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INDO-IRANIAN FRONTIER LANGUAGES. Since the time of the Achaemenid Empire, the territory of present-day Pakistan has been under the cultural and linguistic influence of successive stages of the Persian language. The political history of Persian in South Asia and its spread as the language of literature and politics is traced…

INDO-IRANIAN RELIGION. Indo-Iranian comparative studies enable us to distinguish a fund of religious concepts, beliefs, and practices that are common to ancient Iran and ancient India. It is methodologically possible to reconstruct some elements of an Indo-Iranian religion by using the surviving evidence of ideas and practices that seem to…

INDO-PARTHIAN DYNASTY, rulers over a large part of northwestern India from Seistan (portions of the present-day border provinces of that name of Iran and of Afghanistan) to Sindh on the Indus river at the beginning of the 1st century C.E. They came after the Indo-Greeks and the Indo-Scythians and were,…

INDO-SCYTHIAN DYNASTY from Maues, the first (Indo-)Scythian king of India (ca. 120-85 BCE) to the mid-1st century CE. When precisely and under what circumstances Maues arrived in India is uncertain, but the expulsion of the Scythian (Saka/Sai) peoples from Central Asia is referred to in the Han Shu, where the…

INDRA, the name of a demon (daēwa) in the Avesta. In sharp contrast to the Indra of the Ṛgveda [RV], the most celebrated god (devá) of the Vedic pantheon, whose defeat of the Snake of cosmic obstruction, Vṛtra, is an act of creation, the Indra of the Avesta is a…

INDUSTRIALIZATION, the foundation and development of modern industries in 20th-century Iran. Although Iran is generally characterized as an oil economy, the entries below show that Iran has a relatively rich history of industrialization going back to the early part of the 20th century. Perhaps understandably, much of this history is…

INDUSTRIALIZATION i. The Reza Shah Period And Its Aftermath, 1925-53 Prior to the 1920s, traditional crafts (q.v.) dominated the industrial scene in Iran; and, despite a growing interest in industrial modernization after the 1870s, the role of industry remained very limited in the economy at the turn of the 20th century…

INDUSTRIALIZATION ii. The Mohammad Reza Shah Period, 1953-79 Industrialization in Iran in the postwar period evolved in three distinct phases. These are: 1953-59, known as the semi-liberal phase; the short period of 1960-62, which was beset by crisis and recession; and finally the one and half decades between 1963 and…

INDUSTRIALIZATION iii. The Post-Revolutionary Period, 1979-2000s Industrial development in the post-Revolutionary period can be divided into two distinct phases. The first phase spans the 1980s covering the period from the 1979 Revolution to the end of the 1980s (including the war with Iraq during 1980-88). This period was influenced by…

INFLUENZA (flu, grippe), a common contagious infection of the upper-respiratory system caused by the Orthomyxovirus class of viruses. Members of the Orthomyxovirus family that infect humans include the Influenza-A Viruses (isolated in 1933), the Influenza-B Viruses (isolated in 1940), and the unusual Influenza-C (isolated in 1946), which predominantly infect lower…

INHERITANCE i. Sasanian period. ii. Islamic period.