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WACKERNAGEL, JACOB

RÜDIGER SCHMITT

(1853-1938), Swiss classicist and scholar of Indo-European and Indo- Iranian studies.

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WAKIL-AL-RAʿĀYĀ

JOHN PERRY regnal title assumed by Karim Khan Zand (r. 1164-93/1751-79) after he established himself at Shiraz in 1765. It is recorded in variants wakil-al-raʿiya, wakil-e raʿiat, and wakil-al-ḵalāʾeq, all meaning “deputy of the people.”

WAKIL-AL-RAʿĀYĀ, ḤĀJI SHAIKH TAQI IRĀNI

JOHN R. PERRY

(1868-1939), a prominent merchant and the Majles deputy of Hamadān, who, in October 1906, was the first provincial deputy to take his place in the First Majles (parliament) to be established after the Constitutional Revolution.

WALDMAN, MARILYN DICK DAVIS

(b. Dallas, Texas, April 13th 1943-d. Columbus, Ohio, July 8th, 1996), scholar of Islamic history.

WAR KABUD

BRUNO OVERLAET an archeological site to the north of Čavār in Ilām Province (Pošt-e kuh, Lorestān). Two hundred and three individual tombs of a large plundered graveyard (more than 1,000 tombs estimated to have been plundered) were excavated in 1965 and 1966. They all date to the Iron Age III (ca. 800/750-600 BCE).

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WARŠTMĀNSR NASK

CROSS-REFERENCE

See SŪDGAR NASK AND WARŠTMĀNSR NASK.

WAṢF

A. A. SEYED-GOHRAB a literary term meaning “description;” but it can carry several other connotations, including “quality,” “attribute,” “characterization,” “distinguishing mark,” and “adjective.”

WATER

CROSS-REFERENCE See ĀB.

WAṬWĀṬ, RAŠID-AL-DIN

NATALIA CHALISOVA bilingual poet, philologist, and prose writer in Persian and Arabic, as well as a high-ranking official of the Khwarazmian court in the 12th century.

WAZIRITABĀR, ḤOSAYN-ʿALI

MORTEŻĀ ḤOSEYNI DEHKORDI

(1906-1958) musician and prominent performer of the qaranei (clarinet).

WEBLOGS

ALIREZA DOOSTDAR

The vast majority of Iranian bloggers write in Persian, although other languages – chief among them English – are also used.

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES I. PRE-ISLAMIC PERIOD

A. D. H. BIVAR

Evidence for ancient standards is provided by examination of weights surviving from antiquity, and from inspection of certain specimens of ingot currency. There are six surviving, well-preserved Achaemenid weights with inscriptions. This Article Has Images/Tables.

WELLHAUSEN, JULIUS

LUDMILA HANISCH scholar of Biblical studies, who primarily gained renown as an Old Testament scholar and Semitist.

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WERTIME, THEODORE

ROYA ARAB

(b. Chambersburg, Pa., 31 August 1919; d. Chambersburg, 8 April 1982), diplomat and scholar, expert on the history of technology in the ancient Middle East.

WESTERGAARD, NIELS LUDVIG

RÜDIGER SCHMITT

(1815-1878), Danish orientalist scholar with special interest in Indology.

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WHEAT

CROSS-REFERENCE

See GANDOM.

WHEAT CROSS-REFERENCE

See GANDOM.

WHITE SHEEP DYNASTY

CROSS-REFERENCE

A confederation of Turkman tribes who ruled in eastern Anatolia and western Iran until the Safavid conquest in 1501. See AQ QOYUNLU.

WIKANDER, OSCAR STIG

BO UTAS; JACQUES DUCHESNE-GUILLEMIN

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WILD RUE

CROSS-REFERENCE

See ESFAND.

WILD THYME

CROSS-REFERENCE

See ĀVĪŠAN. WILLIAM OF RUBRUCK

PETER JACKSON a Flemish Franciscan missionary who traveled through the lands that the Mongols had conquered in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Asia Minor between 1253 and 1255.

WILLOW

CROSS-REFERENCE

See BĪD.

WISDOM LITERATURE

CROSS-REFERENCE

See ANDARZ, APHORISM, IRAN viii. PERSIAN LITERATURE (1) Pre-Islamic.

WOLSKI, JÓZEF

MAREK JAN OLBRYCHT distinguished Polish historian, whose research has had an enduring effect on the study of ancient Iranian history.

WOMEN I. IN PRE-ISLAMIC PERSIA

MARIA BROSIUS

To learn about women, we depend on the often hostile secondary sources of the Greek and Roman periods which, however, are of limited historical value, as they tend to focus on particular aspects of the lives of royal Persian women or use specific descriptions for historiographical purposes.

WOMEN II. IN THE AVESTA

LEON GOLDMAN

The egalitarian ideals of Zoroastrianism—in particular, the recognition of women as “men’s partners in the common struggle against evil” have long served to protect the dignified status of women within the Mazdayasnian community.

WOMEN III. IN SHIʿISM

MOOJAN MOMEN

WOMEN IV. IN THE WORKS OF THE BAB AND IN THE BABI MOVEMENT

MOOJAN MOMEN

The Bab elevated the status of women in his writings and confirmed this in his actions. The Babi community reflected this change in the actions of the Babi women.

WOOL WILLEM FLOOR

(Pers. pašm), the oldest fiber to have been used for the making of textiles in Persia. Archeological finds have shown that sheep wool and goat hair were already woven around 6500 BCE, although some doubt this data. Spinning whorls and warp weights dating from 5000 BCE have also been found.

W~ CAPTIONS OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CROSS-REFERENCE list of all the figure and plate images in the W entries

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WACKERNAGEL, JACOB

(1853-1938), Swiss classicist and scholar of Indo-European and Indo- Iranian studies.

WACKERNAGEL, JACOB, Swiss classicist and scholar of Indo- European and Indo-Iranian studies (b. Basel, Switzerland, 11 December 1853; d. Basel, 22 May 1938; Figure 1), the son of Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806-1869), professor of German Language and Literature in Basel from 1835. He was named Jacob (written with “c”) after the famous German scholar Jacob Grimm, who acted as his godfather. Jacob received a fine classical education in his hometown and then studied classical philology and comparative linguistics in Basel (1871), and from 1872 in Göttingen, where the great Indologist Theodor Benfey (1809-81) taught him Vedic and Sanskrit and exerted a particular influence on him. Wackernagel left Göttingen for Leipzig after two years, where, in the winter term of 1874-75, he attended the lectures of Ernst Kuhn (1846- 1920) and other prominent linguists. He returned to Basel and obtained his doctorate there in 1875 with a thesis on the ancient Greek grammarians’ phonological doctrine and theory (Wackernagel, 1876). After a six-month stay in Oxford, he completed in the following year his habilitation as a lecturer in Greek Philology and Sanskrit. In 1879 Wackernagel was appointed extraordinary professor, and two years later became full professor of Greek Language and Literature in Basel. In 1902 he was offered the chair of Comparative Philology at Göttingen University, where he taught until 1915. In protest against the German-Prussian nationalist policy in World War I, in particular against the infringement on Belgian neutrality, he resigned his professorship and returned to his native town.

From 1915, he held first his former chair of Greek Philology and, from 1926 until his retirement in 1936, that of Linguistics. Twice (in 1890 and 1918-19) he served as the rector of Basel University, and in 1912-13 he was also pro-rector in Göttingen (where the King of Prussia himself, in name only. was the rector). His worldwide standing is reflected by the honorary degrees conferred on him and his membership in several academies of sciences.

Wackernagel described himself as “a linguist of philological orientation” (Sprachforscher philologischer Richtung). This means that his linguistic studies were not based on the data collected in grammars and dictionaries, but on the factual material preserved in the texts themselves, more exactly, on historical principles and on a philological foundation. His method made it possible for him to develop the idea that various phenomena considered before as characteristics typical of Greek or of the Indo-Iranian languages only, actually belong to the common Indo-European heritage (especially the so-called Wackernagel’s Law; see below).

Works. Connected with his name are important publications concerning Greek studies, his syntactic investigations, and in particular his scholarship in the field of Old Indo-Aryan, best reflected in his large-scale Altindische Grammatik, a work of fundamental significance for Indo-Iranian and Iranian studies. Perhaps the most significant feature of Wackernagel’s approach to Indo-European studies is that he pursued what we may call an Indo-European Philology, that is, renouncing comparative reconstruction as a goal in itself, but, on the contrary, taking into account a linguistic development within separate languages as a feature from prehistoric times, thus imbuing linguistics with the spirit of history (e.g., his discussion of the Atticisms in Homer; see below).

Though being professor of Greek, Wackernagel began in the early 1880s to collect material for a comprehensive grammar of Old Indo- Aryan, which was to become his masterpiece, Altindische Grammatik. This work, which originally was proposed to him by Ernst Kuhn, is the first historical grammar of that language ever compiled. It is the most exhaustive scholarly treatment that an Old Indo-European language has ever received, although even today it is not yet completed and presumably remains a torso. This standard work is presenting a fundamental view of the history and comparative grammar of Old Indo-Aryan language and thus is the model of a linguistic handbook, combining both stringent linguistic methodology and philological accuracy and scrutiny, not to mention its comprehensive factual and bibliographical aspect. As expected, however, certain points discussed in the book would be indicated, expressed, or explained in a different way, at least formally, by today’s Indo-European scholars. The work is based on careful reference to the Vedic evidence, on thorough knowledge of the Indian grammarians and an impressive use of the Indo-Europeanist methodology. This book clearly reflects the influence of Wackernagel’s Göttingen teacher Theodor Benfey, who had a more philological proclivity than the other comparatists of the mid-19th century and had initiated Wackernagel into the writings and the theory of the native Indian grammarians like Pāṇini and his followers. The most important characteristic feature of this grammar is that Wackernagel is always stressing the primacy of the Vedic language within Old Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit), although he considers the linguistic development within India altogether down to Middle Indo- Aryan.

Wackernagel deemed himself lucky that during his years in Göttingen he was able to work together with the famous Iranist scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846-1930) on the Gathas (see below). At the same time he turned to Greek and finished his great book on the Homeric language, Sprachliche Untersuchungen (1916), which, on the one hand, resumed the question of the so-called “epische Zerdehnung” (treated by him already in 1878: see Wackernagel, 1955-79, III, pp. 1512-65), an artificial restoration of uncontracted forms out of later contracted ones according to him, and on the other hand, and primarily, dealt with the so-called Atticisms in the Iliad and Odyssey, which in his view show the strong influence of an Attic redaction of the Homeric epic poems. Another quite interesting topic of the Sprachliche Untersuchungen is the so-called “gaps” of Homeric Greek, that is, the intrusion of later developments, of features foreign to the basic dialects of the epic language and, not least, of vulgar and improper matters (like the words for “arse” or “to piss”), which are quite inappropriate in a totally aristocratic poetry.

Wackernagel’s best known and most widely read book is Vorlesungen über Syntax (1920-24), a two-volume treatment of problems of Greek, Latin, and German syntax based on a course of lectures. This book, with its lively presentation of the subject matter written in an appealing style without forgoing scientific rigor, is something absolutely novel. It gives a striking impression of Wackernagel as a teaching professor explaining in detail and with the help of convincing examples general concepts and notions like the functions of the various kinds of words (or ‘parts of speech’, as the ancient grammarians put it) and other categories such as gender, number, person, mood, tense, and so on. Although, according to his own statement, not being interested in general linguistics, Wackernagel advanced questions of such kind by his detailed philological studies in a decisive way.

His efficiency and versatility appears above all in his minor publications, including dozens of articles published in journals, commemorative volumes and the like, which now are almost completely reprinted in three volumes of Kleine Schriften (1955-79). Here may be found many examples showing his deductive method of stringent argumentation resulting from an attentive and critical examination of the sources. One of the most characteristic features of his studies is the combination of the Greek and the Indo-Iranian evidence, in particular Homeric Greek as well as Vedic Indo-Aryan and Old Iranian, which are the keystones of his successful and conclusive studies and display his meticulous reading of those texts.

Iranian studies. In Göttingen, when working together with his colleague Andreas, the leading Iranian scholar of that time, who came to Göttingen one year after him, Wackernagel famialiarized himself considerably well with the Old Iranian languages, particularly since he became aware more and more that taking the closely related Old Iranian languages into account was imperative for his work on Old Indo-Aryan. As the result of classes jointly held by both of them, they published four of the Gathas (1911, 1913, and 1931, all regrettably not reprinted in Wackernagel’s Kleine Schriften or elsewhere) in order to show in practice the impact of Andreas’s theory on the textual history of the Avesta, and that this collection of religious texts first was written down in Arsacid times in some rather simple Aramaic-based consonantal writing system and only later, at some time under the Sasanians, was transposed quite mechanically into the newly created, fully vocalized Avestan script. So Wackernagel can take the credit for having induced Andreas, who was extremely hesitant about making known the results of his investigations, to publish those studies together, which really and truly are a joint work (highly praised by Wackernagel even later).

These studies were deeply rooted in the much discussed theory of Andreas concerning the transmission of the Avestan text corpus, which has become obsolete long since; nevertheless, the phonological, morphological, lexicological, and other comments (often showing plainly Wackernagel’s authorship), with their observations that are significant even today, are important contributions to the exegesis of the Gathas, worthy to be consulted. Out of the text transmitted in the manuscripts, they attempt, by eliminating younger forms, to reconstruct the older (Arsacid) text, the so-called “Urtext” in its “real” pronunciation (as claimed by the authors) and to interpret it with regard to phonetics (see ANDREAS iii).

The cooperation with Andreas attracted Wackernagel’s attention to Iranian studies to the point that, even after having left Göttingen in 1915, he devoted his scholarly efforts more intensively than before to Iranian studies, and in later years in Basel gave preference almost exclusively to Indo-Aryan and Old Iranian in his teaching activity. Thus a series of six installments of “Indoiranica” appeared between 1910 and 1942 (often starting from Old Iranian questions) and also one further article with the title “Indoiranisches,” all reprinted in his Kleine Schriften (I, pp. 262-397). One of the most noteworthy contributions therein resolved the remarkable occurrence of the nominal suffixes -maṇt- and -uuaṇt- side by side in Avestan, while *- mant- already in Indo-Iranian being restricted to the position after an u vowel in the final syllable of the basic word (ibid., pp. 262-73).

Among the other issues treated by Wackernagel, the more significant are the expressions of the type Iran. *hubt̥tam bar (Ved. Súbhr̥ tam bhar) “to treat in a good way” (Kleine Schriften I, pp. 405-8); the historical future OPers. patiyāvanhyaiy (DB 1.55) “I was to pray,” and the Avestan nouns in -ana- (Kleine Schriften I, pp. 444-47, 452-56). Wackernagel dealt also with Iranian evidence attested in Greek sources, for instance, the problems connected with the rendering of Iranian proper names in Greek writing, or the words supposed to be Old Persian in Aristophanes’ Acharnians (Kleine Schriften II, pp. 1212-14, III, pp. 1657-58). Especially noteworthy is the study on the toponym Gk. Persépolis (ibid., II, pp. 844-52), that, as he could prove cogently, goes back to older Persaípolis (though attested only later) and further to Pérsai (OPers. Pārsa-), which, as a toponym, was remodeled to *Pérsai pólis (the town Persai) in order to distinguish it from the ethnonym.

Summary. Wackernagel’s most important discoveries arose from observing specific points in a particular language and then noticing that their conditions are valid also for other Indo-European languages and probably for all of them, which means, for their common proto- language. The best known of those discoveries is what usually is called now “Wackernagel’s Law,” that enclitics originally tended towards the position immediately following the first word of the sentence (Kleine Schriften I, pp. 1-104), a rule that Berthold Delbrück had already defined for Vedic prose and Christian Bartholomae had proved for the Avestan Gathas. But the same holds true also for other matters, such as the Greek perfect, which primarily indicated the achieved state (Kleine Schriften II, pp. 1000-21), or the reluctance of several Indo-European languages to employ short monosyllables as verbal or nominal or other forms (ibid., I, pp. 148-85).

Since Wackernagel did prefer to look on the history of a language through observing the inherited facts and not in terms of preconceived opinions, one may understand why he never became involved in the discussion about the ways and the method to reconstruct the Indo-European proto-language, or about such fundamental issues as the Neogrammarians’ principle of phonetic laws operating without exceptions. Being independent from the linguistic theories and the main schools of linguistic thought of his age, he had in mind linguistic research into the Old Indo-European languages firmly based on philological principles.

Wackernagel married Maria, née Stehlin (1864-1940), in 1886. They had eight children. Two of their three sons became full professors of law and of history, respectively, at Basel University. Wackernagel is buried in Reihen near Basel.

Bibliography:

Major works.

De pathologiae veterum initiis: Dissertatio inauguralis, Basel, 1876; repr., in Wackernagel, 1955-79, III, pp. 1427-86. Altindische Grammatik, 3 vols., Göttingen, 1896, I: Lautlehre, repr. with a new introduction by Louis Renou and addenda by Albert Debrunner, 1957; II/1, Einleitung zur Wortlehre: Nominalkomposition, Göttingen, 1905, repr. with addenda by Albert Debrunner, 1957; II/2 (by Albert Debrunner), Die Nominalsuffixe, repr., Göttingen, 1954; III (with Albert Debrunner): Nominalflexion, Zahlwort, Pronomen, , Göttingen, 1930, repr. 1975.

“Die vierte Ghāthā des Zurathušthro (Josno 31): Versuch einer Herstellung der älteren Textformen nebst Übersetzung” (with Friedrich Carl Andreas), NGWG, Phil.-hist. Kl., 1911, pp. 1-34.

“Die erste, zweite und fünfte Ghāthā des Zurathušthro (Josno 28. 29. 32): Versuch einer Herstellung der älteren Textformen nebst Übersetzung” (with Friedrich Carl Andreas), NGWG, Phil.-hist. Kl., 1913, pp. 363-85; “Anmerkungen” (with F. C. Andreas), NGWG, 1931, pp. 304-29.

Sprachliche Untersuchungen zu Homer, Göttingen, 1916; repr. 1970.

