse, 3 August 1844, d. Paris, 25 February 1920), French archeologist.

• DIEZ, ERNST

  Jens Kröger

  (b. 27 January 1878, d. 8 July 1961), Austrian historian of Iranian and Islamic art.

• DIGOR

  F. Thordarson

  Ossetic tribal name.

• DILL

  Hūšang Aʿlam

  Anethum graveolens L. (fam. Umbellifera), an herb widely cultivated in Persia.

• DIMDIM

  Amir Hassanpour

  name of a mountain and a fortress where an important battle between the Kurds and the Safavid army took place in the early 17th century.

• DIMLĪ

  Garnik S. Asatrian

  or Zāzā; the indigenous name of an Iranian people living mainly in eastern Anatolia, in the Dersim region (present-day Tunceli) between Erzincan in the north and the Muratsu in the south, the far western part of historical Upper Armenia.

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• DĪN MOḤAMMAD KHAN

  EIr

  b. Olūs Khan, the Uzbek prince who, with his brother ʿAlī Solṭān, joined Shah Ṭahmāsb’s camp in 943/1536-37 during the latter’s campaign in Khorasan against ʿObayd-Allāh Khan, the Uzbek ruler of Bukhara.

• DĪN WA’L-ḤAYĀT, AL-

  Nassereddin Parvin

  a bi-weekly religious magazine published in Tabrīz, 1928-31, replacing another Tabrīz religious magazine, Taḏakkorāt-e dīnī.

• DINAR

  Philippe Gignoux, Michael Bates

  a gold coin, in pre-Islamic times struck mainly for purposes of prestige. In Arabic of the classical Islamic period, the word dīnār had the double sense of a gold coin and of a monetary unit which might not be precisely embodied by actual coins.

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• DĪNĀR, MALEK

  C. Edmund Bosworth

  b. Moḥammad (d. 1195), a leader of the Oghuz Turkmen in Khorasan and, in the latter years of the 12th century, ruler of Kermān.

• DĪNĀRĀNĪ

  Cross-Reference

  See BAḴTĪĀRĪ.

• DĪNAVAR

  C. Edmund Bosworth

  (occasionally vocalized Daynavar), in the first centuries of Islam an important town in Jebāl, now ruined.

• DĪNAVARĪ, ABŪ ḤANĪFA AḤMAD

  Charles Pellat

  b. Dāwūd b. Vanand (d. between 894 and 903), grammarian, lexicographer, astronomer, mathematician, and Islamic traditionist of Persian origin, who lived at Dīnavar and in several cities in Iraq in the 9th century.

• DĪNAVARĪ, ABŪ MOḤAMMAD ʿABD-ALLĀH

  Josef van Ess

  b. Ḥamdān b. Wahb b. Bešr (d. 902), traditionist and ḥāfeẓ (preserver of the Koranic text).

• DĪNAVARĪ, ABŪ MOḤAMMAD ʿABD-ALLĀH

  Josef van Ess

  b. Mobārak (d. first half of the 10th century), author of a tafsīr (koranic exegesis) entitled al-Wāżeḥ fī tafsīr al-Qorʾān, which is preserved in several manuscripts.

• DĪNĀVARĪYA

  Werner Sundermann

  in Manichean usage originally “the elect.”

• DINKHA TEPE

  Cross-Reference

  See DENḴĀ TEPE.

• DINON

  Wolfgang Felix

  (fl. approximately 360-30 B.C.E.), author of a historical work on the Ancient Orient.

• DĪNŠĀH

  Cross-Reference

  See IRANI, DINSHAH JIJIBHOY.

• DIO CASSIUS

  Marie Louise Chaumont

  (more correctly, Cassius Dio; b. Nicea, Bithynia, ca. 160, d. Nicea, after 229), Roman official whose Rhomaikē Historia is important for the study of Parthian history.

• DIO CHRYSOSTOM

  Cross-Reference

  See DIO COCCEIANUS.

• DIO COCCEIANUS

  Roger Beck

  surnamed Chrysostom ("golden-mouthed"), a traveling scholar who in his 36th Oration (known as the “Borysthenian” or “Olbian” from its dramatic setting), written about 100 C.E., purports to summarize a hymn composed by Zoroaster and sung by the magi in secret rites.

