BAŠĀKERD (also Bašāgerd), a roughly rectan­gular mountainous district (dehestān) east of Mīnāb and north of Jāsk. Bašākerd proper is bounded…

ANTHROPOLOGY (New Persian mardomšenāsī), social and cultural, in Iran and Afghanistan (see also Afghanistan iv). Anthropology as an Iranological discipline…

ĀBYĀRĪ, “irrigation” in Iran. Introduction. Although dry farming is important in Azarbaijan, Kurdistan, and Khorasan, as well as some other…

SIĀQ is a system of numerical notation, one of several different historical systems of Persianate numeracy. It has also been…

ETHNOGRAPHY (Bibliography) For cited works not given in detail, see “Short References”; see also the bibliography in ANTHROPOLOGY, where a…

BALUCHISTAN i. Geography, History, and Ethnography This article is divided into the following sections: 1. introductory review of problems in…

ETHNOGRAPHY, the basic field research method in anthropology. This article, which treats the corpus of ethnographic data, complements the article…

DESERT (Pers. bīābān; kavīr; lūt; see below), area of low precipitation that supports little vegetation and lacks surface water. Secondary…

BĪĀBĀN, name of the coastal plain that extends south from the mouth of the Mīnāb river for 88 miles to…