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CEŠT, a small settlement on the north bank of the Harirud and to the south of the Paropamisus range in northwestern Afghanistan, lying approximately 100 miles upstream from Herat in the easternmost part of the modern Herat welāyat or province. The present form of its name is Ḵᵛāja Češt. In…

ČEŠTĪYA, the name of an influential Sufi order in India, derived from a village east of Herat on the river Harirud called Češt. History. The beginnings of the Češtī Sufi tradition are accounted for in Amir Ḵᵛord’s (d. after 728/1328) Sīar al-awlīāʾ (pp. 40-44) and in Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt (pp. 322-30,…

CHAARENE (Gk. Khaarēnḗ), in Achaemenid times one of the easternmost Iranian provinces and the one closest to India (Strabo, 15.2.11). It must have been part of Ariana (see aria 2). Arachosia and the mountain ranges of eastern Afghanistan separated it from Aria (not Ariana, as in Strabo, 15.2.11). It may…

CHAGHATAY LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. Development of Chaghatay. Languages from three different Turkic language groups were spoken in Cen­tral Asia before the Russian conquest. Chaghatay is the common designation for a language belonging to the Western Uighur, or Eastern Turkic, language group, the easternmost of the three. The other two groups…

CHAGHATAYID DYNASTY, name given to the descendants of Čengīz Khan’s second son Čaḡatai, who reigned in Transoxania until ca. 771/1370 and in parts of Turkestan down to the 11th/17th century. Čaḡatai accompanied his father on his first campaigns against north China and subsequently on the great expedition to the West…

Chahārgāh title Chahārgāh genre/topic Azerbaijani muğam; Ghazal language Baghdadi Turkish performer Alim Qasimov, voice; Malik Mansurov, Azerbaijani tār; Elshan Mansurov, kamānča instruments Voice, Azerbaijani tār, kamānča composer   author/poet Fozuli first line of poem Ney kimi hәr dәm ki bәzmi-vәslini yad eylәrәm recorded by Radio France place of recording Paris…

CHALCOLITHIC ERA in Persia. Chalcolithic (< Gk. khalkos “copper” + lithos “stone”) is a term adopted for the Near East early in this century as part of an attempt to refine the framework of cultural developmental “stages” (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages) and used by students of western...

CHALDEANS (Kaldu), West Semitic tribes of southern Babylonia attested in Assyrian texts from the early 9th century B.C. By the middle of the 8th century they had lost their political and ethnic identity and became a constituent element in the population of Babylonia. Following Berossus, classical authors re­ferred to Babylonians…

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, INDUS­TRIES, AND MINES OF PERSIA (Oṭāq-e bāzargānī wa ṣanāyeʿ wa maʿāden-e Īrān; also called Oṭāq-e Īrān), a national federation of local chambers and syndicates created in Esfand 1348 Š./March 1970 through the merger of various local chambers of commerce and the national chamber of industries and mines…

CHAMBER OF GUILDS (Oṭāq-e aṣnāf), a federation of various guilds formed in 1350 Š./1971 under the “guild-organization act” (Qānūn-e neẓām-e ṣenfī) in most urban centers. The purposes were to provide a single organization for managing the guilds’ affairs, to establish state control over numerous guilds, to collect information and statistics…

CHAMPION, JOSEPH, ESQ. (b. London? ca. 1750, d. London? ca. 1813), English poet and translator of selections from the Šāh-nāma and other Persian poetry. Champion was the son of Joseph Champion, of a Bristol Quaker family, by his second wife (Owen, pp. 38, 40, 41-42); he was thus a younger…

CHĀNGĀ ĀSĀ, an eminent Parsi layman who lived in the 15th-16th centuries a.d. at Navsari in Gujarat. In a passage in the Qeṣṣa-ye Sanjān (text in Unvala, ed., II, pp. 352.18-353.11; tr. in Hodivala, pp. 114-16) he is given the traditional Iranian titles of dahyvad (Pahl. dahibed, OIr. dahyupati-), which…

CHARACENE and CHARAX (Spasinou) in pre-Islamic times. Characene is the name Pliny gives for the later region of Mesene (called Mēšān or Mēšūn in Middle Persian, Maysān/Mayšān in Syriac, and Maysān in Arabic) in southernmost Mesopotamia, which formed a political district of that name in the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian…