Explore Iranica

LORIMER, David Lockhart Robertson (b. Strathmartine, near Dundee, Scotland, 24 December 1876; d. London, 26 February 1962), British Iranist and military and intelligence officer (see SOAS website for photographs). He was the son of Rev. Robert Lorimer. In 1910 he married Emily Martha Overend (1881-1949), who was a trained linguist…

LOTERĀʾI (Lutrāʾi, and phonic variants thereof), term used by Iranian Jews for speech characterized by local Judeo-Iranian grammar with a special exotic substitutive vocabulary which is employed in the presence of gentiles to prevent them from understanding. I will try here to show the early Achaemenid origin of Loterāʾi and…

LOUVRE MUSEUM i. IRANIAN ANTIQUITIES IN THE COLLECTIONS In 1793, when the Louvre Museum (Musée du Louvre) was created under the name of Central Museum of Arts (Musée Centrale des Arts), antiquities were exclusively represented by Greek and Roman sculptures. The items of Sassanid gold and silverware (which were not…

LOUVRE MUSEUM ii. PERSIAN ART IN THE ISLAMIC COLLECTION In 1893 a section devoted to “Muslim Art” was created within the Département des objets d’art, and from the outset objects from Persia have been a most important part of this collection. A few pieces of Persian Islamic art belonged to…

LUKONIN, Vladimir Grigor’evich (b. Leningrad, 21 January 1932; d. Leningrad, 10 September 1984, FIGURE 1), outstanding Russian scholar in the field of history and history of culture and arts of ancient Iran, from the earliest times until the end of the Sasanian period, as well as of the Kushan chronology….

LULUBI, country of a people who probably originated in southern Kurdistan; the form of the name is identical in both Sumerian and Akkadian, namely Lulubi and Lulubum respectively (for the various spellings see Klengel, 1965, p. 350; Edzard, Farber, and Sollberger, 1977, p. 111). The Early Dynastic Listof Geographical Names…

LURISTAN, a province of Iran. i. TBA ii. TBA iii. TBA iv. The Origin of Nomadism v. Religion, Rituals, and Popular Beliefs

LURISTAN BRONZES i. THE FIELD RESEARCH The label “Luristan bronzes” (see BRONZES OF LURISTAN) designates a series of decorated bronze objects in a specific local style dating from the Iron Age (ca. 1300/1250 to 700/650 BCE). These bronzes became known through large-scale illegal excavations starting in the late 1920s, but…

LURISTAN BRONZES ii. CHRONOLOGY OF LURISTAN AS REPRESENTED IN COLLECTIONS A few stray Luristan bronzes were acquired by European museums as early as the second half of the 19th century. At that time, however, their origin was unknown and scholars attributed them to various regions and cultures in the Near…

LURISTAN iv. The Origin of Nomadism Early patterns of settlement and mobility.  The large valleys and plains of Luristan are exceedingly fertile.  They have often been described as suited for agriculture as well as for pastoral nomadism, which seems to have been the prevailing lifestyle for hundreds of years (Mortensen…

LURISTAN v. Religion, Rituals, and Popular Beliefs The official religion.  Since the accession of the first Safavid shah (1502), the official religion in Iran has been the Eṯnā-ʿašariya (Twelver) Shiʿism, one of the two main branches of Islam.  A noteworthy point in this context is that the Lur society has…

LUSCHEY, Heinz (b. Berlin, 3 December, 1910, d. Tübingen, 1 January, 1992; Figure 1), German archaeologist and art historian of Iran and the Middle East. Luschey went to school in Stettin on the Oder in Germany and studied classical archaeology in Munich under Ernst Buschor. Already at an early stage,…

LUṬI, also luti (pl. alvāṭ), has a variety of meanings. The term was first mentioned by the tenth-century poet Kesāʾi, who equated the luṭis with catamites (tāzand mikyāz). For Jalāl- al-Din Rumi (13th century) and ʿObayd Zākāni (14th century) luṭis were pederasts, and the related word lavāṭi (sodomy) is still…

LYSANDER, Spartan commander and politician (b. ca. 454 BCE; d. 395 BCE). Since he acquired, and then lost, far greater power than any other Greek before the Hellenistic age and in the process sharply divided the Spartan citizen body, fiction (much of it denigratory) soon attached to his biography. At…