Table of Contents

  • DASTUR AL-MOLUK

    M. Ismail Marcinkowski

    a manual of administration in Persian from the end of the Safavid period.

  • DASTŪR-E DABĪRĪ

    Hashem Rajabzadeh

    comprehensive manual of letter writing by Moḥammad Meyhanī, consisting of an introduction (dībāča) and two chapters (qeṣm; comp. December 1189-January 1190).

  • ḎĀT-AL-SALĀSEL

    A. Shapur Shahbazi

    lit., “provided with chains”; place near Obolla in southern Iraq where in 633 C.E., one of Ṭabarī’s informants, Ḵāled b. Walīd and an Arab force of about 18,000 men defeated a small Sasanian garrison led by a frontier commander named Hormoz.

  • DĀTA

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    Old Iranian term for “law” attested both in Avestan texts (Old and Younger Av. dāta-) and in Achaemenid royal inscriptions.

  • DĀTABARA

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    title of a high official in the Achaemenid legal and juridical system.

  • DATAMES

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    Iranian personal name, reflecting Old Iranian *Dātama- or *Dātāma-, either a two-stem shortened form *Dāta-m-a- from a compound name like *Dātamiθra- or an unabridged compound *Dātāma-from *Dāta-ama-“to whom force is given.”

  • DĀTAMIΘRA

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    Iranian personal name resulting from an inversion of Miθra-dāta- “given by Mithra” and continued in the New Persian Dādmehr.

  • DATAPHERNES

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    name of an Iranian (perhaps Bactrian) officer in the entourage of Bessos, murderer of Darius III (336-30 B.C.E.).

  • DATE PALM

    Hūšang Aʿlam

    indigenous to the geobotanical “Sahara-Sind region,” a desert or semidesert belt extending from the Indus valley to North Africa. It is believed by some authorities to be native to the Persian Gulf area and by others to have been derived from the the wild or date-sugar palm of western India.

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  • DATES AND DATING

    D. N. MacKenzie

    in Old and Middle Iranian. The only dating formulas preserved in an Old Iranian language are those found in Old Persian in the Bīsotūn inscriptions of Darius I; by the time of the earliest dated Middle Iranian documents, the Parthian ostraca from Nisa of the 1st century B.C.E., the Zoroastrian (so-called Avestan) calendar was in use.