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  • GEORGIA vii. Georgians in the Safavid Administration

    Rudi Matthee

    Safavid interaction with Georgia and its inhabitants dates from the inception of the state in the early 16th century, when Georgians fought alongside the Qezelbāš in Shah Esmāʿīl I’s arm.

  • INDIA iii. RELATIONS: ACHAEMENID PERIOD

    Pierfrancesco Callieri

    The conquest by Darius I of the territories of the Indian subcontinent west of the Indus for the first time created a clear relationship between India and Iran.

  • KĀṮ

    Habib Borjian

    the old capital of Chorasmia, situated by the Oxus/Āmu Daryā river. Kāṯ owes both its glory and demise to the Oxus, an unending source of sustenance as well as destruction in human history.

  • HEDAYAT, SADEQ i. LIFE AND WORK

    Homa Katouzian and EIr

    Sadeq Hedayat was the youngest child of Hedā-yatqoli Khan Eʿteżād-al-Molk, the notable literary historian, the dean of the Military Academy.

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  • Isfahan xviii. JEWISH COMMUNITY

    Amnon Netzer

    According to Armenian sources, the Sasanian Šāpūr II transferred many Jews from Armenia and settled them in Isfahan. According to the Middle Persian text Šahristānihā ī Ērān, Yazdegerd I settled Jews in Jay (Gay) at the request of his Jewish wife Šōšan-doḵt.

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  • Great Britain v. British influence during the Reżā Shah period, 1921-41

    Stephanie Cronin

    During the reign of Reżā Shah (1925-1941) a profound transformation took place in both the character and the scope of British influence in Persia.

  • FĀRS v. Monuments

    Dietrich Huff

    The founder of the Sasanian empire, Ardašīr I (224-40), shifted the seat of power to the newly founded Ardašīr Ḵorra (Fīrūzābād), a circular city with palaces that are still preserved. His successor, Šāpūr I, built Bīšāpūr as his capital. Nevertheless, Eṣṭaḵr remained the most important city of Fārs until Shiraz surpassed it after the Islamic conquest in the 7th century.

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  • HORMOZD (1)

    cross-reference

    See AHURA MAZDĀ.

  • HADITH iii. IN ISMAʿILISM

    Ismail K. Poonawala

    Ismaʿilis had neither a Hadith collection of their own nor a distinct Ismaʿili law before the establishment of the Fatimid dynasty in North Africa in 297/909.

  • GEORGIA ii. History of Iranian-Georgian Relations

    Keith Hitchins

    Between the Achaemenid era and the beginning of the 19th century, Persia helped to shape Georgian political institutions, modified social structure and land holding, and enriched literature and culture. 

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  • CYRUS v. The Tomb of Cyrus

    Antigoni Zournatzi

    The tomb of Cyrus is generally identified with a small stone monument approximately 1 km southwest of the palaces of Pasargadae, in the center of the Morḡāb plain. According to Greek sources, the tomb of Cyrus II 559-29 B.C.E.) was located in the royal park at Pasargadae.

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  • GĪLĀN v. History under the Safavids

    Manouchehr Kasheff

    Gīlān has traditionally been considered by its local population as a land of two distinct regions divided by the course of Safīdrūd River.

  • BAM (2)

    X. De Planhol, M.-E Bāstānī Pārīzī

    (in Arabic, Bamm), a town in southeastern Iran, located on the southwestern rim of the Dašt-e Lūt basin at an altitude of 1,100 m. i. History and modern town. ii. Ruins of the old town.

  • AZERBAIJAN vii. The Iranian Language of Azerbaijan

    E. Yarshater

    Āḏarī (Ar. al-āḏarīya) was the Iranian language of Azerbaijan before the spread of the Turkish language, commonly called Azeri, in the region.

  • KANDAHAR iii. Early Islamic Period

    Minoru Inaba

    Kandahar and its surroundings have been an important junction connecting Iran and India since ancient times.