Vorlesungen über Syntax mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Griechisch, Lateinisch und Deutsch, 2 parts, Basel, 1920-24, 2nd ed. 1926-28; repr. 1950-57.

Kleine Schriften, 3 volumes, Göttingen, 1955-79.

A full bibliography of Wackernagel’s publications in three parts is found in: (1) Mathilde Probst, in Antidoron: Festschrift Jacob Wackernagel zur Vollendung des 70. Lebensjahres, Göttingen, 1923, pp. 354-61; (2) Albert Debrunner, in Indogermanisches Jahrbuch 23, 1939, pp. 447-51; (3) B. Forssman, “Zweiter Nachtrag zum verzeichnis der Schriften Jacob Wackernagel,” in Wackernagel, Kleine Schriften III, pp. XX-XXVI.

Obituaries, studies.

Albert Debrunner, “Jacob Wackernagel,” in New Indian Antiquary 1, 1938-39, pp. 601-8.

Eduard Hermann, “Jacob Wackernagel,” NGWG: Jahresbericht, 1939, pp. 76-89.

A. Rüegg, “Jacob Wackernagel 1853-1938,” in Basler Jahrbuch, 1939, pp. 7-17.

J. Lohmann, “Jacob Wackernagel *11. Dezember 1853 Basel, †21. Mai 1938 Basel,” in Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft 280, 1942, pp. 57-70.

Neville Edgar Collinge, The Laws of Indo-European, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1985, pp. 217-19 (“Wackernagel’s Law I”).

Rüdiger Schmitt, “Jacob Wackernagel 11 December 1853-22 May 1938,” in Ward W. Briggs and William M. Calder III, eds., Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia, New York and London, 1990, pp. 479-88.

Idem, Review of Sprachwissenschaft und Philologie, in Kratylos 37, 1992, pp. 45-53 (with excerpts from Wackernagel’s autobiography, pp. 47-49).

K. Arndt, “Über einen Porträtkopf Alexander Zschokkes,” Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 2000, pp. 192-208 (with photographs of Wackernagel himself and of a bronze portrait- head of him).

(Rüdiger Schmitt)

Originally Published: August 25, 2014

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WAKIL-AL-RAʿĀYĀ regnal title assumed by Karim Khan Zand (r. 1164-93/1751-79) after he established himself at Shiraz in 1765. It is recorded in variants wakil-al-raʿiya, wakil-e raʿiat, and wakil-al-ḵalāʾeq, all meaning “deputy of the people.”

WAKIL-AL-RAʿĀYĀ, well known regional title assumed by Karim Khan Zand (r. 1164-93/1751-79) after he established himself at Shiraz in 1179/1765. It is recorded in variants wakil-al-raʿiya, wakil-e raʿiat, and wakil-al-ḵalāʾeq, all meaning “deputy of the people,” and marked a significant change of polarity in the wording of Karim Khan’s title from wakil-al-dowla (viceroy; Rostam-al-Ḥokamāʾ, p. 333; Donboli, II, p. 31; A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia, I, p. 664; Perry, 1979, pp. 215-17).

The formula was not an ad hoc invention, but denoted an established office, that of a provincial magistrate, appointed by the ruler to promote harmony among the social classes and to investigate injustice, especially corruption or extortion by government officials. The term is first attested under the Safavids, in two manuals of administration, as an ex-officio post of the kalāntar (mayor) of the capital city of Isfahan (Minorsky, fols. 77b-78a, p. 82; Dānešpažuh, pp. 421-23; Lambton, p. 207, citing Du Mans, Le Brun, and Tavernier). The wakil-al-raʿāyā was thenceforth attested as an independent official, appointed by decree of the ruler, in a dozen of the provincial centers of Persia from at least the later Safavid era until the twilight of Qajar rule (approx. 1122-1328/1710–1910).

Thus, both a kalāntar and a separate wakil-al-raʿāyā were among eight administrative officials appointed in Isfahan by Karim Khan in 1165/1752, before he is reported to have assumed this title for himself (Rostam al-Ḥokamāʾ, p. 307). In other instances, in 1194/1780 ʿAli-Morād Khan Zand (r. 1781-85) issued a patent appointing one Āqā Moḥammad-Mahdi as wakil-al-raʿāyā of Qom, with a fixed salary, stipulating that the governor and other civic officials, the kalāntar, and kadḵodāyān (ward aldermen, see KADḴODĀ), should recognize him as sole and autonomous wakil (wakil be’l-esteqlāl wa’l-enferād; Moširi, p. 192). This same formula is found in the letters patent appointing Mirzā Moḥammad-Jaʿfar as wakil of Tabriz in 1314/1896; the other functionaries, the nobles, and the subjects (raʿāyā) are exhorted to defer to his seal and signature and to heed his recommendations, “which are to the advantage of the state.” He himself is urged to devote himself to eliminating inequity between partners and oppression of the peasantry (Nāder Mirzā Qājār, pp. 235-36).

Mirzā Kāẓem of Tabriz (appointed wakil-al-raʿāyā in 1280/1863) figures in an anecdote which illustrates this official in action. During a riot in which several residences were looted, a merchant lost a wallet full of confidential documents. Someone reported to the Wakil that he had seen one of the looters of the merchant’s house hide some loot at his brother-in-law’s home. The Wakil sent his bailiffs (farrāšān), recovered the wallet from the miscreant’s sister, and dismissed her husband (who was not involved in the theft) with a small reward (Nāder Mirzā Qājār, p. 200).

As a local magistrate, the wakil-al-raʿāyā in Qajar times was necessarily involved in local, and occasionally, national politics; e.g., Mirzā Abu’l-Ḥasan, wakil-al-raʿāyā of Kāšān, played a part in the struggle for succession after the death of Fatḥ-ʿAli Shah in 1250/1834 (Narāqi, pp. 248-49).

On the eve of the Constitutional Revolution in 1906, wokalāʾ-al-raʿāyā in cities all over Persia participated in the popular movement, one such being the wakil-al-raʿāyā of Kermānšāh (Ẓahir-al-Dowla, p. 43). Some were elected to the new parliament (majles). The first, and best-known, of these was Ḥāji Shaikh (Moḥammad) Taqi “Irāni," the wakil-al-raʿāyā of Hamadān, who lived up to his remit as spokesman for the oppressed, in particular by proposing (unsuccessfully) that women be enfranchised (Browne, p. 131; The Times, 22 August 1911, p. 3 and 28 August 1911, p. 3; Afary, pp. 73, 76-77). He was joined by Mirzā Moḥsen of Jahrom, from a long line of wakils, whose son, Ḥosām-al-Din, adopted the surname Wakilpur and served in the 17th Majles (1952-53). A deputy from Mahābād in the 6th to the 12th Majles (1926-1941) was likewise the son of a wakil-al-raʿāyā. The early parliamentary history of Persia records a dozen names such as Wakil, Wakili, and Moʿin-al-Raʿāyā, who were most likely wokalāʾ-al- raʿāyā or their progeny (Šajiʿi, pp. 293, 306, 320, 338, 343, 368, 378). The transition from wakil-e raʿāyā (people’s deputy) to wakil-e majles (parliamentary deputy, the term that preceded the modern namāyanda-ye majles, which is not recorded before 1925) was so natural as to go unnoticed. The equation was in fact registered as early as 1230/1815, when an Iranian visitor to London glossed the House of Commons in Persian as kāna-ye wakil-al-raʿāyā (distinct from kāna-ye ḵawānin, the House of Lords), and referred to an individual Member of Parliament as wakil-al-raʿāyā (Širāzi, pp. 17-18, 323).

It has been argued that the post originated in that of a Sasanian official, the yātakgōw dātwar-ē drigōšān or, as transcribed in more recent studies, driyōšān-jādaggōv ud dādvar (advocate-judge of the poor) attested in fourteen provinces (šahr) from Mesopotamia to Khorasan (de Menasce, pp. 282-87; Gyselen, pp. 43-64, map on p. 91; see also Perry, 1978, p. 205; Idem, 2007, pp. 48-50). The origin of the Arabicate phrase wakil-al-raʿiya can be seen as the nominalization of a significant verb phrase in a political testament of the year 286/821, attributed to the first independent Iranian dynast in ʿAbbasid Khorasan, Abu’l-Ṭayyeb ṬāherI b. al-Ḥosayn Ḏüu’l- Yaminayn (r. 821-22); in this he instructs his son and successor designate, ʿAbd-Allāh (r. 828-45): “Appoint as agents [wakkil] in this work of seeking out the oppressed, reliable people from among your subjects [min raʿiyatika]” (Bosworth, p. 39). Subsequent urban officials such as the Saljuq raʾis, the Āq-qoyunlu parvānači-e ʿajaza wa masākin (‘secretary of the powerless and indigent’), and eventually the kalāntar, may be seen as continuing this tradition (Lambton, pp. 383, 387; Woods, pp. 122, 267; Perry, 1978, p. 208). Bibliography:

J.Afary, “On the Origins of Feminism in Early Twentieth-Century Iran,” Journal of Women's History 1/2, 1989, pp. 65-87.

C.E.Bosworth, “Ṭāhir Dhu’l-Yaminayn’s Epistle to his Son ʿAbdullāh (286/821),” JNES 29/1, 1970, pp. 25-41.