• DIODORUS SICULUS

  Ernst Badian

  Greek historian from Agyrium in Sicily, hence called Siculus (the Sicilian) who came to Rome in the middle of the first century B.C.E. and there wrote his Bibliotheca Historica, a universal history in forty books, from the origins to the age of Caesar.

• DIODOTUS

  Osmund Bopearachchi

  satrap of Bactria-Sogdiana, who revolted against his Seleucid soverign Antiochus II and proclaimed himself king, thus laying the foundation of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. The date of his revolt has been  placed between 256 and 239 B.C., the majority of scholars arguing for about the year 250.

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• DIOGENES LAERTIUS

  Wolfgang Felix

  author of a biographically arranged history of Greek philosophy in ten books that also deals with the Persian Magi, especially in the first book on the origins of philosophy.

• DIONYSIUS

  RüDIGER SCHMITT

  (Gk. Dionýsios) of Miletus, Greek historiographer, who may have lived in the 5th century B.C.E. and is said to have written a book about Persian history after the death of Darius I.

• DIPLOMACY

  Cross-Reference

  See under individual countries; see also FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

• DĪRAKVAND

  Pierre Oberling

  Lor tribe belonging to the Bālā Garīva group and inhabiting a mountainous area between Ḵorramābād and Dezfūl in the Pīš-Kūh region of Lorestān.

• DĪRGHANAKHA-SŪTRA

  Yutaka Yoshida

  a Buddhist text in which the Buddha expounds the merits of observing the eight commandments to a parivrājaka named Dīrghanakha.

• DIRHAM

  Philippe Gignoux, Michael Bates

  a unit of silver coinage and of weight. The dirham retained a stable value of about 4 g throughout the entire pre-Islamic period. The tetradrachm, or stater (> Pahl. stēr), was equivalent to 4 drachmas and was already in circulation in the Achaemenid period at the time of Alexander’s departure for Persia.

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• DĪV

  Mahmoud Omidsalar

  demon, monster, fiend; expresses not only the idea of “demon,” but also that of “ogre,” “giant,” and even “Satan.”

• DĪV SOLṬĀN

  Roger M. Savory

  title of ʿALĪ BEG RŪMLŪ, a qezelbāš officer first mentioned at the battle of Šarūr (1501), in which the Safavid Esmāʿīl I defeated the Āq Qoyūnlū prince Alvand.

• DĪVĀL-E ḴODĀYDĀD

  Klaus Fischer

  an extensive area of historic remains in the center of an ancient canal system fed by the rivers Helmand and Ḵāšrūd and located between the eastern border of the Hāmūn-e Aškīnʿām and the lower Ḵāšrūd, about 45 km to the northeast of Zaranj in southwest Afghanistan.

• DĪVĀN

  François de Blois

  archive, register, chancery, government office; also, collected works, especially of a poet.

• DĪVĀN-E KEŠVAR

  Cross-Reference

  See JUDICIAL AND LEGAL SYSTEMS v. Judicial System in the 20th Century.

• DĪVĀNA NAQQĀŠ

  Priscilla P. Soucek

  15th-century painter whose work is known primarily from single-page paintings preserved in the Topkapı Sarayı library, Istanbul.

• DĪVĀNBEGĪ

  Shiro Ando, Roger M. Savory

  originally, the designation for the highest-ranking officer in the Timurid office of finance and justice; in the Safavid administrative system, the dīvānbegī was one of the high-ranking amirs residing at court.

• DĪVĀNĪ, ḴAṬṬ-E

  Cross-Reference

  See CALLIGRAPHY.

• DĪVDĀD

  Cross-Reference

  See BANŪ SĀJ.

• DIVINATION

  Mahmoud Omidsalar

  the art or technique of gaining knowledge of future events or distant states by means of observing and interpreting signs.

• DIVORCE

  Muhammad A. Dandamayev, Mansour Shaki, Sachiko Murata, Akbar Aghajanian, Jenny Rose, Mujan Momen

  legal termination of marriage. In the following series of articles only those communities are taken into consideration which are either Iranian or are focused in Persia. For this reason Jewish and Christian practices have not been included.

