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BŪSTĀNĪ, MĪRZĀ MOḤAMMAD ʿABD-AL-ʿAẒĪM SĀMĪ (commonly known as Mīrzā ʿAẓīm Sāmī), poet and historian of Bukhara, born ca. 1256/1840 in the village of Būstān about 25 miles northeast of Bukhara. He studied in a madrasa in Bukhara and continued his education with the learned qāżī and poet Mollā Saʿd-al-­Dīn Māher,…

BUSTARD, any of a family (Otididae) of game birds of which three species, generally called hūbar(r)a in contemporary Persian, occur in Iran: the great bustard, Otis tarda L., the little bustard, O. tetrax L., and the houbara (bustard), Chlamydotis undulata Jacq. (see below for the specific Persian names of the…

BŪTĪMĀR, a semilegendary aquatic bird, also called ḡamḵᵛorak (lit. “the little griever”) according to some lexicographers, usually equated with Ar. mālek al-ḥazīn (reported by Damīrī, II, pp. 313-14, as meaning literally “the sad owner [of waters]”). The būtīmār is noted in Persian literature for a lore that can be traced…

BUYIDS (also Bowayhids, Buwaihids, etc.; Pers. Āl-e Būya), dynasty of Daylamite origin ruling over the south and western part of Iran and over Iraq from the middle of the 4th/10th to the middle of the 5th/11th centuries. The political background. Since the early days of the Arab conquest of Persia…

BŪZĪNA, monkeys. Other names for monkeys are: meymūn (common), ʿantar (vulgar), kappī (Mid. Pers. kabīg, borrowed from Indian kapí, Mayrhofer, Diction­ary I, p. 157), also būzana, abūzīna, būzanīna. Two myths of the creation of monkeys exist in the Zoroastrian literature. According to the first myth, monkeys are among those beings…

BŪZJĀNĪ, DARWĪŠ ʿALĪ (d. after 929/1522), a Sufi scholar attached to Aḥmad-e Jām and his descendants who in the 10th/16th century were numerous in several towns and villages of Khorasan. Būzjān, a large village near Jām (itself called Jām according to Yāqūt, Boldān II, p. 909 s.v. Zām), had been the…

BYRON, ROBERT (b. London, 26 February 1905; d. off Stornoway, 24 February 1941), travel writer and amateur historian of architecture. He was educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford. Among his books are: The Station. Athos, treasures and men (1928); The Byzantine Achievement, an historical perspective, A.D. 330-1453 (1929); and…

BYZANTINE-IRANIAN RELATIONS. I. Before the Islamic conquest. Introduction. From the middle of the 1st century b.c. the Middle East was dominated by the political rivalries of the empires of Rome and Iran. In a.d. 224 Ardašīr I overthrew the Parthians and founded the Sasanian dynasty, with its capital at Ctesiphon, which…

BYZANTIUM (Byzantion), contact with the Achaemenids (ca. 513-439 BCE). The Greek polis of Byzantium, in the European province of Thrace (OPers. Skudra), stood on the peninsula dividing the Bosporus from the Sea of Marmara; it thus played a pivotal role in the Greco-Persian wars. Though Achaemenid control of Byzantium was…

 B ENTRIES: CAPTIONS OF ILLUSTRATIONS   online entry caption text BĀB-E HOMĀYŪN Figure 4. Plan of the Arg of Tehran (late nineteenth century). After Feuvrier, Trois ans à la cour de Perse, Paris, 1906. BACTRIA i. Pre-Islamic Period Figure 5. Pre-Islamic Bactria. BACTRIAN LANGUAGE Figure 6. Sites at which Bactrian…

CABBAGE (Pers. kalam) Brassica oleracea L. vars. The word kalam (and its obsolete variant karam; see below) seems to be cognate with Greek krámbē, from which comes Arabic karanb/koronb (see Maimonides p. 92 n.; see also Kendī, p. 326 n. 262, where Levey refers also to Skt. karambhā on the…

ČĀČ (Ar. Šāš), the name of a district and of a town in medieval Transoxania; the name of the town was gradually supplanted by that of Tashkent (q.v.) from late Saljuq and Mongol times onwards. The pre-Mongol period. The province of Čāč lay on the right bank of the Syr…

ČAČ-NĀMA, Persian translation of an early anonymous Arabic history of Sind compiled at Arōr in the 3rd/9th century; it was translated some time after the year 613/1216 by ʿAlī b. Ḥāmed b. Abī Bakr Kūfī, an Arab scholar residing at the court of Qabāča (d. 625/1227) in northern Sind. For…

CADMAN, Sir John (b. Silverdale, Staffordshire, England, 7 September 1877, d. Bletchley, Buckingham­shire, 31 May 1941), named first Baron Cadman of Silverdale in 1937, director and later chairman of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) during the reign of Reżā Shah (1344-60 = 1304-20 Š./1925-41). Cadman studied mining engineering at Durham…