  • JAMʿIYAT-E MOʾTALEFA-YE ESLĀMI i. Hayʾathā-ye Moʾtalefa-ye Eslāmi 1963-79

    Ali Rahnema

    The Islamic Coalition of Mourning Groups was born almost two years after the death of Ayatollah Ḥosayn Ṭabāṭabāʾi Borujerdi in 1961.

  • MEDICINE i. INTRODUCTION OF WESTERN MEDICINE TO IRAN

    Shireen Mahdavi

    Western medicine was introduced to Iran by European physicians who began to arrive there from early nineteenth century onwards.

  • CERAMICS ii. The Neolithic Period in Northwestern Persia

    Mary M. Voigt

    The initial occupation of Persian Azerbaijan by farming groups took place in the second half of the 7th millennium B.C.E. The best known site of this period is Hajji Firuz (Ḥājī Fīrūz) Tepe, located in the Ošnū-­Soldūz valley and approximately contemporary with Hasanlu X (ca. 6000-5000 B.C.E.). 

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  • EDUCATION xiv. SPECIAL SCHOOLS

    Samineh Baghchehban-Pirnazar

    Until 1968 responsibility for children with special educational needs had fallen on the individual schools. In that year the National Organization for Special Education  was established as a general directorate under a deputy minister of education.

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  • Isfahan xiv. MODERN ECONOMY AND INDUSTRIES (2) Isfahan City

    Habib Borjian

    The stagnation experienced after the fall of the Safavids was even more marked in the 19th century, owing to European competition that had rendered many local industries practically extinct.

  • CERAMICS xiii. The Early Islamic Period, 7th-11th Centuries

    David Whitehouse

    Early Islamic pottery has been found in two main regions of Persia: Ḵūzestān and the Persian Gulf and the Persian plateau, including Khorasan. Study of all Islamic pottery of the first four hundred years has been dominated by the finds from Sāmarrā in Meso­potamia.

  • TABRIZ v. The city in the 19th century

    James D. Clark

    Tabriz surpassed Isfahan in population early in the nineteenth century to become the most populous city in Iran. The city was centrally situated relative to the three neighboring regions with which most of its trade was conducted and to which people from the province traveled: the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, and central Iran. 

  • KUSHAN DYNASTY iii. Chronology of the Kushans

    H. Falk

    Dates in South Asia usually lack precision. Only in post-Kushan times do we meet with dates which are verifiably precise up to the day. The reason is that years can start in spring, the Indian way, or in the autumn, the Macedonian way. Years start with a certain month, but months can start with the full moon or with the new moon.

  • INDIA xxv. MUTUAL MYSTICAL INFLUENCES

    cross-reference

    See under SUFISM.

  • AZERBAIJAN i. Geography

    X. de Planhol

    characterized by volcanic constructions—along the “volcanic cicatrix” that follows the internal ridge of the Zagros and marks its contact with the central Iranian plateau. 

  • EDUCATION viii. NURSERY SCHOOLS AND KINDERGARTENS

    Tūrān Mīrhādī

    Formalized preschool education in Persia can be traced back to ca. 1891, when Armenians in Jolfā, near Isfahan, founded a kindergarten, which continues today. By 1919 there were a few kindergartens in Tehran and other cities, primarily founded by missionaries and minority groups.

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  • CHINESE-IRANIAN RELATIONS viii. Persian Language and Literature in China

    EIr

    The earliest Persian inscription in China is the tombstone of the Zoroastrian Ma (Pahl. *Māhnūš), wife of General Su-liang (Pahl. Farroxzād; Humbach), inscribed in both Pahlavi and Chinese and dated 874, has been discovered at Xi-an, the capital of Shan-xi province.

  • Isfahan xi. SCHOOL OF PAINTING AND CALLIGRAPHY

    Massumeh Farhad

    The “Isfahan” school of painting and calligraphy generally refers to works of art associated with the city, when it was chosen as the Safavid capital. The school has two distinct phases of first the followers of Reżā ʿAbbāsi and then the European style.

