Table of Contents

  • EPHRAIM KHAN

    Cross-Reference

    See EPʿREM KHAN.

  • EPICS

    François de Blois

    narrative poems of legendary and heroic content.

  • EPIDEMICS

    Cross-Reference

    See PLAGUES.

  • EPIGRAM

    J. T. P. de Bruijn

    originally a Greek word meaning “inscription” and denoting in Western literatures a genre of short poems characterized by their contents and style rather than by a specific prosodic form.

  • EPIGRAPHY

    Multiple Authors

    the study of inscriptions, particularly their collection, decipherment, interpretation, dating, and classification.

  • EPIGRAPHY i. Old Persian and Middle Iranian epigraphy

    Helmut Humbach

    Iranian epigraphy of the pre-Islamic period covers mainly inscriptions in the Old and Middle Iranian languages. Old and Middle Persian inscriptions span by far the longest period of time, from the Bīsotūn inscription until the early Islamic period.

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  • EPIGRAPHY ii. Greek inscriptions from ancient Iran

    Philip Huyse

    In April 1815 the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin enthusiastically accepted the proposal by August Boeckh to produce a comprehensive thesaurus of inscriptions that would include all Greek inscriptional material published to date.

  • EPIGRAPHY iii. Arabic inscriptions in Persia

    Sheila S. Blair

    In Persia, as in other Islamic lands, Arabic was the basic language for religious texts on buildings and objects. In the early Islamic period these texts were usually written in some variant of the angular script known as Kufic. From the 12th century inscriptions in Persian became more common.

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  • EPIGRAPHY iv. Safavid and later inscriptions

    Sussan Babaie

    The principal characteristic of epigraphy in Persia after the advent of the Safavids (1501) is the emphasis on Persian poetry and pious Shiʿite texts with an iconographic potency and deliberate frequency hitherto unknown. Arabic remained the language of koranic and Hadith quotations while Persian became increasingly prominent.

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  • EPIGRAPHY v. Inscriptions from the Indian subcontinent

    Ziyaud-Din A. Desai

    The systematic survey and study of Perso-Arabic epigraphy of the Indian subcontinent is not even half a century old.