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GAṆDARƎBA- (var.gaṇdərəβa- or gaṇdaraβa-; Mid. Pers. Gandarw/Gandarb), a term attested the Avesta as the name of a monster living in the lake Vourukaṧa (see FRĀXKART; Yt. 5, 38; Mayrhofer, 1979, I, p. 153). He is son of Jam and of a witch (parīg) according to the Pahlavi Rivāyat (Williams, I,…

GANDHARA (OPers. Gandāra), a province of the Persian empire under the Achaemenids. The name of Gandhāra or Gandhārī occurs in ancient Indian texts as the name of a people, obviously the inhabitants of Gāndhāra, a district traditionally placed in the extreme northwest of the Indian subcontinent. It was located along…

GANDHĀRAN ART: Iranian contributions and Iranian connections. The region attained its peak of prosperity in the Kushan period (1st to 3rd centuries CE), when it became one of the strongholds of Buddhism, and developed an advanced urban life where the Gandhāra art flourished (Foucher, 1902, pp. 3-50; Deydera, 1950, pp….

GĀNDHĀRĪ LANGUAGE, the language of ancient Gandhāra (q.v.), the area around the Peshawar Valley in the modern North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, lying near the border of the Indian and Iranian linguistic areas. General. Gāndhārī belongs to the Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) family of Indian languages and is closely related to…

GANDOM, the New Persian word for wheat designating both the plant and the grain. All New Iranian names of wheat derive from Av. gantuma-. The middle consonant is unstable (Bal. gandim, Ṭālešī gandəm, Par. and Orm. ganom, Kurd. ganim, Khot. ganama), Yaghnobi (ḡantum/amtun < Sogd. γnt[w]m: γantom) being the only...

GANDOMAK, Treaty of, an agreement between Amir Moḥammad-Yaʿqub of Afghanistan (r. February to October 1879) and Major Pierre Louis Napoléon Cavagnari, representing the British Government of India, signed at the British army camp near the village of Gandomak, about seventy miles east of Kabul, on 26 May 1879, and ratified…

ḠANĪ, pen name of Mollā MOḤAMMAD-ṬĀHER KAŠMĪRĪ (1630-69), one of the most celebrated poets of Kashmir who wrote in the Indian Style (sabk-e hendī). He was a pupil of another famous poet from Kashmir, Shaikh Moḥammad-Moḥsen Fānī (q.v.; d. 1081/1670-71), through whom he met many other poets including Ṣāʾeb and…

ḠANI, MOLLĀ TĀHER KAŠMIRI  (d. 1079/1668-9): the most famous Persian-language poet of the region of Kashmir in South Asia. He practiced the “Speaking Anew” (tāza-guʾyi) stylistics of the ḡazal that had arisen across the Persian world in the early 1500s. In its intricate deployment of kinds of syllepsis, paronomasia, oronym…

ḠANĪ, QĀSEM (b. Sabzavār, 3 Ramażān 1310/21 March 1893; d. San Francisco, 9 Farvardīn 1331 Š./29 March 1952; Figure 1), physician, diplomat, and well-known scholar on the poet Ḥāfeẓ. He was a prolific writer and, during his many years abroad, corresponded with several eminent figures of the time. His diaries,…

ḠANĪMAT KONJĀHĪ, MOḤAMMAD-AKRAM, also known as Ḡanīmat Panjābī (d. ca 1125/1713), a Persian poet from the Indian subcontinent, famous for composing Nīrang-e ʿešq. He was born and buried in the town of Konjāh, about 10 km south of Gujarat (Punjab Province, Pakistan) and about 100 km northwest of Lahore. Ḡanīmat…

ḠANĪZĀDA,MAḤMŪD b. Mīrzā Ḡanī Dīlmaqānī, liberal journalist, historian, and poet (b. Salmās, Jomādā II 1296/May-June 1879, d. Tabrīz. 30 Bahman 1313 Š./19 February 1936). As a young man, he pursued a career in commerce while occasionally writing articles for the liberal paper Ḥabl al-matīn. During a trip to Daghistan he…

GANJ-E ARŠADĪ, an Indo-Persian collection of sayings (malfūẓāt) of the Češtī saint of Jaunpour Aršad Badr-al-Ḥaqq (1047-1113/1637-1701), whose lineage is traced back in the book to the third caliph ʿOṯmān. It was compiled in 1134-35/1721-22 by Aršad’s son and successor Abu’l-Fayyāż Qamar-al-Ḥaqq from the notes made by Shaikh ʿAbd-al-Šakūr, a…

GANJ-E BĀDĀVARD (the treasure brought by the wind), name of one of the eight treasures of the Sasanian Ḵosrow II Parvēz (r. 591-628 C.E.) according to most Persian sources. The Šāh-nāma, however, mentions it also among the riches of a much earlier king, the Kayanid Kay Ḵosrow (ed. Khaleghi, IV,…