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  • ISMAʿILISM ii. ISMAʿILI HISTORIOGRAPHY

    Farhad Daftary

    The general lack of Ismaʿili interest in historiography is well attested by the fact that only a few works of historical nature have been found in the rich corpus of Ismaʿili literature.

  • CYRUS i. The Name

    Rüdiger Schmitt

    Cyrus is a Persian name, most notably of the founder of the Achaemenid empire, Cyrus the Great and of the second son of Darius II.

  • TABRIZ x. MONUMENTS x(1). The Blue Mosque

    Sandra Aube

    (Pers. Masjed-e kabud), also known as Masjed-e Moẓaffariya, built during the rule of the Qarā Qoyunlu dynasty (1351-1469) and completed in 1465. The extant tilework documents artistic connections with contemporary architecture in Timurid Khorasan and in the Ottoman Empire.

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  • GILAN xviii. Rural Production Techniques

    Christian Bromberger

    Chaff produces a great amount of smoke and was once used to punish miscreants or disobedient children who were locked up in the dud otāḡ (literally “smoke room,” where sheaves of rice were dried and cocoons stifled). This punishment was called fal-a dud (“the smoke from the rice chaff”).

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  • GERMANY v. German travelers and explorers in Persia

    Oliver Bast

    Hans Schiltberger, a Bavarian soldier, was the first German to give an eyewitness account of his travels in Persia. Initially captured by the Ottomans in 1396, he later became a prisoner of Tīmūr at the battle of Ankara (1402).

  • KURDISH LANGUAGE i. HISTORY OF THE KURDISH LANGUAGE

    Ludwig Paul

    from Old and Middle Iranian times, no predecessors of the Kurdish language are yet known; the extant Kurdish texts may be traced back to no earlier than the 16th century CE.

  • INDIA xxii. PERSIAN INFLUENCE ON INDIAN ARCHITECTURE

    cross-reference

    See DECCAN ii; DELHI SULTANATE ii; GARDEN iii; HYDERABAD ii.

  • ŠĀH-NĀMA v. ARABIC WORDS

    John Perry

    Moïnfar calculates that the Šāh-nāma contains 706 words of Arabic origin, occurring a total of 8,938 times. The 100 words occurring most frequently account for 60 percent of all occurrences.

  • EDUCATION iv. THE MEDIEVAL MADRASA

    Christopher Melchert

    lit., “place to study” Ar. darasa “to study”. It was a college for the professional study of the Islamic sciences, particularly jurisprudence (feqh) but also the Koran, Hadith, and such ancillary fields as Arabic grammar and philology, knowledge of which helped in understanding sacred and legal texts.

  • CHINESE-IRANIAN RELATIONS iii. In the Mongol Period

    Liu Yingsheng and Peter Jackson

    The incorporation of Persia into a vast empire that extended as far as China, following the conquests of Čengīz (Chinggis) Khan (602-24/1206-27) and his grandson Hülegü (Hūlāgū; 654-63/1256-65), inaugurated an era of intense contact between Persia and China. 

  • KAYĀNIĀN xiii. Synchronism of the Kayanids and Near Eastern History

    Prods Oktor Skjærvø

    The desire of the medieval historians to fit all the ancient narratives into one and the same chronological description of world history from the creation led them to coordinate the Biblical, Classical, and Iranian sources.

  • IRAQ v. AFSHARIDS TO THE END OF THE QAJARS

    Ernest Tucker

    The collapse of the Safavid dynasty in the 1720s ushered in a new round of conflict in Iraq that would continue through the first half of the 18th century.

  • KUHPĀYA i. The District

    Habib Borjian

    Kuhpāya is a large piedmont boluk (3,000 km2) separated from Ardestān on the north and Nāʾin on the east respectively by the Fešārk and Kuhestān chains, extensions of the Karkas range.

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  • Isfahan x. Monuments (2) Palaces

    Sussan Babaie with Robert Haug

    European visitors to Safavid Persia, for example, found themselves increasingly bound by Isfahan, where they were able to gain a royal audience or conduct their business with the court and government bureaucracy without having to follow the itinerant monarchs.