E.G.Browne, The Persian Revolution, Cambridge, 1910.

A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, 2 vols., London, 1939.

Moḥammad-Taqi Dānešpažuh, “Dastur al-moluk-e Moḥammad Rafiʿā wa Taḏkerat al-moluk-e Mirzā Samiʿā,” Majalla-ye dāneškada-ye adabiyāt-e dānešgāh-e Tehrān 16, 1969, pp. 416-40.

ʿAbd-al-Razzāq Beg Maftun Donboli, Tajrebat al-aḥrār wa tasleyat al- abrār, ed. Ḥ.Q.Ṭabāṭabāʾi, 2 vols., Tehran, 1970-71.

Mirzā Abu’l-Ḥasan Ḡaffāri Kāšāni, Golšan-e morād, ed. Ḡ.R.Ṭabāṭabāʾi-Majd, Tehran, 1990.

R.Gyselen, La géographie administrative de l’Empire sassanide, Paris, 1989.

A.K.S.Lambton, “The Administration of Sanjar’s Empire as Illustrated in the ʿAtabat al-Kataba,” BSOAS 20, 1957, pp. 367-88.

Idem, “The Office of Kalāntar under the Ṣafavids and Afshārs”, Mélanges d’Orientalisme offerts à Henri Massé à l’occasion de son 75éme anniversaire, Tehran, 1963, pp. 206-18.

J.de Menasce, “Le protecteur des pauvres dans l’Iran sassanide,” Mélanges d’Orientalisme offerts à Henri Massé à l’occasion de son 75éme anniversaire, Tehran, 1963, pp. 282-87.

V.Minorsky, ed. and tr., Tadhkirat al-Mulük: a Manual of Ṣafavid Administration (circa 1137/1725), London, 1943.

Moḥammad Moširi, “Do sanad-e nafis az Zandiya,” Barrasihā-ye tāriḵi 8, 1973, pp. 187-200.

Nāder Mirzā Qājār, Tāriḵ wa joḡrāfiā-ye dār-al-salṭana-ye Tabriz, ed. M.-T.Lesān-al-Molk Sepehr, Tehran, 1944.

Ḥasan Narāqi, Tāriḵ-e ejtemāʿi-e Kāšān, Tehran, 1966.

J.R.Perry, “Justice for the Underprivileged: The Ombudsman Tradition of Iran,” JNES 37/3, 1978, pp. 205-15. Idem, Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran, 1747-1779, Chicago, Ill., 1979.

Idem, “The Vakil al-raʿāyā: a Pre-modern Iranian Ombudsman,” in Iran und iranisch geprägte Kulturen: Studien zu Ehren von Bert G.Fragner; überreicht an seinem 65. Geburtstag (Beiträge zur Iranistik), ed. B.Hoffmann, R.Kauz, and M.Ritter, Wiesbaden, 2007, pp. 41-50.

Moḥammad-Hāšem Āṣaf Rostam-al-Hokamāʾ, Rostam al-tawāriḵ, ed. M.Moširi, Tehran, 1969.

Zahrā Šajiʿi, Namāyandegān-e Majles-e Šowrā-ye Melli, Tehran, 1965.

Mirzā Sāleḥ Širāzi, Safar-nāma, ed. E.Rāʾin, Tehran, 1968.

J.E.Woods, The Aqquyunlu, Clan, Confederation, Empire, Minneapolis and Chicago, 1976.

Mirzā ʿAli Khan Qājār Ẓahir-al-Dowla, Asnād-e tāriḵi-e waqāʾeʿ-e Mašruṭa-ye Irān, ed. J.Qāʾem-Maqāmi, Tehran, 1969.

(John Perry) Originally Published: August 15, 2009

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WAKIL-al-RAʿĀYĀ, Ḥāji Shaikh Taqi Irāni

WAKIL-al-RAʿĀYĀ, Ḥāji Shaikh (Moḥammad) Taqi Irāni (b. ca. 1285/1868, d. 1318 Š./1939), a prominent merchant and the Majles deputy of Hamadān, who, in October 1906, was the first provincial deputy (wakil-e majles) to take his place in the First Majles (parliament) to be established after the Constitutional Revolution (Browne, p. 131). Wakil-al-raʿāyā (lit. deputy of the subjects), a title which first appears in documents of the later Safavid period, referred to a provincial magistrate appointed by the shah to investigate administrative malfeasance or injustice and promote harmony among the governing, commercial, and working classes of society (see Perry, 1978). By the later Qajar period, the title appears to have been devalued to one of the many honorifics for public figures. It was bestowed on Ḥāji Shaikh Taqi by the anjoman of Hamadān (called majles-e fawāʾed-e ʿomumi), to which he was elected in 1906, in recognition of his services to the Constitutional movement (Aḏkāʾi, p. 439).

During his first term, Ḥāji Shaikh Taqi solicited charitable donations for various humanitarian causes, and feuded with a more established and conservative delegate, Āqā Aḥmad Moʿin-al-Tojjār (see, e.g., “Moḏākarāt,” in Irān-e now, Year 1, no. 197, May 7, 1910); in March 1908, supported by Sayyed Ḥasan Taqizāda, he successfully supported the right of political assembly (anjoman) for women (Moḏākarāt, 1, p. 474). Re-elected to the Second Majles (1909-11), he again spoke up for the rights of women. When the new electoral law (as drafted by a commission chaired by Moḥammad-ʿAli Foruḡi Ḏokāʾ-al-Molk was submitted to the Majles on 4 August, 1911, women were listed among those classes ineligible to vote. Ḥāji Shaikh Taqi, alone among the deputies, protested that women, too, were God’s creatures, and demanded on what grounds they were disenfranchised. Foruḡi, supported by the more “rational” people’s representatives (the Wakil-al-Raʿāyā of Hamadān had already gained a reputation as an eccentric), explained that there was no objection in principle, but women in Iran were not yet ready for the vote (Moḏākarāt, 2, p. 1531). This clash gained some international notice, and has even entered the mythopoea of feminism: legend has it that Ḥāji Shaikh Taqi was ejected from the parliament by a prominent cleric for his protest (The Times, London, 1911, 22 August, p. 3; 28 August, p. 3; repr. in Bayat-Philipp, p. 301; Bāmdād, Rejāl III, pp. 325-26 [which differs most noticeably from the official record]; Afary, pp. 73, 76-7). Had the Wakil-al-Raʿāyā’s view prevailed, Iran would have been years ahead of Britain and nearly all other parliamentary democracies of that time in respect of women’s franchise; only four countries permitted women to vote in 1911.

The reputation of Wakil-al-Raʿāyā is tarnished, ironically, by accusations of nepotism and peculation from the treasury (e.g., see “Moḏākarāt,” Year 3, no. 7, April 2, 1911; no. 19, April 17, 1911; no. 36, May 7, 1911; no. 73, June 21, 1911; Aḏkāʾi, pp. 447-48). Upon the dissolution of the Second Majles at the end of 1911, he retired to Hamadān, where he remained active in charitable and educational affairs. In later years he evinced increased signs of eccentricity and dementia. He left five sons, four of whom distinguished themselves in public life (Malekzāda, IV-V, pp. 1040-41).

Bibliography:

Faridun Ādamiyat, Ideʾoloži-e nahżat-e mašruṭiyat-e Irān, 2 vols., Tehran, n.d.

Parviz Aḏkāʾi, “Ḥāj Šayk Taqi (Wakil-e Raʿāyā) Hamadāni,” Āyanda 12/7-8, 1986, pp. 438-48 (a comprehensive biography).

Janet Afary, “On the Origins of Feminism in Early Twentieth-Century Iran,” Journal ofWomen’s History 1/2, 1989, pp. 65-87.

Mangol Bayat-Philipp, “Women and Revolution in Iran, 1905–1911,” in Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie, eds., Women in theMuslim World, Cambridge, Mass., 1978, pp. 295-308.

Edward G. Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, Cambridge, 1910.

Mahdi Malekzāda, Tāriḵ-e enqelāb-e mašruṭiyat-e Irān, 7 vols. in 3, Tehran, 1984.

“Mozākarāt-e Majles,” in Irān-e now, Tehran, approx. three times weekly, Aug. 24, 1909–Dec. 20, 1911 (usually on pp. 2-3; for parliamentary activities of Ḥāji Shaikh Taqi, see esp. Year 1, through June 1909 and Year 3, through July 1911).

Moḏākarāt-e Majles, Legislative Sessions 1 and 2, Tehran, 1946.

John R. Perry, “Justice for the Underprivileged: The Ombudsman Tradition of Iran,” JNES 37/3, 1978, pp. 203-15.

Idem, “The Vakil al-Raʿâyâ: A Pre-modern Iranian Ombudsman,” in Birgitt Hoffmann, Ralph Kauz and Markus Ritter, eds., Iran und iranischgeprägte Kulturen: Studien zu Ehren von Bert G. Fragner; überreicht an seinem 65. Geburtstag, Beiträge zur Iranistik, Wiesbaden, 2007, pp. 41-50.

(John R. Perry)

Originally Published: October 1, 2010

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WALDMAN, Marilyn

(b. Dallas, Texas, April 13th 1943-d. Columbus, Ohio, July 8th, 1996), scholar of Islamic history.

