i. THE TERM

Dīvān is a Persian loan-word in Arabic and was borrowed also at an earlier date into Armenian. It is attested in Zoroastrian Middle Persian in the spellings dpywʾn and dywʾn. It has long been recognized that the word must go back to some derivative of Old Persian dipi-, (inscription, document), itself borrowed, via Elamite, from Akkadian ṭuppu and ultimately from Sumerian dub (clay tablet). Compare also Persian debīr (scribe), Middle-Persian dibīr, from *dipī-var-. Armenian divan, which occurs already in the translation of the Bible, could in theory represent an Arsacid Parthian *dēvān, but such a form would be most difficult to explain, as it is hardly imaginable that dipi- should have become *dē-. But the Armenian form could equally well be a later borrowing from Sasanian Middle-Persian dīvān (with -ī-), which (following Bailey) could continue an earlier Middle-Persian *diβi-vān, from the adjective *dipi-vān- (relating to documents) with contraction of -iβi- to -ī-. In this case, must one assume that the word was borrowed into Armenian after the Middle-Persian shift of post-vocalic -p- to -b/β- (i.e., not before the 3rd century) and, moreover, that the correct Middle-(and early New-)Persian form is dīvān, not *dēvān. To be sure, there is an often quoted fanciful etymology (e.g., in Aṣmaʿī, apud Jawāleqī, p. 70), according to which the Persians called the chancery dīvān because they considered the bureaucrats to be devils (dēvān), – a variant of this says that it was because they were crazed (dēvāna); either version seems to presuppose the pronunciation dēvān, but one need not attach much importance to this obviously facetious story. It does, however, seem that, probably as a result of this sort of popular etymology, there was a secondary pronunciation dēvān, which still survives in Tājīkī. (For the treatment of the Iranian vowels in Armenian loan-words see ARMENIA AND IRAN iv).