Table of Contents

  • DARVĪŠ, ʿABD-AL-MAJĪD ṬĀLAQĀNĪ

    Cross-Reference

    See ʿABD-AL-MAJĪD ṬĀLAQĀNĪ.

  • DARYĀ

    Xavier de Planhol

    sea or river.

  • DĀRYĀ

    Nassereddin Parvin

    a Tehran morning daily of news and politics, published with a number of interruptions from May 1944 to March 1951.

  • DARYĀ-YE ḴAZAR

    Cross-Reference

    See CASPIAN SEA.

  • DARYĀ-YE MĀZANDARĀN

    Cross-Reference

    See CASPIAN SEA.

  • DARYĀ-YE NŪR

    Yaḥyā Ḏokāʾ

    lit., “sea of light”; one of the largest diamonds in the world, kept and exhibited in the Jewel museum of the Central bank of Persia (Bānk-e markazī-e Īrān).

  • DARYĀ-YE ʿOMĀN

    Cross-Reference

    See ʿOMĀN, SEA OF.

  • DARYĀ-YE SĪĀH

    Cross-Reference

    See BLACK SEA.

  • DARYĀBEYGĪ

    Guity Nashat

    lit. "sea lord"; originally an Ottoman naval title dating from the 15th century.

  • DARYĀČA

    Cross-Reference

    For individual lakes, see entries under the respective names.

  • DĀRZĪN

    Mehrdad Shokoohy

    village on the road between Kermān and Bam on the site of a large, early medieval town. Ruins of  buildings of different periods still stand. The earliest are probably three small forts of similar form, built of straw-tempered rectangular mud bricks, which may date from the 8th or 9th century.

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  • DĀŠ ĀKOL

    SOHILA SAREMI

    a story in the first collection of short stories by Sadeq Hedayat.

  • DASĀTĪN

    Jean During

    the term for modes in early musical theory, translated into Arabic as aṣābeʿ (fingers) and sometimes also as mawājeb “obligations, laws.”

  • DASĀTĪR

    Fatḥ-Allāh Mojtabaʾī

    the most important tract of the Āḏar Kayvānī sect, almost certainly the work of its founder, Āḏar Kayvān.

  • DASCYLIUM

    Michael Weiskopf

    Achaemenid satrapy in northwestern Anatolia, part of the Persian empire until the 330s BCE. The borders varied, extending as far south as the Mysian plain and the southern Troad and east into the land of the Bithynian peoples; some satraps controlled both sides of the Hellespont.

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  • DASKARA(T AL- MALEK)

    Cross-reference

    or DASKARAT AL-MALEK. See DASTGERD.

  • DAŠLĪ

    Pierre Amiet

    or Dashly; oasis situated south of the Āmū Daryā, on the desert plain of northern Afghanistan, ancient Bactria, now in the province of Jūzjān ca 35 km northeast of Āqča.

  • DAŠNAK

    ARAM ARKUN

    short name for Hay Yełapʿoxakan Dašnakcʿutʿiwn (Armenian revolutionary federation [A.R.F.]) or its members.

  • DAŠT

    Eckart Ehlers

    lit. "plain, open ground"; Persian term for a very specific type of landscape, the extended gravel piedmonts and plains that are almost ubiquitous in arid central Persia.

  • DAŠT-E ARŽAN

    Sayyed ʿAlī Āl-e Dāwūd

    (also Arjan, Arzan, lit., “plain of the mountain or bitter almond”), a mountain basin ca. 14 x 5-6 km situated 1,500 m above sea level on the road from Shiraz to Kāzerūn.

  • DAŠT-E MOḠĀN

    Cross-Reference

    See MOḠĀN.

  • DAŠT-E NĀWOR

    Gérard Fussman

    lit. “plain of the lake”; a depression (average elev. 3,100 m) 60 x 15 km with a brackish lake in the center, located at 33° 41’ N and 67° 46’ E, about 60 km west of Ḡaznī.

  • DAŠT-E QALʿA

    Henri-Paul Francfort

    lit., “plain of the fortress”; small bāzār village on an irrigation canal near the junction of the Kōkča and Āmū Darya rivers in the province of Badaḵšān, northeastern Afghanistan, the site of several earlier settlements.

