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IMMORTALS (Gk. athánatoi), name of a corps of 10,000 Persian élite infantry soldiers in Herodotus (7.83.1, 211.1; 8.113.2). The later attestations in Athenaios (q.v.), Deipnosophistai 12.514c (who is quoting Heracleides of Cumae); Hesychius, Lexicon s.v. (with the erroneous definition as a “cavalry detachment”); Procopius (1.14.31); and other sources obviously derive…

INĀLU. See ḴAMSA TRIBES.

ÏNĀNČ ḴĀTUN (Inānj Ḵātun), wife of the Atābeg Noṣrat-al-Din Jahān-Pahlavān Moḥammad b. Šams-al-Din Eldigüz (r. 571-82/1175-86), the Eldigüzid or Ildegizid ruler in Arrān, most of Azerbaijan, and then Jebāl. She was the daughter of the powerful Turkish governor of Ray, nominally for the later Saljuqs, Ḥosām-al-Din Ïnānč Sonqor, who was…

INCEST AND INBREEDING. Incest and inbreeding are two different but related aspects of marriage and human reproduction: the former a legal and culturally determined concept that regards specific cases of sexual relationship, the latter a biological notion that concerns processes and tendencies in the reproduction of a population. Next-of-kin marriage…

INDIA: relations with Iran. This subject will be treated in the following thirty-three entries. i. Introduction. ii. Historical geography: the ancient frontier with Iran. iii. Political and cultural relations: Achaemenid period. iv. Political and cultural relations: Seleucid, Parthian, Sasanian periods. v. Political and cultural relations: medieval period to the 13th…

INDIA i. INTRODUCTION By the close of the second millennium B.C.E. the speakers of related but already well-differentiated and internally diversified language groups, proto-Iranian and proto-Indo-Aryan (along with proto-Nuristani), were settling in the new homelands of Iran and India where their historical future lay. Existing cultural, as well as linguistic,…

INDIA ii. HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE ANCIENT FRONTIER WITH IRAN The geographical borders between the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent are well defined by a number of marked features, such as mountain ranges, which represent the western limits of the Indus River valley. From a historical and cultural perspective, however,…

INDIA iii. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RELATIONS: ACHAEMENID PERIOD Much of what has been written on the history of the cultural and political relations between ancient Iran and India concentrates on the Achaemenid period (cf. Weber and Wiesehöfer, 1996, pp. 614-16). While the complex question of Indo-Iranian origins is not discussed…

INDIA iv. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RELATIONS: SELEUCID, PARTHIAN, SASANIAN PERIODS Seleucus I (d. 281 B.C.E.), after establishing himself as heir of Alexander in western Asia, led an expedition to India (Matelli, 1987) ca. 305 B.C.E. It ended, however, with the cession of the territories of Paropamisadae, Aria, Arachosia, and Gedrosia…

INDIA v. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RELATIONS: MEDIEVAL PERIOD TO THE 13TH CENTURY The first political and military footholds of the Muslims in the subcontinent proper were in Sind, and at Multan in the middle Indus valley, secured in the early 8th century C.E., and were the work of troops from…

INDIA vi. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RELATIONS: FROM THE 13TH TO THE 18TH CENTURIES Relations between peoples of the Iranian plateau and India were extensive and uninterrupted between the 13th and 18th centuries. Migration, commerce, and politics all led to a range of cross-regional influences, most of which flowed from Iran…

INDIA vii. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RELATIONS: THE AFSHARID AND ZAND PERIODS The invasion of the Persian capital (Isfahan) by Ḡilzai Afghan (q.v.) forces in 1722 and the collapse of Safavid central authority had a marked impact on Indo-Persian relations, disrupting diplomatic relations between Persia and the Mughal empire in the…

INDIA viii. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RELATIONS: QAJAR PERIOD, THE 19TH CENTURY By the time of Āqā Moḥammad Khan’s (q.v.) founding of the Qajar dynasty in 1796, Persia’s diplomatic relations with the Mughal empire and other territories in the Indian subcontinent were gradually passing under the supervision of British authorities in…