Table of Contents

• DHALLA, DASTUR MANECKJI NUSSERWANJI

  Kaikhusroo M. JamaspAsa

  (b. 22 September 1875, Surat; d. 25 May 1956, Karachi), Parsi priest and scholar.

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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

  or D’YAKONOV (b. Petrograd, 30 December 1914/12 January 1915; d. St. Petersburg, 2 May 1999), Russian orientalist of international standing, one of the greatest scholars in the field of Ancient Near Eastern studies.

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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 Ottomon 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. Afghan refugees in Pakistan. x. Afghan refugees in Persia.

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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

  i. Persian dictionaries. ii. Arabic-Persian dictionaries. iii. Bi/Multiligual dictionaries. iv. Specialized dictionaries. v. Slang dictionaries.

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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 (Dutch orientalist)

  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.