Table of Contents

• PADERY, ETIENNE

  Anne-Marie Touzard

  (b. 1674; fl 1714-1725), Ottoman Greek who served as a translator to the French embassy at Istanbul, and as a French consul at Shiraz.

• PĀDYĀB

  Ramiyar P. Karanjia

  a Pahlavi word meaning “ritually clean,”.

• PAHLAVI PAPYRI

  Dieter Weber

  documents written exclusively in Egypt during the Persian (Sasanian) occupation under Ḵosrow II between 619 and 629 CE.

• PAHLAVI PSALTER

  Philippe Gignoux

  name given to a fragment, consisting of twelve pages written on both sides, of a Middle Persian translation of the Syriac Psalter.

• PAIRIKĀ

  Siamak Adhami

  a class of female demonic beings in the Avesta, often translated “sorceress, witch, or enchantress.”

• PALACE ARCHITECTURE

  Dietrich Huff

  The abundant variety of styles in Iranian domestic architecture conceals a basic functional system that has remained unchanged since the Achaemenid period.

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• PALEOLITHIC AGE IN IRAN

  Frank Hole

  The Paleolithic or ‘Old Stone Age’ begins with the first stone tools some 2.5million years ago in Africa, and it ends with the Neolithic or ‘New Stone Age,’ essentially at the beginnings of agriculture.

• PALM READING

  Mahmoud Omidsalar

  (chiromancy or palmistry; Pers. Kaf-bini), a form of physiognomy that deduces personal characteristics from the form of the lines on the subject’s palm.

• PANJIKANT

  Boris I. Marshak

  (Sogd. Pancyknδ), a Sogdian city, the ruins of which are located in the southern periphery of the present-day city of Panjakent in western Tajikistan. The systematic archeological excavations show that this city, situated on the rim of a high terrace overlooking a fertile, well-irrigated valley, was founded in the 5th century C.E. and was inhabited until the 770s.

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• PAPER AND PAPERMAKING

  Willem Floor

  By 650 CE, the Persians started to import Chinese paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree, though it was so rare a commodity that it was only used for important state documents.

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• PARIḴĀN ḴĀNOM

  Manučehr Pārsādust

  (1548-1578), the second daughter of Shah Ṭahmāsp I, a politically influential and colorful figure at the Safavid court.

• PARMENIO

  Ernst Badian

  (b. ca. 400 BCE, d. 330 BCE); probably from mountainous Upper Macedonia, he became Philip II’s most successful general.

• PARSI COMMUNITIES i. EARLY HISTORY

  John R. Hinnells

  The creation of a Parsi settlement in India was the outcome of the migration of Zoroastrian refugees from their original homeland in medieval Islamic Persia.

• PARSI COMMUNITIES ii. IN CALCUTTA

  Jesse S. Palsetia

  Calcutta became a center of Parsi settlement from the 18th century. Dadabhoy Behramji Banaji is recorded as the first Parsi to have come to Calcutta from Surat in western India in 1767.

• PASARGADAE

  David Stronach and Hilary Gopnik

  capital city and last resting place of Cyrus the Great (r. 559-530 BCE), located in northern Fārs in the fertile and well-watered Dasht-i Murghab (Dašt-e morḡāb), the site stands 1,900 m above sea level at 30°15’ N and 53°14’ E.

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• PAUL THE PERSIAN

  Byard Bennett

  writer at the time of the Nestorian Patriarch Ezekiel (567-580 C.E.), well versed in ecclesiastical and philosophical matters.

• PAYĀM-E MAŠREQ

  David Matthews

  Title of a collection of Persian verse by Muhammad Iqbal.

• PAYANDEH, ABU’L-QASEM

  Ṣafdar Taqizāda

  (1908/1911-1984), journalist, translator, and fiction writer.

• PEARL i. PRE-ISLAMIC PERIOD

  Brigitte Musche

  i. PRE-ISLAMIC PERIOD The oldest find of pearls in Persia comes from Tepe Giyan in Luristan, from levels dated to the mid-second millennium BCE.

• PEARL ii. ISLAMIC PERIOD

  Daniel T. Potts

  ii. ISLAMIC PERIOD In the Islamic era pearls have been widely used—strung to make necklaces or sewn onto textiles, used to decorate hats, crowns, daggers, and scabbards.