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  • ART IN IRAN v. SASANIAN ART

    P. O. Harper

    There are major remains of many different types: monumental rock reliefs, silver vessels, stucco architectural decoration, and seals.

  • Italy viii. PERSIAN MANUSCRIPTS

    Paola Orsatti

    Italy houses 439 Persian manuscripts in two public archives and thirty public libraries located in fifteen different cities.

  • HISTORIOGRAPHY v. TIMURID PERIOD

    Maria Szuppe

    Timurid historiography is firmly rooted within the Persian literary tradition of official court histories of the post-Mongol period.

  • GILĀN xx. Handicrafts

    Christian Bromberger

    Gilān was a region that produced raw materials (including silk), to which one came for supplies, much more than a region where finished products were made; and the area long remained rural, with only minor importance accorded to towns housing professionals, workshops, and master craftsmen.

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  • FESTIVALS vi, vii, viii

    Moojan Momen, Amnon Netzer, A. Arkun

    vi. BAHAI, vii. JEWISH, viii. ARMENIAN.

  • HAFEZ xii. HAFEZ AND THE VISUAL ARTS

    Priscilla Soucek

    The 16th century constitutes the apex in production for illustrated copies of Hafez’s Divān; they were made in several places for a range of patrons. The largest group of the illustrated Hafez manuscripts was produced in Shiraz, the most impressive among them dating to the 1580s.

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  • GEOGRAPHY i. Evolution of geographical knowledge

    Xavier de Planhol

    Geography of Persia and Afghanistan. The concept of Iran and ancient Iranian geography (Justi; Spiegel, I, pp. 188-243 and especially pp. 210-12; Herzfeld, pp. 671-720; Gnoli, 1980, 1989).

  • GERMANY i. German-Persian diplomatic relations

    Oliver Bast

    Around 1555 a man coming from Italy, who called himself the son of the “king of Persia,” turned up at the University of Wittenberg.

  • KAWĀD I i. Reign

    Nikolaus Schindel

    The reign of Kawād I, lasting with an interruption of some three years from 488 to 531, is a turning point in Sasanian history.

  • INDIA xvi. INDO-PERSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

    Stephen F. Dale

    Historical works in Persian began to appear in India in the era of the Delhi Sultanate during the late 13th to 14th centuries.

  • GILĀN xiii. Kinship and Marriage

    Christian Bromberger

    According to a 1991 sample survey, in Iran, the plain of Gilān has the lowest proportion of marriages whether with paternal or maternal cousins or with a near or distant (non-consanguineous) relation. 

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  • KAYĀNIĀN viii. Kay Luhrāsp, Kay Lohrāsb

    Prods Oktor Skjærvø

    In the Avesta, Vištāspa’s father is Auruuaṯ.aspa, who is mentioned only once, when Zarathustra asks Anāhitā for the ability to make Vištāspa, son of Auruuaṯ.aspa, help the daēnā along with thoughts, words, and deeds, a wish he is granted. 

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  • ISFAHAN vi. MEDIEVAL PERIOD

    Hossein Kamaly

    The history of Isfahan prior to the city’s efflorescence in the 17th century often traced alternating cycles of urbanization and de-urbanization.

  • CLOTHING xxii. Clothing of the Caspian area

    Christian Bromberger

    In several aspects the traditional dress (Gīlaki lebās; Ṭāleši ḵalā) of Gīlān and Māzandarān bears a struc­tural resemblance to that of other rural regions of Persia. It is constructed in successive layers, often of similar pieces superimposed, like women’s skirts or men’s shirts in winter. 

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  • CYRUS iiia. Cyrus II as Portrayed by Xenophon and Herodotus

    Robert Faulkner

    Xenophon, in his work The Education of Cyrus, makes Cyrus’s imperial founding the theme of a biography; for Herodotus, that founding dominates only Book 1 of nine parts apparently devoted to the Persian-Greek wars decades later.

