Explore Iranica

HĀTEFI, ʿABD-ALLĀH, Persian poet (d. Ḵargerd, 927/1521) and nephew of ʿAbd-al-Rahmān Jāmi. Hātefi was born in around 858/1454 at Ḵargerd, a village on the outskirts of the Khorasanian town Jām, in present-day Afghanistan (Kāboli, fol. 167a; other dates are less believable and contradictory, cf. Haft Manẓar, ed. and tr. Bernardini,…

ḤĀTEMṬĀʾI, the epitome of generosity and munificence in Arabic and Persian anecdotal traditions. Ḥātem b. ʿAbd-Allāh b. Saʿd Abu Saffāna (or Abu ʿAdiy) Ṭāʾi (Ebn ʿAbd-Rabbeh, I, p. 197; Waṭwāṭ, p. 65) is the most renowned of the so-called “three most generous men of pre-Islamic Arabia” (Ebn ʿAbd-Rabbeh), I, p….

ḤĀTEM-NĀMA, a popular prose romance by an unknown author, consisting of the imaginary adventures of Ḥātem (coll. Ḥātam) Ṭāʾi, the pre-Islamic Arab noble, renowned for his   boundless generosity and graceful hospitality.  Being very popular during the 17th and 18th centuries in the Indian subcontinent, numerous manuscripts of this narration have…

HATRA (Ḥaṭrā; Ar. Ḥażr), a strongly fortified city in Upper Mesopotamia (today northern Iraq), situated at 35° 40′ N and 42° 45′ E in the midst of the desert steppe of the northern Jazīra (the area between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris), about 3 km to the west of the…

HAUG, MARTIN, Oriental scholar and one of the founders of Iranian studies (b. January 30, 1827 in Ostdorf near Balingen, Württemberg, Germany; d. June 5, 1876 in Bad Ragaz, Kanton St. Gallen, Switzerland; Figure 1). He married Sophia Speidel (1819-96) in 1859 and had one son. The eldest of a…

HAUMAVARGĀ, a term distinguishing one of the three groups of Sakā tribes, Sakā haumavargā (like the Sakā tigraxaudā “with pointed caps” and the seemingly western Sakā tayai paradraya “beyond the sea” placed between Greeks and Thracians), in some of the lists of the peoples in the Achaemenid royal inscriptions: OPers….

ḤĀWI, AL- (i.e., al-Ketābal-ḥāwifi’l-ṭebb “Comprehensive book on medicine”), the title of a major Arabic work on medicine in twenty-five volumes by Abu Bakr Moḥammad b. Zakariyāʾ Rāzi (b. Rey [classical Rhagai, on the southern outskirts of modern Tehran], 1 Šaʿbān 251/28 August 865; d. 5 Šaʿbān 313/26 October 925; these…

ḤAYĀT-DĀWUDI, a sedentary Lor tribe dwelling in the dehestān of Ḥayāt-dāwūd, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Māhur-e Mīlāti mountains, northwest of Bušehr. According to A. T. Wilson, their ancestors came from the Behbahān region, supplanting a Persian population which, until about 600 years ago, was Zoroastrian (p. 170)….

ḤAYĀTI TABRIZI, QĀSEM BEG (قاسم بیگ حیاتی تبریزی), sixteenth-century Persian historian whose chronicle, which he refers to just as Tāriḵ, spans the period between the formative years of the Ṣafaviya Sufi order under Shaikh Ṣafi-al-Din Esḥāq Ardabili (d. 735/1334) and the opening years of the reign of Shah Esmāʿil I…