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• DIZK

  Cross-Reference

  See JIZAK.

• DJANBAZIAN, Sarkis

  Maria Sabaye Moghaddam

  After graduating from high school, Djanbazian went to Leningrad to study dance. He graduated from Vaganova Dance Academy of Leningrad in 1936 and from Lesgaf University with a Masters of Arts degree in 1936. After graduation, he worked as a principal dancer, choreographer, and artistic director in Kirov Theatre.

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• DJEITUN WARE

  Cross-Reference

  See CERAMICS i.

• DO-BARĀDARĀN

  Cross-Reference

  See JĀMI.

• DO-BAYTĪ

  Stephen Blum

  a quatrain of sung poetry in many Persian dialects.

• DOʿĀ

  Hamid Algar

  the act of offering supplicatory or petitionary prayer, a principal manifestation of Muslim piety.

• DOʿĀ-NEVĪSĪ

  Aḥmad Mahdawī Dāmḡānī

  the act of writing charms against various evils.

• DOĀB-E MĪḴZARĪN

  Klaus Fischer

  a group of archeological sites with numerous pre-Islamic mud-brick ruins on either side of the Sorḵāb river, on the road from Bāmīān to Došī, opposite the entrance to the Kahmard valley.

• DOCUMENTS

  Mansour Shaki, Muhammad A. Dandamayev

  i. In pre-Islamic period. ii. Babylonian and Egyptian documents in the Achaemenid period. iii. In the modern period.

• DŌDĀ-BĀLĀÇ

  Cross-Reference

  See BALUCHISTAN iii/II.

• DODDER

  Cross-Reference

  See AFTĪMŪN.

• DOERFER, GERHARD

  Michael Knüppel

  German scholar of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus languages. He divided the Turkic elements in Persian into three layers:  (1) an older, “pure” Turkic layer, which consists of southern and eastern Turkic elements; (2) a Middle Mongolian and Turkic layer, which includes Mongolian and southern and eastern Turkic elements; and (3) a later, “pure” Turkic layer, which comprises southern Turkic elements only. 

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• DOG

  Mahmoud Omidsalar and Teresa P. Omidsalar, Mary Boyce, Jean-Pierre Digard

  Canis familiaris; i. In literature and folklore. ii. In Zoroastrianism. iii. Ethnography.

• DOḠLAT, MĪRZĀ MOḤAMMAD ḤAYDAR

  Cross-Reference

  See Supplement.

• DOGONBADAN

  Cross-Reference

  See GAČSARĀN.

• DOJAYL

  Cross-Reference

  See KĀRŪN.

• DOḴĀNĪYĀT

  Willem Floor

  tobacco projects; referring to the State tobacco-monopoly law (Qānūn-e enḥeṣār-e dawlatī-e doḵānīyāt) of 20 March 1909 and to the state monopoly of tobacco products itself.

• DOKKĀN

  Cross-Reference

  See BĀZĀR i.

• DOKKĀN-E DĀWŪD

  Hubertus von Gall

  lit., “shop of David"; rock-cut tomb of the Achaemenid period in the Zagros range a few kilometers southeast of Sar-e Pol-e Ḏohāb, in the province of Kermānšāhān. The relief of a priest with a barsom bundle probably belongs to the early Hellenistic period.

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• DOḴTAR-E NŌŠERVĀN

  MARKUS MODE

  lit., “daughter of Nōšervān”; rock-cut architectural complex with important wall paintings, in northern Afghanistan. Surrounding the deity’s head is a tripartite nimbus with attached animal protomes. This complex system seems to emphasize the supernatural force of the “king of gods” as ultimate creator of all life.

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• DOḴTARĀN-E ĪRĀN

  Nassereddin Parvin

  lit., “Daughters of Iran”; a monthly variety magazine for girls published in Shiraz from 23 July 1931 to November 1932.

• DOKUZ ḴĀTŪN

  Charles Melville

  (d. 16 June 1265), chief wife of the Il-khan Hülegü and granddaughter of Wang Khan, leader of the Nestorian Christian Kereyit tribe domiciled near present-day Ulan Bator.

• DOLAFIDS

  Fred M. Donner

  family of Arab origin that became politically prominent in western Persia during the 9th century.