WALDMAN, Marilyn (b. Dallas, Texas, 13 April 1943; d. Columbus, Ohio, 8 July 1996), scholar of Islamic history. Waldman received her BA from Radcliffe College, where she specialized in African Studies, and her MA (1966) and PhD. (1974) from the University of Chicago, where she studied under the noted historian of Islamic Civilizations, Marshall Hodgson. In 1974 she joined the faculty of the Department of History of The Ohio State University at Columbus, where she remained until her death, at the age of 53. Her most significant work is Toward a Theory of Historical Narrative: A Case Study in Perso- Islamicate Historiography (Columbus. Ohio, 1980; tr. as Zamāna, zendagi, and ruzeḡār-e Bayhaqi, by Mansoureh Ettehadieh, Teheran, 1996), in which, responding to a larger discursive turn in the theory and philosophy of history, she employs a controversial literary theory— Speech Act—and analyzes the surviving portions of the History of Bayhaqi, the notable 11th century historian, as a work of literature. Highlighting the narrative structure and rhetorical devices employed by Bayhaqi and outlining his selection, organization and juxtaposition of the ‘secondary’ historical anecdotes, as opposed to his ‘primary account’ of Ghaznavid history, Waldman tries to bring to the surface the significant tension between the explicit and the implicit values of this historical text. The tension conveys the attitudes of the author, often not easily communicated by his statements about the historical figures and events (Meisami, Poliakova, Yavari). Waldman’s principal concerns are to ground Bayhaqi’s work within both expectations of the genre, which she is at pains to demonstrate as pervasive in his writing, and within the context of Bayhaqi’s own life and time, in so far as this is recoverable. Toward a Theory of Historical Narrative raised critical debates on the centrality of the narrative chronicle tradition to the understanding of medieval Islamic history, on the desirability of employing literary theories to analyze historical texts, and on treating historical narratives more as images and representations of the past than reservoirs of presumed historical realities (Bulliet, Meisami, Perry, Siddiq Khan). Although the book had an ambivalent reception, many of Waldman’s insights, especially those alluding to the essentially generic nature of medieval Islamic historiography, and the ways in which the conventions of genre dictate how material is presented, have emerged as a lasting legacy to the field.

Bibliography:

Richard Bulliet, in International Journal of Middle East Studies 14/1, 1982, pp. 101-2.

Julie S. Meisami, Persian Historiography: To the End of the Twelfth Century, Edinburgh 1999, pp 79-81.

Idem, “Dynastic History and Ideals of Kingship in Bayhaqi’s Tarikh-i- Masʿudi,” Edebiat 9/1, 1989, p. 69.

John R. Perry, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 44/3, July 1985, pp. 242-44.

E. A. Poliakova, “The Development of a Literary Canon in Medieval Persian Chronicles: The Triumph of Etiquette,” Iranian Studies XVII/2- 3, Spring-Summer 1984, pp. 237-56.

Mohammad Siddigh Khan, in Muslim World Book Review 4/4, summer 1984, pp. 40-42.

M. E. Yapp, in Times Literary Supplement, 19 September 1980, p. 1040.

Houra Yavari, “Taʾammoli dar naqš-e ravāyat-hā-ye afzuda dar tāriḵ- e Bayhaqi,” Iranshenasi XXI/1, 2001, pp. 117-38.

(Dick Davis)

Originally Published: July 20, 2005

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WAR KABUD an archeological site to the north of Čavār in Ilām Province (Pošt-e kuh, Lorestān). Two hundred and three individual tombs of a large plundered graveyard (more than 1,000 tombs estimated to have been plundered) were excavated in 1965 and 1966. They all date to the Iron Age III (ca. 800/750-600 BCE).

WAR KABUD, an archeological site to the north of Čavār in Ilām Province (Pošt-e kuh, Lorestān). Two hundred and three individual tombs of a large plundered graveyard (more than 1,000 tombs estimated to have been plundered) were excavated in 1965 and 1966 by the Belgian Archaeological Mission in Iran, directed by Louis Vanden Berghe (Ghent University, Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels; FIGURE 1). Fifty tombs were excavated in the plundered area and one hundred fifty-three in two rectangular plots (961 sq. meters). They all date to the Iron Age III (ca. 800/750-600 BCE), a distinct cultural phase in the Pošt-e kuh known also from graveyards at Gol Ḵānān Morda (Gul Khanan Murdah), Čamzi Muma, and Jub-e Gowhar (Vanden Berghe, 1987; Haerinck and Overlaet 1998, 1999 and 2004). War Kabud is the largest Iron Age III graveyard reported from the area.

Various types of tombs were found, simple pit tombs usually covered with horizontal stone slabs, pit tombs with the deceased and the burial goods covered by slanting stone slabs, and cist tombs with one to four stone walls and cap stones. Stone circles, stones with a small central depression and pillar shaped stones (probably to be seen as headstones), were sometimes found up to 0.50 m above the tombs. The burial goods include pottery (46%), bronze and iron objects, flint arrowheads, shells, beads, some cylinder seals and a scarab (FIGURE 2). Most of the pottery is common ware. Diagnostic shapes are jugs and teapots with tubular spout and vertical and/or basket-handle. Also characteristic for the Pošt-e kuh Iron Age III is the fine grey ware (27% of the pottery), and the fine buff ware (8%). This fine ware is often decorated with incised geometric patterns, usually hatched triangles that allows a comparison with the Baba Jan III (Piškuh, Lorestān) painted ware (cf. Goff, fig. 1-9). Exceptional is one bull shaped fine grey ware vessel similar to five from Jub-e Gowhar. Four glazed vessels, probably Assyrian imports, were also recorded.

Iron was used for weapons such as arrowheads, daggers, swords (some with bronze mountings), spearheads, and axes, as well as for elbow fibulae. Bronze was used for jewelry (rings, pins, fibulae, bracelets, and anklets), decorative items (quiver plate), vessels, and specific types of armament (mace-heads, decorated axe-adze). A bimetallic mace-head had an iron core and a cast-on socket. Silver and gold was only used in small quantities for jewelry (earrings, nose rings, hair-coils, beads). One female tomb contained two frit/faience cylinder seals and one frit/faience scarab, probably of Assyrian or North-Syrian manufacture.

Among the exceptional finds are a bronze quiver plate with geometric decorations and a bronze cup or pyxis, decorated with a fortress and winged composite creatures with a scorpion’s tail. Bronze vessels were altogether common in the Pošt-e kuh Iron Age III. A characteristic local shape is the “ink-well” vessel of which seven were found at War Kabud.

Above the tombs, at the level of the headstones, a group of bronze and iron horse trappings was discovered. It includes bronze phalera, buttons, rings, bronze bells with iron clappers, an iron stake, and an iron horse-bit with twisted canons and curved cheek pieces.

Bibliography:

Clare Goff, “Excavations at Baba Jan: The Pottery and Metal from Levels III and II,” Iran 16, 1978, pp. 29-65.

Ernie Haerinck and Bruno Overlaet, Chamahzi Mumah: An Iron Age III Graveyard, Luristan excavation documents 2, Acta Iranica 33, Leuven, 1998. Idem, Djub-i Gauhar and Gul Khanan Murdah: Iron Age III Graveyards in the Aivan Plain, Luristan excavation documents 3, Acta Iranica 36, Leuven, 1999.

Idem, The Iron Age III Graveyard at War Kabud, Pusht-i Kuh, Luristan, Luristan excavation documents 5, Acta Iranica 42, Leuven, 2004.

Louis Vanden Berghe, Het archeologisch onderzoek naar de Bronscultuur van Luristan: Opgravingen in Pusht-i Kuh I. Kalwali en War Kabud (1965 en 1966), Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Letteren, jaargang 30/64, Brussel, 1968 (with abstract in French).

Idem, “Les pratiques funéraires à l’âge du Fer III au Pusht-i Kuh, Luristan: les nécropoles žgenre War Kabud’,” Iranica Antiqua 32, 1987, pp. 201-66.

August 23, 2006

(Bruno Overlaet)

Originally Published: November 15, 2006

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WARŠTMĀNSR NASK

See SŪDGAR NASK AND WARŠTMĀNSR NASK.

SŪDGAR NASK and WARŠTMĀNSR NASK the first and second of three commentaries on the Old Avesta, extant in a Pahlavi resume in book nine of the Dēnkard, the third being the Bag nask.

SŪDGAR NASK and WARŠTMĀNSR NASK, the first and second of three commentaries on the Old Avesta (the five Gāthās [Gāθās] and Yasna haptaŋhāiti), extant in a Pahlavi resume in book nine of the Dēnkard, the third being the Bag nask. They are three of the 21 nasks (parts of the Avesta), which, according to Dēnkard book eight, constituted the Avesta in the ninth century CE. All three contain 22 fragards, corresponding to the traditional division of the Gāthās into 17 sections (hāitis), the Yasna haptaŋhāiti (as per the Avestan manuscripts, its seven hāitis are treated as a single unit and called Yasn; cf. Nērangestān 18.3, ed. Kotwal and Kreyenbroek, p. 101, n. 343), and four fragards on the four sacred prayers (Ahuna vairiia, Aṣəm vohū, Yeŋˊhē hātąm, and Ā airiiə̄mā išiiō). In addition, the Sūdgarhas a brief introduction (Dēnkard 9.1.1-2), the Warštmānsrhas an introductory fragard on the birth and life of Zoroaster (Dēnkard 9.24), and the Baghas a final fragard with quotations from the Pahlavi Gāthās on the future existence (Dēnkard 9.69).

