Table of Contents

  • LENTIL

    Cross-Reference

    See ʿADAS.

  • LENTZ, OTTO HELMUT WOLFGANG

    Gerd Gropp

    Lentz wrote no voluminous book, but many essays in periodicals, including pioneer works on Turfan texts, Iranian dialects, local eastern systems of time reckoning, and loanwords in Mid. Iranian. His doctoral dissertation on North Iranian elements in the Šāh-nāma (1926) won him immediate recognition.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LEOPARD

    Eskandar Firouz

    (Panthera pardus, Pers. Palang), the largest and most powerful member of the cat family still occurring in Iran. The Persian leopard is very variable in both size and coloration, depending on the conditions of the natural environment of its range.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LESĀN-AL-DAWLA

    Nader Nasiri-Moghaddam

    (1862-ca. 1920), MIRZĀ ʿALI KHAN, royal librarian. His career at the royal court began in Tabriz in 1891.

  • LEWIS, David Malcolm

    Amılie Kuhrt

    Lewis was educated at the City of London School and Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he studied the traditional Classics curriculum in Greek and Latin, philosophy and ancient history (1945-1949). After National Service in the Royal Army Education Corps (1949-1951), he pursued graduate studies at Princeton, NJ with two leading historians of classical Greece before returning to Oxford.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LEXICOGRAPHY

    John R. Perry

    the compiling of dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies of a language or a particular lexical corpus.

  • LEYLI O MAJNUN

    A. A. Seyed-Gohrab

    narrative poem of approximately 4,600 lines composed in 584/1188 by the famous poet Neẓāmi of Ganja.

  • LIGHTING EQUIPMENT AND HEATING FUEL

    Willem Floor

    Before the widespread use of electricity in Iran, the main illuminants were vegetable oils and animal fat.

  • LILAC

    Ahmad Aryavand and Bahram Grami

    a fragrant shrub of the olive family. Different varieties exist with blue and purple flowers, used for aroma, decorative, and medicinal purposes. The Persian lilac is a small shrub and has been a garden favorite in Iran for centuries and today occurs in various parts of the country.

  • LILY

    Ahmad Aryavand and Bahram Grami

    (susan in Persian and Arabic), the name of herbaceous and bulbous flowering plants of the lily family, lilies are among the oldest cultivated plants. Persian poets have likened the lily’s petal to the human tongue.

  • LIME

    Cross-Reference

    a solid, white substance consisting essentially of calcium oxide. See ĀHAK.

  • LION RUGS

    Parviz Tanavoli

    (gabba-ye širi), a group of Persian rugs with the image of the lion as the main motif. The majority of the existing lion rugs are the work of Baḵtiāri and Qašqāʾi tribes in southwest Iran and were woven during the 19th and 20th centuries.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LION TOMBSTONES

    Pedram Khosronejad

    a type of tombstone in the form of a lion, found mostly on the graves of Lor and Qašqāʾi nomads in the west, southwest, and parts of southern Persia. These stylized, sculptured lions stare out from isolated Baḵtiāri graveyards in many valleys and along the migration routes of the tribes across the Zagros Mountains.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LITERACY CORPS

    Farian Sabahi

    (Sepāh-e dāneš), educational program implemented in Iran in the framework of the White Revolution (1963-79) during the reign of Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi (1941-79). With the Literacy Corps, education to some extent escaped the control of the ʿolamāʾ, who used to shape the younger generation along traditional lines.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LITHOGRAPHY i. IN PERSIA

    Olimpiada P. Shcheglova

    The first lithographic printing press was brought to Persia in 1821 from Tiflis (Tbilisi), on the orders of the Crown Prince, ʿAbbās Mirzā. The Persian painter Allāhverdi who had studied lithography there, returned to Tabriz in March 1821 with a complete set of lithographic equipment.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LITHOGRAPHY ii. IN INDIA

    Olimpiada P. Shcheglova

    From the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th, India was at the hub of a great expansion in lithographic printing. Hundreds of lithographic printing houses flourished in India, and although books in Persian were only a part of their production, it was there that the largest number of Persian lithographed books was published.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LITHOGRAPHY iii. IN CENTRAL ASIA

    Olimpiada P. Shcheglova

    Lithographic book printing began in Central Asia in the late 19th century: in the khanate of Khiva, 1874 (in Turkic languages only), in Turkistan in Tashkent, 1881, and in the khanate of Bukhara, 1901. The bulk of lithographed books in Oriental languages were published in Tashkent.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LITHOGRAPHY iv. LITHOGRAPHED ILLUSTRATIONS

    Ulrich Marzolph

    The first illustrated Persian lithographed book is the 1259/1843 edition of Maktabi’s Leili o Majnun.

  • LIZARDS

    Steven C. Anderson

    reptiles belonging to the order Squamata; second to birds, they are the most often seen vertebrates in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, especially during daylight hours. “Lizard” is a colloquial term for these reptiles that are members of a larger evolutionary group that includes snakes.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.
  • LOCKHART, LAURENCE

    Ernest Tucker

    Lockhart returned to the company’s London headquarters in 1930 and served there until 1939.  He continued to engage in academic pursuits in parallel with his business career, publishing numerous short scholarly pieces on a wide range of topics.  In his spare time, he conducted extensive research on Iran and Iranian history.

    This Article Has Images/Tables.