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BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN iv. Geography Bīrūnī’s conceptions of the spherical shape of the earth and of the distribution of geographical features on its surface are those of Greek scientists, and especially of Ptolemy, as modified by earlier Muslim geographers. Thus he explains the Greek astronomers’ theory of the earth in…

BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN v. Pharmacology and Mineralogy Pharmacology. Bīrūnī, a traveler proficient in several Asian languages and an inquisitive and attentive ob­server, was interested all his life in gathering precise information on plants and their medicinal uses. At the end of his long life, he arranged them alphabetically in a…

BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN vi. History and Chronology Bīrūnī’s main essay on political history, Ketāb al-mosāmara fī aḵbār Ḵᵛārazm (Book of conversation concerning the affairs of Ḵᵛārazm) is now known only from quotations in Bayhaqī’s Tārīḵ-e masʿūdī (ed. Fayyāż, pp. 906ff.). In addition to this various discussions of historical events and…

BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN viii. History of Religions Bīrūnī is one of the most important Muslim authorities on the history of religion. In this article some of his remarks on pre-Islamic Iranian religions, on Christian­ity and Judaism, and on Muslim sects will be discussed (for Indian religions, see viii, below). There…

BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN viii. Indology Bīrūnī’s fame as an Indologist rests primarily on two texts. One is a translation from Sanskrit into Arabic of the yogasūtras of Patañjali, entitled Ketāb Bātanjal (The book of Patañjali). The other, Bīrūnī’s magnum opus, is Ketāb taḥqīq mā le’l-Hend men maqūla maqbūla fi’l-ʿaql aw…

BĪŠĀPŪR, ancient and medieval town in Fārs, in the Sasanian period the administrative center of one of the five districts in the province of Fārs. The name of the city derives from Middle Persian Bay-Šāpūr “Lord Šāpūr” (for a dis­cussion of the name see Sundermann, pp. 294-95). The name is…

Search terms:  بیشپ، ایزابلا      

BISOTUN, (Bīsetūn, Bīstūn, Behistun), the modern name of a cliff rising on the north side of the age-old caravan trail and main military route from Babylon and Baghdad over the Zagros mountains to Hamadān). i. Introduction ii. Archeology iii. Darius’s inscriptions

BISOTUN i. Introduction The original Old Persian form of the name Bīsotūn can be recovered from the Greek rendering Bagistanon (óros) “Mt. Bagistanon” in Diodorus (2.13.1, from Ctesias) as *Bagastāna “place or stand of the god(s)” (cf. Markwart, Ērānšahr, p. 71). In the works of medieval Arabic geographers like Ebn…

BISOTUN ii. Archeology Although the relief and inscription of Darius on the cliff have made Bīsotūn famous, there are also various other remains in the neighborhood, including some that were discovered or identified only in 1962 and 1963. All these remains will be described here in chronological order (see Figure…

BISOTUN iii. Darius’s Inscriptions The monumental relief of Darius I, King of Persia, representing the king’s victory over the usurper Gaumāta and the nine rebels (cf. ii, above), is surround­ed by a great trilingual inscription in Old Persian (text DB in Kent, Old Persian), Elamite, and Babylonian. This inscription is…

BĪSOTŪN, ẒAHĪR-AL-DAWLA ABŪ MANṢŪR b. Vošmgīr, the Ziyarid amir in Ṭabarestān and Gorgān (r. 357-67/967-78, not 356-66 as in Zambaur, pp. 210-11). The date of his father Vošmgīr’s (q.v.) death in a hunting accident is given by Ebn Meskawayh, Tajāreb II, p. 233, tr., V, p. 247, as 1 Moḥarram…

BĪSTGĀNĪ, Persian term for pay and rations of troops used in classical texts, corresponding to Arabic ʿešrīnīya. According to the 4th/10th-century encyclopedist Ḵᵛārazmī (Mafātīḥ al-ʿolūm, p. 65; Pers. tr., p. 66), in Khorasan ešrīnīya was paid four times a year. Qodāma b. Jaʿfar (d. 337/948-49) calls the troops’ pay tesʿīnīya…

BĪT BUNAKKI (or Bīt Burnakki/Purnakki), the name of an Elamite border city mentioned frequently in the eighth and seventh centuries in neo-Assyrian texts. It is first mentioned during the reign of Shamshi-Adad V; it then appears in a letter to king Sargon II and again in the royal inscriptions of…

BĪT HAMBAN (also Bīt Habban), a district on the Iranian-Iraqi frontier which first appears in Akkadian cuneiform sources after the fall of the Kassite dynasty (1157 B.C.) and which disappears from the records with the fall of the Assyrian empire in 612 B.C. No material has ever been scientifically excavated…