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MAŠREQ AL-AḎKĀR (the Dawning-Place of the Remembrance [of God]), a Bahai term having three meanings.  The first meaning is a gathering which is held, ideally at dawn, to say prayers and recite from scripture; the second meaning is a building to be constructed in every community in which this dawn gathering…

MASRUR, Hosayn (pen name of Ḥosayn Soḵanyār; b. Kupā, a village in southeast of the Isfahan Province, 1890; d. Tehran, 1968), 20th century novelist, poet, and literary scholar. Masrur’s father was a merchant and his mother came from a clerical family. He received his elementary education in Kupā and later…

MASSAGETAE (Gk. Massagétai), a mighty nomadic tribe reckoned to be Scythians already by Herodotus (1.201, 1.204.1; see also Stephanus Byzantius, s.v.), who settled somewhere in the wide lowlands to the east of the Caspian Sea and the southeast of the Aral Sea on the Ust-Urt Plateau and the Kyzylkum Desert,…

MASSON, Charles (alias of James Lewis: 1800-53), traveler, pioneering archaeologist and numismatist, who in 1832-38 produced the first comprehensive archaeological records of eastern Afghanistan from surveys of excavations of Buddhist sites, and a collection of coins and other finds primarily from the urban site of Begram and the Kabul bazaar….

MĀSULA, township and district (baḵš) in western Gilān. Located at lat 37°10′ N, long 48°59′ E, at an altitude of 1,050 m in the upper valley of the Māsula Rudḵān, Māsula was visited between late 18th and mid-19th century by a number of travelers following the caravan or pedestrian route…

MASʿUD (III) B. EBRĀHIM, ʿALĀʾ-AL-DAWLA WA’L-DIN ABU SAʿD, Ghaznavid sultan (r. 492-508/1099-1115), recorded on his coins with various other honorifics (see Bosworth, 1977, p. 83). He succeeded his father, Ebrāhim, probably after fratricidal succession disputes amongst his many brothers, though details are lacking; indeed, in the light of Masʿud’s apparently…

MASʿUD-E SAʿD-E SALMĀN (b. Lahore 1046-49?, d. 1121-22), Persian poet of the later Ghaznavid period. The first major Indo-Persian poet, Masʿud-e Saʿd-e Salmān is best known for the poetry he wrote in prison and in exile. Although later traditions about his life are unreliable, his divān provides a considerable amount…

MASʿUDI, ABU’l-ḤASAN ʿALI b. Ḥosaynb. ʿAli b. ʿAbd-Allāh Hoḏali, a tenth-century geographer and historian and an important source of information on pre-Islamic and early Islamic Iran. Reportedly a descendant of the Prophet’s companion ʿAbd-Allāh b. Masʿud (d. 32/652-53?), he was born in Baghdad, probably around 275/890. In addition to the…

MAS’UD, Mohammad (Moḥammad Mas’ud, b. Qom 1901; d. Tehran, 11 February 1948) novelist and editor of the controversial and highly popular newspaper Mard-e emruz (1942-1948). Mohammad Mas’ud was born to a poor religious family, and was brought up, in his own words, in “the midst of sanctity and piety.” (Bahār-e…

MATHESON, Sylvia Anne (b. London, 20 May 1916; d. Javea, Spain, 2 March 2006), writer, traveler, photographer, and archeologist (FIGURE 1). In the world of Persian art and archeology Sylvia Matheson will be especially remembered for her pioneering work, Persia: An Archaeological Guide, first published in 1972. Far more than…

MAURICE, Flavius Mauricius Tiberius Augustus (r. 582-602 CE; Figure 1), Roman emperor who helped restore Kosrow II (r. 590-628) to the Sasanian throne. Maurice was born in 539 in the undistinguished Cappadocian city of Arabissus.  He appears to have been a protégé of the Caesar Tiberius, whom he succeeded as…

MAWDUD B. MASʿUD B. MAḤMUD, ABU’L-FATḤ, sultan of the Ghaznavid dynasty (r. 432-41/1041-49), recorded on his coins with the honorifics Šehāb-al-Din wa’l-Dawla and Qoṭb-al-Mella. Mawdud inherited a Ghaznavid state that had just lost its western lands, namely Ray and the fringes of Jebāl, and Khorasan, to the Saljuqs, but was…

MAWLAWI, ʿAbd-al-Raḥim Maʿdumi (b. 1806, d. near Ḥalabja, 1882-83), a leading Kurdish poet of the 19th century who wrote in the Gurāni dialect of southeastern Kurdistan (FIGURE 1). He used the pen name Maʿdumi, but he is better known as the Kurdish Mawlawi (Mawlawi-e Kord). He was born in the…

MAYRHOFER, MANFRED, Austrian scholar of comparative Indo-European linguistics and Indo-Iranian studies (b. Linz, Austria, 26 September 1926; d. Vienna, 31 October 2011).  The son of an engineer, he completed his secondary studies in Linz in 1944 and was immediately called up to the Reich Labor Service and to the armed…