  • GILAN xvi. FOLKLORE

    Christian Bromberger

    Even today, old women believe that cutting down an āzād tree is an act of sacrilege. Whether they are themselves objects of worship or simply grow near the tombs of saints, near cemeteries or inside mosques, these trees are places of devotion, each one dedicated to a specific type of wish (naẕr).

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  • ISLAM IN IRAN vi. THE CONCEPT OF MAHDI IN SUNNI ISLAM

    Said Amir Arjomand

    The Savior is a descendant of the Prophet whose expected return to rule the world will restore justice, peace, and true religion.

  • ART IN IRAN ii. Median Art and Architecture

    P. Calmeyer

    We know that Medes were mentioned in neo Assyrian annals from the year 836 B.C. onwards; as late as in King Esarhaddon’s vassal treaties (672 B.C.) they are represented by petty princes: central kingship had not yet been established, the foundation of which was later ascribed to the legendary judge, Deïokes.

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  • CORRESPONDENCE iii. Forms of opening and closing, address, and signature

    Hashem Rajabzadeh

    In this article the parts of the Persian letter are surveyed section by section, with comments on the general features, style, and stock formulas characteris­tic of each from early Islamic times to the present.

  • HERODOTUS iv. CYRUS ACCORDING TO HERODOTUS

    Robert Rollinger

    The historical past takes on clearer outline beginning with the figure of Cyrus the Great. With him the Persians too are introduced into world history.

  • Italy iv. TRAVEL ACCOUNTS

    Michele Bernardini, Anna Vanzan

    Italian travel accounts represent a major source for the history of Iran, especially that of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

  • ARMENIA i. IMAGE OF PERSIANS IN

    Robert Thomson

    In the Sasanian period Armenians developed a self-awareness as Christians against the background of their earlier Iranian social and religious culture.

  • GILĀN xix. Landholding and Social Stratification

    Christian Bromberger

    Prior to the Land Reform of 1962 that began the process of land redistribution, the dominant production system in Gilān, as in the majority of Persianprovinces, was of a feudal nature.

  • HAFEZ vi. PRINTED EDITIONS OF THE DIVĀN OF HAFEZ

    Bahaʾ-al-Din Khorramshahi and EIr

    Printed editions of Hafez’s poems include partial and complete collections, non-critical and critical editions, in lithographic, calligraphic, facsimile, and typeset formats. The first printed edition was commissioned by Richard Johnson of the East India Company and published by Upjohn’s Calcutta press in 1791.

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  • ḴĀQĀNI ŠERVĀNI ii. Works

    Anna Livia Beelaert

    a major Persian poet and prose writer (b. Šervān, ca. 521/1127; d. Tabriz, between 582/1186-87 and 595/1199). Ḵāqāni’s fame rests on his qaṣidas, of which, in Żiāʾ-al-Din Sajjādi’s edition, there are one hundred and thirty-two.

  • INDIA viii. RELATIONS: QAJAR PERIOD, THE 19TH CENTURY

    Mansour Bonakdarian

     By the time of Āqā Moḥammad Khan’s founding of the Qajar dynasty in 1796, Persia’s diplomatic relations with the Mughal empire and other territories in the Indian subcontinent were gradually passing under the supervision of British authorities in India.

  • BAHAISM vii. Bahai Persecutions

    D. M. MacEoin

    Bahai persecutions were a pattern of continuing discriminatory measures against adherents and institutions of the Bahai religion, punctuated by outbreaks of both random and organized violence.

  • KAYĀNIĀN iii. Kauui Kauuāta, Kay Kawād, Kay Kobād (Qobād)

    Prods Oktor Skjærvø

    Kauui Kauuāta has no epithets in the Avesta to describe him, and the descriptions in the Pahlavi sources are mostly vague. His seed is from the xwarrah; he was the first to establish kingship in Iran; he was godfearing and a good ruler. According to a notice in the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, he may have married Wan, daughter of Gulaxš.

