Explore Iranica

IRAN NATIONAL COMPANY, founded by brothers Aḥmad and Maḥmud Khayami with an initial capital of 100,000,000 Rls, and later directed by Maḥmud Khayami alone. Established in August 1962, it was the single pioneer of the automotive industry in Iran, assembling and manufacturing various motor vehicles, including buses, mini-buses, passenger cars,…

IRĀN, the title of five newspapers, of which four were published in Persia and one in Baghdad, Iraq. 1. IRĀN, the official organ of the Persian government, was published from 11 Moḥarram 1288 to 14 Ḏu’l-qaʿda 1326 (1 April 1871-8 December 1908), as a substitute when the publication of three…

IRAN v. PEOPLES OF IRAN In the following discussion of “Iranian peoples,” the term “Iranian” may be understood in two ways. It is, first of all, a linguistic classification, intended to designate any society which inherited or adopted, and transmitted, an Iranian language. The set of Iranian-speaking peoples is thus…

IRAN v(2). Pre-Islamic Period This survey focuses on the early phase of the Iranian-speaking peoples’ presence on the plateau, during the early state-building phase. It is driven, inevitably, by two major early resources: (a) the dahyus (on which see above, Introduction) enumerated in the Achaemenid inscriptions to define the extent…

IRAN vi. IRANIAN LANGUAGES AND SCRIPTS Overview. vi(1). Earliest evidence. vi(2). Documentation. vi(3). Writing-systems. vi(4). Origins of the Iranian languages. vi(5). Indo-Iranian. vi(6). Old Iranian languages.   OVERVIEW The term “Iranian language” is applied to any language which is descended from a proto-Iranian parent language (unattested by texts) spoken, presumably,…

IRAN vi, continued vi(1) Earliest Evidence Archeological identities of the proto-Indo-Iranians and proto-Iranians. The Indo-Aryan and Iranian tribes separated about 2000 B.C.E., but attempts to correlate the proto-Indo-Iranians with archeological sites are all problematic. Theories about this also have to take into account the presence of Indo-Iranian words in typically…

IRAN vi, continued vi(2) Documentation Iranian languages are known from roughly three periods, commonly termed Old, Middle, and New (Modern). Historically, this division corresponds roughly to (1) the pre-Achaemenid and Achaemenid period (down to 400-300 B.C.E.), (2) the period down to the Arab invasion of Iran and the spread of…

IRAN vi, continued vi. (3) Writing Systems Writing systems for Iranian languages include cuneiform (Old Persian); scripts descended from “imperial” Aramaic (q.v.; earliest monuments of Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, and Chorasmian); two Syriac scripts, Estrangelo or “Manichean” (Middle Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, Sogdian, Modern Persian) and “Nestorian” (Christian Sogdian, Modern Persian);…

IRAN vi, continued (4) Origins Of The Iranian Languages  General historical surveys of the Iranian languages are found in several collective works, notably M. Mayrhofer’s article in CLI (pp. 4-24). Rastorgueva and Edel’man (1975) is a typological survey of the Iranian languages, and another work of this kind is Windfuhr…

IRAN vi, continued (5) Indo-Iranian  Several important linguistic changes took place between Indo-European and Indo-Iranian, the reconstructed common ancestor of Iranian and Indian. The reconstruction of this proto-language is based primarily on the oldest recorded stages of Old Indic and Old Iranian, namely the Rigveda and the Old Avesta. Later…

IRAN vi, continued (6) Old Iranian Languages Proto-Iranian split into at least four distinct dialect groups, characterized, among other things, by the typical developments of the palatal affricates *ć, *j́ and the groups *ćw, *j́w. In Old Northwest Iranian, represented by the Alanic dialects and modern Ossetic, at some stage…

IRAN vii. Non-Iranian Languages of Iran This entry will discuss the non-Iranian languages spoken in Iran in the course of its history as the result of various peoples settling in parts of Iran and interacting with Iranian-speaking peoples who began to migrate to Iranian territories at the beginning of second…

IRAN vii, concluded (10) Aramaic Aramaic has been documented since the early first millennium B.C.E. The following stages can be distinguished: Old Aramaic, ca. 950–600 B.C.E.; Imperial Aramaic, ca. 600–200 B.C.E.; Middle Aramaic, ca. 200 B.C.E.–250 C.E.; Classical (Late) Aramaic, ca. 250–700 C.E.; New Aramaic, ca. 700 C.E. onward. Speakers…

IRAN vii, continued (2) Non-Iranian Languages in Pre-Islamic Iran Of the three known pre-Islamic languages (i.e., Urartian, Kassite, and Elamite) only Urartian and Elamite are fairly well known. Geographically they represent the northwestern and the southwestern corners of the plateau. Perhaps not surprisingly, the two are typologically almost diametrically opposed…