The fragards are called by the Pahlavi forms of the names of the Avestan hāitis (e.g., Xwadmēd for Xᵛaētumaitī hāiti = Yasna 32; Kamnamēz for Kamnamaēzā hāiti = Yasna 46), but Yasna 28 (Ahiiāsā hāiti) is named after its introductory text (Yasna 28.0), the (archaizing) Young Avestan Yānīm manō (thus also in Wizīdagīhā ī Zādspram 28.3, ed. Gignoux and Tafazzoli, pp. 92-93). The Young Avestan Yasna 42 (between the Yasna haptaŋhāiti and the second Gāthā) and Yasna 52 (between the third and fourth Gāthās) are not included (Molé, pp. 142-43, arguedthat this shows a traditional awareness of the structure of the Old Avestan corpus).

Whether there were complete Avestan nasks is uncertain; the only text with an extant Avestan original is the last fragardof the Warštmānsr nask, the Ērmān fragard (commenting on the Ā airiiə'mā išiiō= Yasna 54.1), which is the translation of the so- called Fragment Westergaard 4.1-3. This suggests that at least some of the fragards were based on Avestan originals.

The style is terse and best described as a “table of contents”; most sections are introduced by the preposition abar(“about, regarding”) and are often followed by ud ēn-iz kū(“and [it says] this also”), introducing additional explanations (cf. West, 1892, p. xlvi). The Sūdgar is more expansive in its interpretation of the Old Avesta than the Warštmānsr and Bag nasks, which, at least at times, follow the Pahlavi Gāthās closely, whereas the Sūdgar often draws on material from the Vīdēvdād and the Yašts.

Sūdgar may mean “the benefit-maker,” but swtyklyhy> = sŭd(ī?)garīh in the Pahlavi Psalter renders Syriac “supplication” (see Andreas and Barr, p. 54). In the Zand ī Wahman yasn(1.1) and the Persian rivāyats (Dhabhar, 1932, pp. 2-3) it is called Stūdgar or Istūdgar, “the praise-maker,” by popular etymology (Cereti, p. 171). In Dēnkard 8.1.12, the Sūdgar is listed as thefirst of the gāhānīgnasks (Gathic nasks), and its contents and style are briefly described in Dēnkard 8.2.2-4. The nasks are listed in the same order in the Persian rivāyat of Bahman Punjya (Dhabhar, 1932, p. 1), but in the Pahlavi Wizīrgird ī dēnīgand thePersian rivāyats of Kama Bohra, Narimān Hoshang, and Dastur Barzoji, it is listed second, with the Stōt yašt (Av. Staota yesniia)listed first (Dhabhar, 1932, pp. 1-2).

The name Warštmānsr refers to the working/composing (varz-) of a mąθra (cf. Yasna 45.3 mąθrəm varəšəṇtī “[those who] shall work a mąθra”; Yasna 3.4 gāθanąmca sraoθrəm huuarštå mąθrå “and the recitation of the Gāthās, the well-wrought mąθras”). In the Persian rivāyats it is called Wahišta-mānsar “the best mąθra” by popular etymology (ibid., 1932, p. 3). In Dēnkard 8.1.12, the Warštmānsr is listed as the second of the gāhānīg nasks, and its contents and style are briefly described in Dēnkard 8.3.1-5, where it says (8.3.4), “whatever is said in the Gāθās, then in the Warštmānsr something is said about it.”

Manuscripts. Dēnkard 9 is found in six published manuscripts. The only complete manuscript is J5 (copied in 1865 from B, now in Bombay; Jamasp Asa and Nawabi, 1976b), but it is modern and less reliable than the others (e.g., AMT = ka “when” is typically used for MNW= kē “who, which”). The three oldest, but incomplete manuscripts are DH (copied in 1577, now in Bombay; ed. P. K. Anklesaria), K43b (copied in 1594, from DH, nowin Copenhagen; ed. Christensen), and B (copied in 1659,now in Bombay; ed. Dresden; see DĒNKARD). The remaining two modern manuscripts are D10a (copied from Bin 1868, now in Bombay; ed. Jamasp Asa and Nawabi, 1976a) and MR24II (= Meherji Rana; copied in 1893 to fillthe lacunae of B, now in Navsari; ed. Dresden).

DH (and K43b) and B represent two separate manuscript traditions (evidenced by variant readings and divergent text in certain parts), but both go back to the Baghdad manuscript copied by Māhwindād in 369A.Y./1020 CE, whose colophon (the oldest in Pahlavi literature) is preserved in B (Sanjana, 1928, XIX, pp. 95-100; see the translation in West 1892, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv).

The Sūdgar naskis missing in B and D10a, except the end of the 10th and all of the 11th fragard (cf. West 1892, pp. xxxvi-xxxvii). The Warštmānsr naskis missing in B and D10a, and K43b has only the first eight fragards (West relied upon K43b, and his translation is therefore incomplete). Only the first half of the first fragard (Ahunwar) is preserved in MR24II. Editions and translations. The only complete editions of the two nasks are those of D. M. Madan (1911, pp. 787-818 [Sūdgar], and pp. 818-72 [Warštmānsr]) and D. P. Sanjana (1922, XVII, pp. 1-65 [Sūdgar], pp. 66-98 [Warštmānsr], and 1926, XVIII, pp. 1-57 [Warštmānsr]). The only complete translation is that of Sanjana (1926, XVII, pp. 1-50 [Sūdgar], pp. 51-75 and XVIII, pp. 1-42 [Warštmānsr]). E. W. West’s translation of the Sūdgar (1892, whose paragraph numbering is used here) is complete (pp. 172-226), but that of the Warštmānsr(pp. 226-303) is lacking a portion of the 10th-11th and 14th fragards (Dēnkard 9.33-34, 37). Dresden provides concordances for manuscripts B, MR24II and K43b, and the editions of Sanjana and Madan.For concordances of all the published manuscripts and editions of the Dēnkard, book 9, see Vevaina; also see Vevaina; also see TABLE 1.

Contents. The Sūdgar contains numerous references to characters and events from the mythological narratives found primarily in the Young Avestan yašts (Menasce, p. 1175; cf. Darmesteter, pp. CIII-CIV). Many passages have parallels in other Pahlavi texts and the Persian rivāyats; for instance, in the section on the Ahunwar, the number of times the prayer is to be recited in particular circumstances is listed as “nine when one wishes to throw seeds into the earth, ten when one wishes to release the male animals [into the females], eleven when one goes to seek a wife” (Dēnkard 9.2.11-13); similar texts about how many times to recite the Ahunwar are found in the Pahlavi Supplementary Texts to the Šāyest-nē-šāyest (e.g., 19.9: “corn will ripen in nine months,” cf. West, 1880, p. 392; ed. Kotwal, pp. 76-81) and the Persian rivāyat of Bahman Punjya (tr. Dhabhar, 1932, pp. 9-10).

The remuneration of priests is frequently hinted at, e.g., “he who goes according to the law of the demons, is going over to the demons, or has committed deceit is like a wealthy person who gives nothing to a worthy supplicant” (Dēnkard 9.4.2 on the Yeŋ'hē hātąm), and “he who gives something to Zoroaster’s disciples, his fee/salary [mizd] and reward [pādāšn] are just as if you gave something to Zoroaster (himself)” (Dēnkard 9.13.9 on Yasna 43). Another frequent theme in both the Sūdgar and the Warštmānsr is the rise of heresy (ahlomōγīh), e.g., “regarding the complaint of the spirit of the Gāθās that, when a herbed or dastur dies away from home and the body of that man does not return to his own land, for that reason, in the land of his birth, there will oppression by heretics” (Dēnkard 9.6.2 on Yasna 29).

Anachronistic interpretations are found in both the Sūdgar and the Warštmānsr. In the exegesis of Yasna 31 (Tā və' uruuātā hāiti) in the Sūdgar (Dēnkard 9.8.1-7), the four ages of mankind are described as the golden age, in which Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazdā) revealed the dēn (“religion”) to Zoroaster; the silver age, in which Wištāsp received it from Zoroaster; the age of steel, in which Ādurbād ī Mahraspandān (lived 4th century CE) was born; and the age mixed with iron, when heresy is confused with religion, sovereignty, goodness, and virtue weaken, and character and wisdom deteriorate and disappear from Iran. The same description is explicitly cited from the “Stūdgar” in chapter one of the Zand ī Wahman yasn (Cereti, pp. 139, 149). In the exegesis of Yasna 46.7 in the Warštmānsr(Dēnkard 9.39.13), it is suggested that the Avestan text is about the characteristics of the fiend, the cripple Mani (3rd century CE) and the evil people who are his Hearers (niyōšāg) and the beating, which came upon him from the lord of the land (dahibed).

