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AURELIUS VICTOR, SEXTUS, born in Africa ca. 325/330, held high positions under Julian and Theodosius. He was a contemporary of Ammianus Marcellinus. Of the several works attributed to him, only one survives: the Liber de Caesaribus or “Book of Emperors,” an abridgment of imperial biographies from Augustus to Constantius II….

AUSTRIA i. Relations with Persia Diplomatic and Commercial Relations with Persia. Diplomatic and commercial relations between Austria and Persia have a long history, stretching back to the sixteenth century. At that time Shah Esmāʿil I had founded the Safavid dynasty in Persia, while the Hapsburg rulers of Austria were at…

AUSTRIA ii. IRANIAN STUDIES Many of the Austrian Iranologists and their scholarly achievements are discussed in the surveys s.v. GERMANY iii. and iv. The present entry is intended as a synthetic history of the organization of Iranian studies (1) up to 1918 in all the Habsburg “hereditary countries,” which included…

AUTIYĀRA, name of a district (Old Persian dah-yāuš) of the satrapy Armina of the Achaemenid empire; this Old Persian form (attested only in DB 2.58f.; see Kent, OldPersian, pp. 122, 124) is rendered as Elamite h.Ha-u-ti-ya-ru-iš and Babylonian KURú-ti-ia-a-ri (completely preserved only in the fragment BE 3627, line 2; see…

AUTOPHRADATES (Greek rendering of Old Persian *Vāta-fradāta, Lycian Wataprddata). The bearers of this name include: 1. A satrap of Lydia under Artaxerxes II, from 391 B.C. until the late 350s. Some coins with his portrait come from the cities Lampsacus and Cyme, which belonged to his satrapy. In an inscription…

ĀVA, the basic modern form (and the older spoken form) of the name of two small towns of northern Persia, normally written Āba in medieval Islamic sources. The geographers of that time had difficulty in distinguishing the two places, but usually designate them by the names “Aba of Hamadān” (Maqdesī,…

AVADĀNA, Sanskrit term for a category of Buddhist narrative literature. Three such popular Buddhist stories are known through fragments of Khotanese paraphrases: the Aśokāvadāna (see Aśoka iii), the Nandāvadāna (q.v.), and the Sudhanāvadāna (q.v.). The Khotanese texts of all three have been published in transcription by H. W. Bailey (Khotanese…

AVADH (English also Audh or Oudh), an ancient cultural and administrative region lying between the Himalayas and the Ganges in North India, named after Ayodhyā, the setting of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. By the 700s/1300s, Avadh proper had become a province of all the major Islamic dynasties in India (except…

AVALOKITEŚVARA-DHĀRAṆĪ, name given by H. W. Bailey to a Buddhist text written in archaizing Late Khotanese (q.v.). The text was so called because it ends with a dhāraṇī (Skt. “spell, sacred formula”) that is preceded by homage to the bodhisattvas headed by the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. It has been published so…

AVARAYR, a village in Armenia in the principality of Artaz southeast of the Iranian town of Mākū. The plain of Avarayr, located in the extreme northwest of Iran near the Soviet frontier, was the scene of an important battle which took place during an Armenian uprising against the Persians in…

ĀVĀZ, in modern Persian “song” (of any kind) or, more broadly, “music.” In use it thus resembles Arabic ḡenāʾ (singing), which has “stood for both “song” in particular and “music” in general” (Farmer, History of Arabian Music, p. 152). The word is derived from OIr. vač- “to voice, utter, speak,”…

Āvāz-e Dašti title Āvāz-e Dašti genre/topic Āvāz-e Dašti language Persian performer Adib Kwānsāri, voice instrument Voice with ney composer   author/poet  Hāfez first line of poem Čo bešnavi soḵan-e ahl-e del magu ke ḵatāst  recorded by   place of recording   date of recording   duration 4:13 source A Century…

Āvāz-e Dašti title Āvāz-e Dašti genre/topic Āvāz-e Dašti language   performer Maḥjubi, Morteżā instrument Piano composer Maḥjubi, Morteżā author/poet   first line of poem   recorded by   place of recording   date of recording   duration 2:49 source The Art of Piano. Mortezā Mahjubi. Mahoor Institute of Culture and…

AVERY, Peter (b. Derby, England, 15 May 1923; d. Cambridge,6 October 2008), British scholar of Persian literature and history (FIGURE 1). Avery was born in Derby in northwest England, the son of an officer in the merchant navy. He began learning Persian while he was in India during World War II,…

AVESTA the holy book of the Zoroastrians. i. Survey of the history and contents of the book. ii. Middle Persian translations.