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  • ISFAHAN iii. POPULATION (2) Isfahan Province

    Habibollah Zanjani

    In 2001, the sub-provinces of Isfahan (with more than 1.6 million), Kāšān, and Najafabād (with more than 300,000) were the most populated, while the sub-provinces of Naṭanz, Fereydunšahr, and Ardestān were the least populated with populations of less than 50,000 persons.

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  • PERSIAN LANGUAGE i. Early New Persian

    Ludwig Paul

    Early New Persian is the first phase (8th-12th centuries CE) of the Persian language after the Islamic conquest of Iran.

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  • FĀRS ii. History in the Pre-Islamic Period

    Josef Wiesehöfer

    The history of early pre-Islamic Fārs is most closely interwoven with that of its eastern and western neighbors. Agrarian settlements had been established (by immigrants?) in the Muški phase in the Kor basin, a widely and well researched area, before 5,500 B.C.E.

  • HAFEZ i. AN OVERVIEW

    Ehsan Yarshater

    Hafez is the most popular of Persian poets. Many of his lines have become proverbial sayings, and there are few who cannot recite some of his lyrics.

  • INDIA iv. RELATIONS: SELEUCID, PARTHIAN, SASANIAN PERIODS

    Pierfrancesco Callieri

    Seleucus I (d. 281 BCE) led an expedition to India (Matelli, 1987) ca. 305 B.C.E. It ended, however, with the cession of  territories to a new Indian king, Candragupta Maurya.

  • BAHAISM ii. Bahai Calendar and Festivals

    A. Banani

    The Bahai year consists of 19 months of 19 days each, i.e., 361 days, with the addition of four intercalary days between the 18th and the 19th months in order to adjust the calendar to the solar year. The Bāb named the months after the attributes of God.

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  • ECONOMY vi. IN THE TIMURID PERIOD

    Maria E. Subtelny

    The Timurid invasions against the Kartid rulers of Khorasan, which began in 783/1381, caused socioeconomic dislocation and unprecedented wholesale destruction and pillaging of towns, as well as brutal massacres of their populations.

  • CERAMICS ix. The Bronze Age in Northeastern Persia

    Serge Cleuziou

    Archeologists have traditionally linked the ap­pearance of burnished gray wares at Tepe Hissar (Ḥeṣār) and Tureng (Tūrang) Tepe in Gorgān during the second half of the 4th millennium b.c., and their possible diffusion westward in the first half of the 2nd millennium.

  • OSSETIC LANGUAGE ii. Ossetic Loanwords in Hungarian

    J.T.L. Cheung

    One of the features of Ossetic is the number of lexical traces that show ancient contacts with many, often very diverse, ethnic groups.

  • FRANCE i. Introduction

    Jean Calmard

    Compared to the long-standing history of Persian civilization, France emerged as a powerful entity endowed with its own distinctive culture only in the 13th century C.E., i.e. the great century of Christianity.

  • TENTS in Iran

    Multiple Authors

    A portable dwelling characteristic of certain nomad groups. It consists of a canopy of cloth or skin supported by upright posts and anchored to the ground by means of pegs and ropes.

  • Isfahan xx. GEOGRAPHY OF THE MEDIAN DIALECTS OF ISFAHAN

    Habib Borjian

    The continuum of Central Plateau Dialects appears along a northwest-souteast axis traversing the modern provinces of Hamadān, Markazi, Isfahan, and Yazd, that is, the area of Ancient Media Major.

  • ŠĀH-NĀMA — EXCURSUS

    Amin Banani

    Essay: “Reflections on Re-reading the Iliad and the Shahnameh” by Amin Banani.

  • Great Britain vii. British Travelers to Persia

    Denis Wright

    The British, more than any others, have been prolific authors of travelogues, and memoirs about Persia.

  • FĀRS vii. Ethnography

    Pierre Oberling

    The largest part of the population of Fārs is of Iranian stock, but since the rise of Islam in the 7th century there has been substantial immigration of peoples of other ethnic origins into the province.