  • DASTA

    Peter J. Chelkowski

    the most common term for a ritual procession held in the Islamic lunar month of Moḥarram and the following month of Ṣafar, both periods of mourning for Imami Shiʿites. The procession commemorates the tragic death of Ḥosayn, grandson of the prophet Moḥammad and the third imam of the Shiʿites.

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  • DAŠTAKĪ, ʿAṬĀ-ALLĀH

    Andrew J. Newman

    (d. 1506, 1511, or 1520), a scholar of Hadith in Khorasan in the late Timurid and early Safavid periods.

  • DAŠTAKĪ, GĪĀṮ-AL-DĪN

    Andrew J. Newman

    b. Ṣadr-al-Dīn Moḥammad Šīrāzī Ḥosaynī (1462-1541), scholar, philosopher, and motakallem (theologian) of the late Timurid and early Safavid period, and, for a brief interval under Shah Ṭahmāsb, one of two ṣadrs (chief clerical overseers).

  • DASTĀN

    Jean During

    a term used in two different contexts in Persian music- melody and fingering system.

  • DASTĀN (1)

    Cross-Reference

    See ZĀL.

  • DĀSTĀN (2)

    Cross-Reference

    story, tale, parable. See FICTION.

  • DĀSTĀN-SARĀʾĪ

    William Hanaway

    (storytelling), term used for written and oral genres of fictional narrative.

  • DAŠTESTĀN

    Jamšīd Ṣadāqat-Kīš

    or šahrestān, lit. "subprovince" on the Persian Gulf coast in Būšehr province, bounded on the north and east by Fārs province, on the south by the šahrestān of Daštī, and on the west by the šahrestāns of Būšehr, Tangestān, and Ganāva.

  • DASTGĀH

    Jean During

    modal system in Persian music, representing a level of organization at which a certain number of melodic types (gūšas) are regrouped and ordered in relation to a dominant mode (māya).

  • DASTGERD

    Philippe Gignoux

    lit. “made by hand, handiwork”; a term originally designating a royal or seigneurial estate.

  • DAŠTĪ (musical mode)

    Jean During

    one of the twelve modal systems in the repertoire of traditional music (radīf); it is an āvāz, or auxiliary modal system, derived from or attached to the dastgāh Šūr.

  • DAŠTĪ (subprovince)

    Jamšīd Ṣadāqat-Kīš

    šahrestān (subprovince) on the Persian Gulf in Būšehr province, corresponding approximately to the area referred to as Māndestān and Sīf Āl Moẓaffar in early sources.

  • DAŠTĪ, ʿALĪ

    J. E. KNÖRZER

    (ca. 1894–1982), man of letters, journalist, and politician. Perhaps his innovative and “personal” studies of the principal Persian classical poets will prove the most enduring of his writings; they broke sharply with traditional Persian literary criticism focused on anecdotes, prosody, and explication de textes.

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  • DASTJERDĀNĪ, JAMĀL-AL-DĪN

    David O. Morgan

    Il-khanid bureaucrat.

  • DASTŪR

    Mansour Shaki

    in the Sasanian period dastwar had a wide range of meanings, primarily denoting “one in authority, having power”; from that time, the semantic range was increasingly widened to convey different meanings at different times.

  • DASTŪR AL-AFĀŻEL FĪ LOḠĀT AL-FAŻĀʾEL

    Solomon Baevsky

    lit. "manual of the learned for learned words"; an early Persian-to-Persian dictionary (farhang-nāma), compiled in India in 1342, during the reign of Moḥammad b. Tōḡloq Shah by Ḥājeb Ḵayrāt Rafīʿ, a poet from Delhi, for his patron Šams-al-Dīn Moḥammad Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Jajnīrī.

  • DASTŪR AL-KĀTEB FĪ TAʿYĪN AL-MARĀTEB

    David O. Morgan

    administrative manual written by Moḥammad Naḵjavānī (ca. 1280-after 1366), son of Faḵr-al-Dīn Hendūšāh b. Sanjar Naḵjavānī, author of Tajāreb al-salaf.

  • 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.