A famous passagein the Warštmānsr is the exegesis of Yasna 30.3 on the twin “spirits” (mainiius), where the demon Arš says that Ohrmazd and Ahriman were two brothers in one womb (Dēnkard 9.30.4-5). Here, this view (often ascribed to “Zurvanism” by Western scholars) is repudiated in favor of the separate origin of light and darkness. A similar statement is found in a Manichean polemical hymn (see Skjærvø, pp. 245; cf. Henning, pp. 50-51),and the doctrine is critiqued in greater detail in the Armenian Christian theologian Eznik of Kołb’s “Refutation of Sects” (4th-5th centuries CE; cf. Zaehner, for other polemics against Zurvanism).

A unique ritual interpretation is found in the exegesis of Yasna 50.1-11 in the Warštmānsr (Dēnkard 9.43.7). Here, the three steps taken by the priest(zōt) when libating the waters (see ĀB-ZŌHR) at the beginning of the Ābān niyāyišn are interpreted as the three steps through good thoughts, words, and deeds from the earth, via the star, moon, and sun stations (pāyag) up to paradise (garōdmān; this is also the path of the soul after death, cf. Mēnōy ī xrad 7.8-12, tr. West, 1885, pp. 29-30, ed. T. D. Anklesaria, pp. 39-40 [6.8-12]; Ardā Wirāz-nāmag 7-10, ed. Gignoux, pp. 53-56, 161-63). In the modern Yasnaritual, these three steps are taken during the recitation of Yasna 64.3-4 = Yasna 50.7-8(the Ātaš niyāyišn) before the beginning of Yasna65 (the Ābān niyāyišn);Yasna 50.8 contains the statement “with the steps (pada-) that are renowned as those of the milk libation (īžā-),” which evidently prompted the exegesis (cf. West, 1892, pp. 292-93, see p. 293, n. 1-2; Darmesteter, I, pp. 400-1, for further details on the ritual actions of the officiating priest; and Windfuhr, pp. 30-31, on related matters).

Bibliography:

Friedrich Carl Andreas and Kaj Barr, Bruchstücke einer Pehlevi-Übersetzung der Psalmen, SPAW, phil.-hist. Kl. 1, 1933, no. 1, pp. 1-64.

Tehmuras Dinshaw Anklesaria, Dânâk-u Mainyô-i Khard. Pahlavi, Pazand, and Sanskrit Texts, Bombay, 1913.

Peshotan K. Anklesaria, The Codex DH, Being a Facsimile Edition of Bondahesh, Zand- e Vohuman Yasht, and Parts of Denkard, Tehran, 1971.

Carlo G. Cereti, The Zand ī Wahman Yasn. A Zoroastrian Apocalypse, Serie Orientale Roma 75, Rome, 1995.

Arthur Christensen, The Pahlavi Codex K 43, Second Part, Copenhagen, 1936, repr. in Pahlavi Codices and Iranian Researches 42, ed. Kaikhusroo M. Jamasp Asa and Mahyar Nawabi, Shiraz, 1976.

James Darmesteter, Le Zend-AvestaI-III, Paris, 1892-93, repr. Paris, 1960.

Bamanji Nasarvanji Dhabhar, The Persian Rivayats of Hormazyar Framarz and Others. Their Version with Introduction and Notes, Bombay, 1932.

Mark J. Dresden, Dēnkart. A Pahlavi Text. Facsimile Edition of the Manuscript B of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute Bombay, Wiesbaden, 1966.

Philippe Gignoux, Le livre d’Ardā Vīrāz, translittération, transcription, et traduction du texte Pehlevi, Paris, 1984.

Idemand Ahmad Tafazzoli, Anthologie de Zādspram. Studia Iranica, Cahier 13, Paris, 1993.

Walter Bruno Henning, Zoroaster. Politician or Witch-Doctor, London, 1951. Helmut Humbach and Pallan Ichaporia, The Heritage of Zarathushtra: A New Translation of his Gāthās, Heidelberg, 1994.

Kaikhusroo M. Jamasp Asa and Mahyar Nawabi, Manuscript D 10a. Dinkart. Books 4-9, 2 vols., Pahlavi Codices and Iranian Researches 9-10, Shiraz, 1976a.

Idem, MS. J 5. Dinkart. Books 5-9, Pahlavi Codices and Iranian Researches 22, Shiraz, 1976b.

Firoze M. P. Kotwal, The Supplementary Texts to the Šāyest ne-Šāyest, Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-filosofiske Meddelelser 44, 2, Copenhagen, 1969.

Idem and Philip G. Kreyenbroek with contributions by James R. Russell, The Hērbedestān and Nērangestān, vol. II: Nērangestān, Fragard1, Paris, 1995.

Dhanjishah Meherjibhai Madan, The Complete Text of the Pahlavi Dinkard,Bombay, 1911.

Jean de Menasce, “Zoroastrian Pahlavī Writings,” in CHI III/2, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, Cambridge, 1983,pp. 1166-95.

Marijan Molé, Culte, mythe et cosmologie dans l’iran ancien. Le problème zoroastrien et la tradition mazdéenne,Annales du Musée Guimet, Bibliothèque d’Études 69, Paris, 1963.

Behramjee Sanjana and Peshotan Sanjana, The Dînkard. The Original Pahlavi Text, 19 vols., Bombay, 1874-1928.

Prods Oktor Skjærvø, “The Manichean Polemical Hymns in M 28 I,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute9, 1995 [pub. 1997], pp. 239-55.

Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina,“Studies in Zoroastrian Exegesis and Hermeneutics with a Critical Edition of the Sūdgar Nask of DēnkardBook 9,”Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University (Cambridge, 2007).

Edward William West, Pahlavi TextsI: The Bundahis, Bahman Yast, and Shâyast lâ- shâyast,SBE 5, Oxford, 1880 (repr. New Delhi, 1993).

Idem, Pahlavi Texts III: Dînâ-î Maînôg-î Khirad, Sikand-Gûmânîk Vigâr, Sad Dar, SBE 24, Oxford, 1885 (repr. New Delhi, 1994).

Idem, Pahlavi TextsIV: Contents of the Nasks, SBE 37, Oxford, 1892 (repr. New Delhi, 1994).

Gernot Windfuhr, “The Ties that Bind. Sacred Geometry in the Zoroastrian Yasna Ritual (Nērangestān 60-61),” Nāma-ye Irān-e Bāstān4/1, 2004, pp. 3-40.

R. C. Zaehner, Zurvan. A Zoroastrian Dilemma, Oxford, 1955 [1971].

(Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina)

Originally Published: January 7, 2010

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WAṢF a literary term meaning “description;” but it can carry several other connotations, including “quality,” “attribute,” “characterization,” “distinguishing mark,” and “adjective.”

WAṢF, a literary term meaning “description;” but it can carry several other connotations, including “quality,” “attribute,” “characterization,” “distinguishing mark,” and “adjective,” (Sumi, 2004, p. 5), which are also relevant to the analysis of descriptive poetry in Persian. One has to bear in mind that in a specific context, the poet or the critic using the term may have one or all of these meanings and connotations in mind.

Waṣf passages serve different purposes in different genres and poetic forms. In epic poetry the description has a narrative function. By inserting a descriptive passage the epic poet freezes the narrative moment and draws the reader’s attention to other aspects of the story. In several cases, the poet indicates time and setting by presenting a descriptive passage. Such descriptions are frequently about dawn and sunset in a locality, whether a garden in autumn or spring, a desert, or any other place. The epic poet uses a description to add a meditative pause or an embellishment to the story. What is more, descriptive passages commonly reflect physical and psychological aspects of a character. A description can provide an allegory of a protagonist’s mental state, reflecting the character’s feelings and giving the reader clues on how to interpret a scene. Sometimes the poet gives a lengthy description to distract the reader’s attention from what has been told previously, and to draw attention to other aspects of the story (Seyed-Gohrab, 2003, pp. 314-19; Kunitzsch, 1982; Ritter, 1927, pp. 22-27).

In panegyrics (qaṣidas), the poet depicts a variety of objects and abstract ideas connected to the military, administrative, festive, and sportive aspects of the court in his opening lines (nasib). The nasib originated as the amatory introduction to a qaṣida; but particularly in Persian literature, the nasib presents a variety of themes, including a dynamic and multi-faceted description of gardens, with panoply of personifications and extended metaphors. Other frequent subjects for the descriptive passages in panegyrics are gardens, wine, love, the beloved, musical instruments, a book, pen, ring, horse, sword, bows and arrows, candle, and several other objects and abstract ideas associated with the court or the more elevated echelons of society. Characteristics of a patron, such as magnanimity, precision, justice, aspirations and ambitions, etc. are also described. Description should not be seen as a definition of a concrete object or an abstract idea: it is usually meant to refer to some quality of the žpraised person’ (mamduḥ). At the same time, the description is a way for the poet to reveal his virtuosity; and it could also be seen as an intellectual game to entertain the educated public at the court. Poets displayed their verbal talents and sought to outshine both their predecessors and their contemporaries by introducing new ways of depicting familiar courtly objects or ideals.

