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ĀNAND RĀM MOḴLEṢ (1111-64/1699-1750), chronicler, lexicographer, and poet of the later Mughal period, b. in Sodhra, Sialkot district (now in Pakistan). His grandfather, Gajpat Rāi, held a high position in the civil service and his father, Hirday Rām, was the wakīl (personal representative at court) of Moḥammad Shah’s (1131-61/1719-48) prime…

ANANIAS OF SHIRAK (ANANIA ŠIRAKAC‘I), Armenian scholar (ca. 600-670 CE), to whom is attributed a wide range of late Antique scientific texts, including the anonymous Armenian Geography (Ašxarhac‘oyc‘) which is also, confusingly, attributed to a pseudo-MOVSĒS XORENAC‘I. Ananias remains an enigmatic figure. Despite his fame as an Armenian polymath, the…

ANANTAMUKHANIRHĀRADHĀRĀṆĪ, the name of a Buddhist text belonging to the Mahayanist Tantric tradition. The only surviving fragment of the original Sanskrit was edited by F. W. Thomas in A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, Manuscript Remains of Buddhist Literature Found in Eastern Turkestan, Oxford, 1916, pp. 86-87. Several Tibetan and Chinese translations…

ANAPHAS, Persian male name, attested only in the Greek forms Anaphās (Diodorus, 31.19.1-2), Ionic Anáphēs (Herodotus, 7.62.2, where we find the secondary variant Anáphanēs), and Onáphas (Ctesias, fragment 13, par. 16.24.30). It may most easily reflect an Old Persian hypocoristic form *Vana-f-a- from *Vanafarnah- “earning the divine splendor and glory”…

ANĀRAK, a baḵš and its town on the southern fringes of the Dašt-e Kavīr (33° 20’ north latitude and 53° 35’ east longitude). It lies in a basin fifty miles northeast of Nāʾīn and seventy-seven miles north of Ardestān, with the low range of the Kūh-e Āšīn to its southwest….

ANĀRAKI, the dialect of Anārak, a town with 2,100 inhabitants in the Bīābānak region northeast of the city of Nāʾīn. It is closely related to the dialect of Nāʾīn; both are members of the complex network of isoglosses usually called central dialects. Some typical lexical items are: ker/kert “do,” k/keft…

ANAW, village and archeological site at the foot of the Kopet-Dag mountains east of Ashkhabad in Soviet Turkestan. i. Prehistoric period. ii. Historical period.   i. Prehistoric Period Of the two mounds (kurgans) at Anaw, the north kurgan contains Neolithic and Chalcolithic remains (Anaw I and II), while the south…

ANA’L-ḤAQQ “I am the Truth,” the most famous of the Sufi šaṭḥīyāt (ecstatic utterances, or paradoxes). Uttered by Ḥosayn b. Manṣūr Ḥallāǰ (executed 309/922 in Baghdad), these words are traditionally said to have been spoken when he knocked at the door of his master, Jonayd, after returning from a pilgrimage…

ANBĀR (Pers. term meaning granary), a town on the left bank of the Euphrates five km north-west of Fallūǰa and sixty-two km west of Baghdad. Its strategic position at an important ford near the point where the Euphrates enters the alluvial plain and where the first navigable canal went to…

ANBĀR or ANBĪR, a town of the medieval Islamic province of Gūzgān or Jūzǰān in northern Afghanistan, probably to be identified with the modern Sar-e Pol. The variable spelling of the sources (in Yāqūt, I, pp. 257, 259, there are separate entries for each of the two forms) doubtless reflects…

ʿANBARĪĀN, a distinguished family of officials, littérateurs, ʿolamāʾ, and traditionists from Bayhaq (modern Sabzavār). Their activities in public and scholarly life from the 4th/10th to the 6th/12th centuries are known above all through Ebn Fondoq’s Tārīḵ-e Bayhaq (ed. A. Bahmanyār, Tehran, 1317 Š./1938, pp. 119-22, 182-83). The family was probably…