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  • BRONZE ii. In Islamic Iran

    James W. Allan

    The most common copper alloys in use in Iran were brass and a quaternary alloy of copper, lead, zinc, and tin. As for bronze, two alloys should be differentiated: low-tin bronze, with a tin content of 10 percent or less, and high-tin bronze, with a tin content of about 20 percent.

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  • HORMOZD I

    M. RAHIM SHAYEGAN

    Sasanian great king (r. 272-73 CE), the throne name of Šāpur I’s son and and successor, Hormozd-Ardašēr.

  • GEORGIA iv. Literary contacts with Persia

    Aleksandre Gvakharia

    The tribes of Georgia had a well-established and vast literary tradition and folklore long before the Christian era. None of the pre-Christian Georgian literary works have survived, however. Christianity became established in Georgia as an official religion at the beginning of the 4th century.

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  • GĪLĀN vii. History in the 19th century

    EIr and Reza Rezazadeh Langaroudi

    Sealed off by mountains from the rest of the country, political and social life in Gīlān had always been highly influenced, if not determined, by its geographical position. The history of 19th-century Gīlān began with the continuation of the binary division of Bīa-pas and Bīa-pīš and the rule of local families.

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  • NAVY i. Nāder Shah and the Iranian Navy

    Michael Axworthy

    earliest moves toward establishing a navy arose out of the consequences of his military campaigns in the interior of Persia.

  • KANDAHAR v. In the 19th Century

    Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

    city in southern Afghanistan (lat 31°36′28″ N, long 65°42′19″ E), the second most important in the country and the capital of Kandahar province.

  • ECONOMY ii. IN THE PRE-ACHAEMENID PERIOD

    Robert C. Henrickson

    Pre-Median Persia was a crucial economic component of ancient southwest Asia from the earliest times.

  • CERAMICS iv. The Chalcolithic Period in the Zagros Highlands

    Elizabeth F. Henrickson

    The Zagros Chalcolithic may be divided into Early, Middle, and Late subperiods. Within each several distinctive regional assemblages are known in varying arche­ological detail. 

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  • GEORGIA i. The land and the people

    Keith Hitchins

    At a crossroads of great empires to the east, west, and north throughout their history, the Georgians absorbed and adapted elements from the cultures of diverse peoples, while at the same time defending their political and cultural independence against all comers. The Georgians are today distinguished by a unique cultural heritage.

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  • EDUCATION xv. FOREIGN AND MINORITY SCHOOLS IN PERSIA

    EIr

    Modern education was introduced to Persia in the 19th century by European and American religious institutions and military advisers.

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  • Isfahan xvi. FOLKLORE AND LEGEND

    Mahmoud Omidsalar

    Systematic collection of the folklore of Isfahan is mostly due to Amirqoli Amini, whose first publication was a collection of Persian dicta entitled hazār o yak soḵan.

  • FĀRS i. Geography

    Xavier de Planhol

    comprised of the highland basins. East of the meridian of Bušehr and Isfahan, the Zagros mountain chains, which gradually decrease in altitude toward the southeast but still mostly remain above 2,000 and sometimes 3,000 m.

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  • GREAT BRITAIN ii. An Overview of Relations: Safavid to the Present

    Denis Wright

    Prior to the Safavid period, contacts between Britain and Persia were confined to the 13th century, and were infrequent and of short duration.

  • KALILA WA DEMNA ii. The translation by Abu’l-Maʿāli Naṣr-Allāh Monši

    Mahmoud Omidsalar

    Naṣr-Allāh’s Persian version of the Kalila wa Dimna is not a translation in the strict sense of the term, but a literary creation in its own right. 

  • KAWĀD I ii. Coinage

    Nikolaus Schindel

    Since the reign of Jāmāsp interrupts the two regnal periods of Kawād I, and because of marked differences between the two, they should be treated separately. Kawād employs only one obverse and one reverse type during his first reign. The obverse shows the king’s bust to the right wearing a crown consisting of a crescent and two mural elements. 

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