Explore Iranica

BĀZARGĀN, a village on the Turkish-Iranian frontier eighteen kilometers northwest of Mākū (West Azerbaijan province, šahrestān and baḵš of Mākū, dehestān of Qaḷʿa Daresī). The old village is located at an altitude of 1,550 meters on an alluvial cone above the Āqčāy river. The population, which is of Turkish origin,…

Search terms:  بازارگانی bazargani bazaargani bazargani bazargany baazargany    

BĀZDĀRĪ (or bāzyārī, lit. “bāz keeping,” now an obsolete Persian term), falconry, as a practical art and as a sport. Like falconry in the West, which was concerned primarily with keeping and training falcons, bāzdārī in Iran originally involved only the bāz—a generic term for some species and varieties of…

BĀZGAŠT-E ADABĪ, “literary return,” a move­ment for a return to writing poetry in the Ḵorāsānī and ʿErāqī styles, which began in the middle of the 12th/18th century and continued until the time of the Consti­tutional Revolution and after. The term was proba­bly first used by Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār. The origins of…

BĀZĪ (games). The word bāzī, Pahlavi wāzīg, prob­ably comes from the OIr. stem *waz- “to move, fly,” Pahlavi wāzīdan “to move, to play” (cf. N. Sims-Williams, “The Sogdian Fragments of the British Library,” Indo-Iranian Journal 18, 1976, p. 82, n. 116; Hübschmann, Pers. Studien, p. 22; Nyberg, Manual II, p….

BĀZRANGĪ, the family name of a dynasty of petty rulers in Fārs from whom Sāsān, the eponymous ancestor of the Sasanians, took a wife called Rāmbehešt, according to Ṭabarī (I, p. 814). At that time, he continues, the king of Eṣṭaḵr was a man of the Bāzrangīs (Bāzranjī) called Jūzehr…

Search terms: بازیار bazyar baazyar baz yar baaz yaar      

BE SŪ-YE ĀYANDA (Toward the future), Per­sian daily newspaper and unofficial publicity organ of the Communist Ḥezb-e Tūda (Tudeh party; q.v.), pub­lished 1950-53. Its original licensee and editor was Maḥmūd Žandī. During the newspaper’s three-year existence, Be-sū-ye āyanda was suppressed several times by government censors, and its office was attacked…

Search terms:  مهره mohre mohreh  

BEANS. This term is used in English in a wide sense to designate several plants (and their seeds) of different genera of the vast family Leguminosae. In this article it will be confined to the two genera Phaseolus (Tourn.) L. and Vigna Savi, i.e., to what is commonly called lūbīā…

BEAR, Pers. ḵers, Av. arša-. Two varieties of bears are found on the Iranian plateau: the Eurasian brown bear and the Baluchistan black bear (Figure 1). 1. Eurasian brown bear (Ursus arctos). The Eurasian brown bear is the most common of all bears. Its distribution includes the Pyrenees and Alps,…

BEAUSOBRE, ISAAC DE (1659-1738), pioneer of modern studies of Manicheism. Beausobre was a Frenchman from a family who had been Protestants (Huguenots) for several generations. Born at Niort in Poitou on March 8, 1659, he received a basic but incomplete education and, despite his parents’ wish that he should go…

BEAVER, Castor fiber L., semiaquatic mammalian rodent, in Persian commonly called sag-e ābī (lit. “aquatic dog”), no longer extant in Iran (Eʿtemād, I, and Harrington et al. do not mention it). As late as 1874 J. H. Schlimmer (p. 115) noted that “small numbers [of beavers] are found along the…