Explore Iranica

CHOARA and CHOARENE (Latin forms of Gk. Khóara, Khoarēnḗ, possibly from Ir. *huṷăra- or *xṷăra-, for which numerous etymologies might be constructed). Choara was a town or village in Parthia mentioned by Ptolemy (6.5.3) and called “the most attractive place of Parthia” by Pliny (Natural History 6.44). It was appar­ently…

CHOASPES (or Coaspēs; Lat. form of Gk. Khoáspēs, rarely Khóaspis, probably from OIr. *hṷ-aspa- “pos­sessing good horses”; Late Av. huuaspa- or Huuaspā- [Yt. 19.67], river flowing into Lake Hāmūn identified as the modern Rūd-e Ḵospās north of Ḵāšrūd in Baluchistan [Stein, p. 22]; OPers. uvasa-, hybrid Pers. and Median uvaspa-),…

CHOBANIDS (Chupanids, Pers. Čūpānīān), a fam­ily of Mongol origin descended from the amir Čobān (or Čūpān, Ar. Jūbān) Noyan. Its members ruled over Azerbaijan, Arrān, and parts of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and west central Persia from the death of Abū Saʿīd on 13 Rabīʿ II 736/30 November 1335 until the death…

CHODŹKO, ALEKSANDER BOREJKO  (b. 30 August 1804, in Krzywicze, Poland in the Russian Empire [the city is now in Belarus], d. Noisy-le-Sec, near Paris, 19 December 1891), Polish poet and diplomat, the first European scholar to work on Persian folklore. Between 1820and 1823 he studied at the university of Wilno/Vilna,…

CHOLERA (Cholera asiatica, Cholera indica), epidemic intestinal disease of Indian origin caused by infectious bacteria. i. In Persia. ii. In Afghanistan. i. In Persia In Persian cholera was usually called wabā (wabāʾ), the term for any epidemic disease, but sometimes also hayża, which was more correctly applied to clinically similar…

CHORASMIA (Gk. Chorasmiē < OPers. (H)uwārazmiš, Av. Xᵛāirizəm, later Ḵᵛārazm [Khwārazm], generally derived from *hwāra-zam/zmī-, either “nourishing land” [Burnouf, p. cviii; Sachau, p. 473; Geiger, p. 29; Pauly-Wissowa III/2, cols. 2406-08] or “lowland” [Lerch, p. 447; Veselovskiĭ, p. v; Kiepert, no. 60; MacKenzie, Camb. Hist. Iran III/2, p. 1244; Bogolyubov,...

CHORASMIA i. Archeology and Pre-Islamic History Prehistory. At the turn of the 3rd millennium B.C.E. the Neolithic Kel’teminar culture flourished in the Chorasmian oasis (Vinogradov, 1968; idem, 1981). Remains of the Bronze Age Suyargan (beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C.E.), Tazabag’yab (middle and late 2nd millennium B.C.E.), and Amirabad (10th-8th…

CHORASMIA ii. In Islamic Times The Islamic history of Ḵᵛārazm, as the name of the region appears in the Arabic and Persian sources, begins with the two invasions of Arab troops under the governor of Khorasan Qotayba b. Moslem Bāhelī in 93/712, who intervened in the region on the pretext…

CHORASMIA iii. The Chorasmian Language Chorasmian, the original Iranian language of Chorasmia, is attested at two stages of its development. Old Chorasmian was written in an indigenous script descended from the Aramaic, brought to the region by the administration of the Achaemenid empire and characterized by heter­ography, that is, the…

CHORASMIAN COINAGE, issued by the rulers of Chorasmia between the 2nd century BCE and the 8th century CE (see COINS AND COINAGE, in EIr VI, pp. 14-17). These coins are important primary evidence for the Old Chorasmian language and the region’s post-Achaemenid history because of the paucity of preserved sources for…

CHORIENES, Sogdian nobleman and opponent of Alexander. According to Arrian (Anabasis 4), when Alexander reached Nautaca in Sogdiana on his way to India, early in 327 b.c.e., he found the whole region well prepared for defense and the road ahead protected by strong fortresses. His first task was to make…

CHRISTENSEN, ARTHUR EMANUEL (b. Copenhagen 9 January 1875, d. Copenhagen 31 March 1945), Danish orientalist and scholar of Iranian philology and folklore. Apart from periods of travel and study abroad he spent his entire life in Copenhagen. He passed his secondary-school examinations (studentereksamen) in 1893 and in 1900 received from…

CHRISTIANITY i. In pre-Islamic Persia: Literary sources. ii. In pre-Islamic Persia: Material remains. iii. In Central Asia and Chinese Turkestan. iv. Christian literature in Middle Iranian languages. v. Christ in Manicheism. vi. In Persian literature. vii. Christian Influences in Persian Poetry. viii. Christian Missions in Persia.

CHRISTIANITY i. In Pre-Islamic Persia: Literary Sources In Middle Persian there are three terms used for Christians: KLSTYDʾN and NʾCLʾY in the inscription on the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt of the 3rd-century Zoroastrian high priest Kartir; and tarsāq, Sogdian loan-word trsʾq, New Persian tarsā. The first term represents Syriac kristyānē; the second,…

CHRISTIANITY ii. In Pre-Islamic Persia: Material Remains Apart from literary sources, evidence for Christian communities within the Sasanian empire is scarce. Although Christians may have been among the deportees from Roman Syria who worked on the monuments of Šāpūr I (240-70 c.e.) at Bīšāpūr and the dam at Šūštar (see deportations),…