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.

  This Article Has Images/Tables.

• 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.

  This Article Has Images/Tables.

• 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).