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TRAJAN (Marcus Ulpius Traianus), Roman emperor (98-117 CE), born probably in 53 CE, and died in early August 117. During his reign, the Imperium Romanum stretched to its widest extent, but only for a short period (see map, FIGURE 1). This entry focuses on the emperor’s Parthian campaigns (concerning the…

ṬUBĀ VA MAʿNĀ-YE ŠAB (1987, tr. Kamran Talattof and Havva Houshmand as Touba and the Meaning of Night, New York), a highly acclaimed novel by Shahrnush Parsipur (Šahrnuš Pārsipur, b. Tehran, 28 Bahman 1324 Š./17 February 1946), fiction writer and essayist (FIGURE 1). Ṭubā va maʿnā-ye šab (FIGURE 2) is…

TUMANSKIǏ (Toumansky), Aleksandr Grigor’evich (b. 23 September 1861; d. Istanbul, 1 December 1920), Russian orientalist, Major-General of the Russian Imperial Army. Tumanskiǐ belonged to an ancient aristocratic family which had originated from the Great Duchy of Lithuania. He spoke eleven languages and, besides serving in the Russian Imperial Guards, he…

TUP (tr. by Fariydoun Farrokh as The Cannon, Washington D. C., 2009), the first full-length novel by Gholam-Hosayn Sa’edi (Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Sāʿedi, 1936-1985; q.v.), noted dramatist and fiction writer. It was published originally as a serial in the literary magazine Ḵuša, later as a book in 1967, and republished in 1968,…

ṬURĀN (ṬOVARĀN), the mediaeval Islamic name for the mountainous district of east-central Baluchistan lying to the north of the mediaeval coastal region of Makrān, what was in recent centuries, until 1947, the Aḥmadzay Khanate of Kalat (see BALUCHISTAN i. Geography, History, and Ethnography, sec. 7-8). Tomaschek (part 1, 1883, p….

TURFAN EXPEDITIONS, Turfan (also Uigur Turpan, Chin. Tulufan) in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) is the largest oasis (ca. 170 square kilometers) on the ancient northern Silk Road, the geographical position of which is between 42° and 43° north latitude and between 88° and 90° east longitude. The oasis is a depression,…

TURKIC LANGUAGES OF PERSIA: AN OVERVIEW Only in few other regions (Caucasus and Southern Siberia) one can find a nearly comparable diversity of Turkic languages as in Persia. The number of their speakers varies from several thousands (e. g., Khalaj, which had only some ten thousands of speakers in the…

TURKIC LOANWORDS IN PERSIAN Turkic-Iranian language contacts, as well as reciprocal loaning/borrowing of words, go back to the era of the Old Turkic language. During that period, the Turkic languages mostly borrowed from the Iranian languages of Central Asia (e. g., Sogdian, Middle Persian, or Saka). In this regard, the…

TURKIC-IRANIAN CONTACTS i. LINGUISTIC CONTACTS Geo-historical survey. Speakers of Iranian and Turkic languages have been in contact since pre-Islamic times, notably along the Inner Asian commercial corridors known collectively as the Silk Road. Manichaean literature is found in Old Turkic, Sogdian, Parthian, and Middle Persian, while Buddhist literature of Inner…

TURKIC-IRANIAN CONTACTS ii. CHAGHATAY LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE Chaghatay Language This Turkic language is a multilayered, lexically rich, and grammatically complex literary idiom. It belongs to the Altaic group of the Uralo-Altaic language family. It is an agglutinative language that creates grammatical and lexical derivatives by suffixes attached to base forms:…

TURKMENS OF PERSIA ii. LANGUAGE The Turkmens inhabit an extensive area which stretches from the northwest of Kazakhstan and the adjacent parts of Russia over Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to northern and northwestern Afghanistan, as well as to northeastern Persia. Turkmens’ area of settlement becomes much larger when the “Turkmens”…

TURKO-SOGDIAN COINAGE, issues of the khaqans (ḵāqāns) of the Western Turkic khanate in Central Asia between the 6th and 8th centuries CE, so called because the Turkic rulers issued them with Sogdian inscriptions (Smirnova, 1952). The existence of the coinage points to the khaqans’ consolidation of political and economic power…