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ṢAWMAʿA SARĀ, city and district in western Gilān.  The city is located at lat 37°17′ N, long 29°19′ E, in the Fumanāt plain, at a distance of 25 km to the west of Rašt, the center of the province.  During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ṣawmaʿa Sarā was a…

ŠĀYEST NĒ ŠĀYEST (Proper and Improper; abbrev. Šnš), a work in the Middle Persian/Pahlavi language dealing with Zoroastrian jurisprudence and containing miscellaneous laws concerning sins, purity, and impurity. It also contains the description of religious rituals and ceremonies pertaining to each sin and the ways to compensate for it. As…

SAYFI QAZVINI, Nāṣer-al-din Mir Yaḥyā b. ʿAbd-al-laṭif (b. Qazvin, 19 Ḏu’l-qaʿda, 885/20 January 1481; d. Isfahan, 8 Rabiʿ I, 962/ 31 January 1555), commonly known as Mir Yaḥyā, a Persian historian best known for his Lobb al-tawāriḵ, a chronicle dealing with the dynastic history of Iran from ancient times until the late…

ŠĀYGĀN, ʿALI (ALI SHAYEGAN; b. Shiraz, 12 Esfand 1281 Š./1 March 1903; d. Westwood, New Jersey, 20 Ordibehešt 1360 Š./10 May 1981, FIGURE 1), law scholar, author, academician, and one of the closest associates of the prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Moḥammad Moṣaddeq).  He was an Iranian patriot committed to democracy…

ŠAYḴ-ʿALI KHAN ZANGANA, grand vizier for twenty years (1079-1100/1669-89) under Shah Solaymān I Ṣafawi (r. 1075-105/1666-94). Šayḵ-ʿAli Khan was born in 1020/1611 or 1022/1613 in a prominent family of the Kurdish Zangana tribe (Ḵātunābādi, pp. 530-31).  His father, ʿAli Beg Zangana, was a “holder of the rein” (jelawdār) under Shah…

SAYR WA SOLUK, title of the spiritual autobiography of Naṣir-al-Din Ṭusi (597-672/1201-74), celebrated polymath and vizier of under the Il-khanid Hülegü (r. 654-63/1256-63). Around the year 620/1224, Ṭusi wrote a short treatise that takes the form of an extended letter addressed to the chief of the Nezāri Ismaʿili mission in…

SAYYED(-E) AJALL, ŠAMS-AL-DIN ʿOMAR BOḴĀRI (b. Bokhara, 1211; d. Šanšan [Kunming] in southwest China, 1279), governor of the Dali province in China during the Mongol period.  Born into a prominent Ḵvārazmi family, Sayyed Ajall (Chinese: Saidianchi) entered Mongol service as a youngster, after his grandfather and namesake, a cavalry commander…

ṢĀʾEB TABRIZI, Mirzā Moḥammad ʿAli (b. Tabriz, ca. 1000/1592; d. Isfahan, 1086-87/1676), celebrated Persian poet of the later Safavid period. The exact year of Ṣāʾeb’s birth is unknown, but an allusion in one of his ḡazals to turning eighty suggests that he was born sometime in the last decade of…

SAʿDI, Abu Moḥammad Mošarref-al-Din Moṣleḥ b. ʿAbd-Allāh b. Mošarref Širāzi, Persian poet and prose writer (b. Shiraz, ca. 1210; d. Shiraz, d. 1291 or 1292), widely recognized as one of the greatest masters of the classical literary tradition. The present article examines the sources for his biography, including his major…

SCERIMAN FAMILY (ŠAHREMĀNIĀN, SHAHREMANEAN, SERIMAN), a wealthy Persian-Armenian merchant family. With origins in early 17th-century New Julfa, the family had branches going as far west as Italy (especially Venice) and as far east as Madras (modern Chennai in India) and Pegu (Burma), and it was active up until the 19th…

SCHAEDER, HANS HEINRICH (b. Göttingen 31 January 1896; d. Göttingen 13 March 1957; Plate I), one of the most creative, knowledgeable, and versatile of German Iranists, and taking into account his familiarity with other neighboring disciplines, from Hebraic studies to Sinology, he might have claimed to be an Orientalist in…

SCHEFER, Charles-Henri-Auguste (b. 16 November 1820, Paris; d. 3 March 1898, Paris), orientalist and academic administrator, as well as minister plenipotentiary and bibliophile. Schefer combined a brilliant career in the French Foreign Ministry (Ministère des affaires étrangères) with a productive life in scholarship. He was appointed professor of Persian at…

SCHEIL, Father Jean-Vincent (b. Kœnigsmacker [département of Moselle], 10 June 1858; d. Paris, 21 September 1940), French philologist and archeologist. After his studies at the college of Sierck (Moselle), he entered the Dominican order in 1881 and took the name of Father Vincent. His ecclesiastical studies and his novitiate lasted…

SCHLERATH, BERNFRIED (b. Leipzig, 15 May 1924; d. Berlin, 30 May 2003; Figure 1), German scholar of Indo-European, chiefly Indo-Iranian, philology and Indo-European cultural studies. As only child of the literary editor Dr. phil. Franz Schlerath and his wife Karoline, née Sutor, he grew up in Frankfurt am Main and…

SCHLIMMER, JOHANNES LODEWIK (b. Rotterdam, 22 August 1818; d. Tehran, 25 March 1876), a Dutch physician who served in Iran as an instructor of medicine at Dār al-Fonun and became a leading pioneer in the promotion of modern medicine in Iran. His Terminologie Medico-Pharmaceutique (Figure 1), published in 1874, helped standardize…