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EPHESUS, SEVEN SLEEPERS OF, Christian legend attested by texts in many languages. A page of the manuscript C2 (preserved in the Turfan collection of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, and most recently edited by Sims-Williams, pp. 154-57) was identified by Martin Schwartz as belonging to a Sogdian version…

EPICS,narrative poems of legendary and heroic content. Classical Persian literary theory did not recognize the epic as a distinct genre and included works discussed here under the general heading maṯnawī. Modern Persian critics have coined for them the term ḥamāsa-sarāʾī, roughly “heroic poetry.” These works, however, have nothing in common…

EPIGRAM, originally a Greek word meaning “inscription” and denoting in Western literatures a genre of short poems characterized by their contents and style rather than by a specific prosodic form. The term epigram is most often used for satire and light verse, but it has also been applied to aphoristic…

EPIGRAPHY, the study of inscriptions, particularly their collection, decipherment, interpretation, dating, and classification.i. Old Persian and Middle Iranian epigraphy.ii. Greek inscriptions from ancient Iran.iii. Arabic inscriptions in Persia.iv. Safavid and later inscriptions.v. Inscriptions from the Indian subcontinent.vi. Ossetic epigraphy. See OSSETIC.vii. Early Persian epigraphy. See SUPPLEMENT.

EPIGRAPHY i. Old Persian and Middle Iranian epigraphy Definitions, classification, and method. Inscriptions are texts carved, incised, or engraved on durable materials like stone and metal. Often they are public messages intended to be permanent, but graffiti scratched, drawn, or painted on walls are also included. Manuscripts, on the other…

EPIGRAPHY ii. Greek inscriptions from ancient Iran Introduction. In April 1815 the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin enthusiastically accepted the proposal by August Boeckh to produce a comprehensive thesaurus of inscriptions that would include all Greek inscriptional material published to date. When in 1853 Johannes Franz published the third…

EPIGRAPHY iii. Arabic inscriptions in Persia In Persia, as in the rest of the Islamic lands, Arabic was the basic language for foundation and religious texts on buildings and objects. In the early Islamic period these texts were usually written in some variant of the angular script known as Kufic…

EPIGRAPHY iv. Safavid and later inscriptions The principal characteristic of epigraphy in Persia after the advent of the Safavids (907/1501) is the emphasis on Persian poetry and pious Shiʿite texts with an iconographic potency and deliberate frequency hitherto unknown. Arabic remained the language of koranic and Hadith quotations while Persian…

EPIGRAPHY v. Inscriptions from the Indian subcontinent The systematic survey and study of Perso-Arabic epigraphy of the Indian subcontinent is not even half a century old. Studies of the Indian region, also of recent origin, have been done by the Perso-Arabic section of the Epigraphy Branch of the Archaeological Survey…

EPIPHANIUS (b. ca. 315 [?] near Eleutheropolis, Judaea; d. 403 in Constantia, Cyprus), bishop of Constantia on Cyprus, founded on the remains of Salamis. His main work is the Panárion (Latin title, Adversus Haereses), in which he attacked eighty heresies. In this work (1.1.6; cf. Jackson, p. 188, 244) Epiphanius…

EPISCOPAL(ANGLICAN) CHURCH IN PERSIA (Kelīsā-ye osqofī-e Īrān), a diocese of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, one of thirty-seven independent churches of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church in Persia was established by British missionaries in the 19th century but was never part of the Church…