Descriptions are conventional and the poet had to follow standard poetic rules used by his predecessors and set out in treatises on poetics (Qeys-e Rāzi, pp. 356-60). For instance, when the poet describes a vernal garden, a splendid example of the locus amoenus (Curtius, ch. 10), he starts off with the smaller plants in the garden such as the meadow grass, lily, violet, hyacinth, tulip, narcissus and rose, followed by trees such as the cypress, juniper, box-tree, etc. Afterwards the poet describes the singing birds. Flora and fauna have their own standard character-traits, which are repeated in new but familiar images and metaphors. The flowers have their own hierarchy in the garden with the grass as the lowliest and the rose as the queen of the flowers. The poet usually assigns human feelings, gestures, and attributes to flowers, which are then applied to the conditions of a character in the poem’s context (Ritter, 1927, p. 8). Through rich imagery and metaphors, the poet associates the colors of trees and flowers with precious stones such as agate, ruby and turquoise, their fragrance to ambergris and musk, and their substance to silk and brocade. Suffice it here to give one example of a vernal garden by Farroḵi of Sistān:

When the meadow covers its face with blue silk,

The mountains cover their heads with seven-colored brocade.

Boundless musk is borne from the earth as from the gazelle’s navel-bag,

Countless leaves grow on the willow like the feathers of a parrot.

Last night, at midnight, the wind conveyed the scent of spring.

You would say that the wind had pounded musk in its sleeve,

You would say that the garden had embraced innocent beauties.

The Judas tree had ruby earrings from Badaḵšān;

The white rose possessed peerless pearls on its ears. As the red cups of wine appeared on the stems of the rose,

The fingers of man stretched downwards from the sycamore.

The garden wore a chameleon dress and the trees revealed chameleons;

The water had the color of pearls and the clouds were laden with pearls.

(p. 175, q. 86, ll. 1-7)

In his description of a garden, the poet shows the unity, harmony, and internal relationships between various elements of the garden. The same technique is used in narrative poetry. In this description, the rose asks the hyacinth to give her the scent. “The wild rose needs the silvery dews of the jasmine to wash her petals. The queen of the flowers, the rose, dares not bloom. As soon as she opens her eyes for the first time in this burgeoning garden, she is overwhelmed by its sublimity; she embarks on her dalliance only when she discovers that she has no match. The petals of the lily are compared to tongues, i.e. to the lover’s eloquence. However, as soon as the lover sees the beloved in the garden, he becomes speechless, an eloquent silence. The lily’s stamen and leaf are likened to a blade” (Seyed-Gohrab, 2003, p. 326). The entire description of the garden is then commonly used to display the feelings of the protagonists in an epic.

In the same way that the description of the vernal garden is joyful, the autumnal garden is gloomy. Autumn as a universal symbol of loss and sadness is used as the correlative of a sorrowful event, the death of a person, or the condition of a forsaken lover. Autumn is commonly personified as a fierce army that destroys the garden, expelling the singing birds such as the nightingale. In his description, the poet illustrates how autumn replaces the fresh fragrant flowers with dead branches, and the nightingale of a thousand melodies with the crow’s raucous caw; the gentle breeze is replaced by cold winds, and the running stream is turned to ice. The colors of dark autumnal clouds are associated with the condition of the lover. While the lover’s pale appearance corresponds to the yellow tints of the garden, the migrating birds remind him of separation. Not all descriptions of autumn are steeped in melancholy, since one of the most celebrated of all Persian festivals, Mehregān, falls in the time of the grape harvest and pressing. The Samanid and Ghaznavid poets have given us the most joyful and animated descriptions of the grape harvest, followed by close descriptions of how wine is made (Hanaway, 1988, pp. 69-80; Moʾtaman, 1943, pp. 106-31). In these descriptions, the grapes are often personified as žthe daughters of the vine’ as in the following description:

The grape said to the old farmer:

“The sun has made me pregnant from a distance.

It is almost a hundred and seventy days

Since I have been in the bed of the brilliant sun.

There is neither a pact nor a marriage contract between us;

there has been neither a wedding ceremony nor a wedding feast.

I was not very chaste; no, nor do I claim descent

From a virginal maternal line.

I have become pregnant by the bright sun,

I do not apologize, I do not apologize and I do not apologize.

God has made an example of me in both worlds, He had made me black, with hanging head, and sorrowful.

In the beginning I was like the creatures of Paradise,

My face was like the garments of the houris.

(Now) God has made my face like the guardians of Hell:

Black, coarse-lipped, dark and afflicted.

God has appointed over me bees

Which continually tear at my skin.

O landlord, I want you that you should, today,

Take a dagger, a large chopping knife,

And with this dagger cut my throat completely,

And put me upon the back of a laborer;

Pound me to pieces under your feet;

Pierce my two shoulders, like Šāpur; Throw me upside down into the press,

Off of the back of the laborer and the guard of the vineyard;

Kick me on the head three hundred thousand times -

You are the person in charge of doing this -

Throw away my bones, my flesh and pulp,

As well as my veins, fat and peeled skin;

Take my blood - like the juice of the red tulip,

Like a drop of dew, like tears of a forsaken lover -

Pour me into a royal vat,

And watch over this sealed vat for a year.

Perhaps the Lord may be pleased with me

And your efforts for me will be worthy of thanks.

Then bring me out of my vat, Like the palm of Moses’ hand on Mount Sinai.

Then drink of me, toasting the king,

To the sound of harp, flute and lute.

(Manučehri, Divān, No. 20, p. 39; tr. Seyed-Gohrab)

Whether objects or ideas belonged to the court or to nature, they are described in terms of jewels, emeralds and pearls. Since the majority of descriptive poetry occurs in court poetry, natural descriptive elements are inspired by the court as well. The following passage, translated by Jerome W. Clinton, not only shows how an object such as an apple is transformed into “something magical and luxurious” in the hands of the court poet Manučehri, but it also shows how the poet describes the apple from the inside (for a similar description of a grape, see Seyed-Gohrab, 2001, pp. 23-26):

The apple like a smooth turned ball of sugar

That has been dyed three hundred times with saffron.

Upon its cheeks are spots of coral hue

An emerald saddle-cloth lies by its stem.

The tiniest of domes fill up its belly.

In each of these there is a Zangi child, As black as pitch, who’s sound asleep.

(Manučehri, Divān, p. 154, ll. 2088-90)

Description as a relief. Descriptions in Persian panegyrics can be seen as the verbal equivalent of bas-relief carvings with a political significance. Both are symbols of the ruler’s power, freezing an important moment in the patron’s life. Persian descriptive poetry, particularly of the Ghaznavid period, highlights many of the insignia of the court, celebrating the ruler as a victorious monarch, such as a horse, sword, lance, and bows and arrows, which also feature on many rock carvings in Persia. Because of this similarity between a relief and the descriptions in panegyrics, Clinton has referred to the Persian qaṣida as a “frieze or bas relief, a work for public display whose purpose was to celebrate the virtues and accomplishments of the artist’s patron” (Clinton, 1972, p. 130). When Islamic dynasties modeled their administrative systems on the Sasanian bureaucracy, they were also influenced by the Sasanian way of celebrating an important moment in a patron’s public life. By pointing to the close parallel between a poet and his artist contemporary, Clinton shows how Sasanian iconography could function as a source of inspiration for poets. In his view, the descriptions of a garden at the Persian New Year, looked “like paintings done on water-blue-paper.” He notes the poet’s “fondness for likening the garden to a rich brocade, embroidered with gems and precious metals, and for filling it with the scents of costly perfumes ...” (Clinton, 1972, p. 128). Clinton cites the description of a throne from Beyhaqi’s chronicle to support his opinion:

... a throne which was like a garden ... the seat was made of silver slats woven closely together, and on it thirty golden trees were arranged whose leaves were of various kinds of cornelian ... and around these trees were set twenty flower holders and the flowers in them were made of gold and silver and many kinds of jewels, and all about these silver flower holders were set small golden cups, all filled with amber, incense, and camphor ... (Clinton, 1972, p. 129; Beyhaqi, p. 396).

Waṣf and riddling poems. Persian descriptive poetry shares many similarities with the genre of literary riddles (loḡaz or čistān). In both genres, the poet tries to depict concrete objects and abstract ideas in a vivid way. In waṣf, the poet’s purpose is not to make his description puzzling: he is doing his best to be as vivid and transparent as possible. The most important element is the poet’s originality in contriving novel and intricate techniques to depict an object or an abstract idea as minutely as possible. In many cases, however, especially in the case of ʿOtËšmān Moḵtāri, the poet’s sophisticated imagery and use of metaphors are so rarefied that many of his descriptions, as explicated by the editor of his divān, Jalāl-al-Din Homāʾi, are almost riddle-like in their complexity. Whether they were more immediately accessible and less puzzling to his contemporaries is a moot point.

There is great scope for ambiguity in Persian descriptive passages. This ambiguity regarding the nature of the object described derives partly from the poet’s attempt to depict the ideal form of an earthly object, idea or event. The poet was not expected to give a žreal’ picture of the object he described; their expectations were focused rather on how the poet would describe a familiar object through his fantasy and novel imagery. The poet was, therefore, immersed in his imagination, trying to be as original as possible: his attention was turned away from žreality,’ focusing instead on images from the ideal world. At the same time, the poet did not want to risk falling into obscurity. He composed poems for an educated, courtly audience who were familiar with poetic rules, and with the way a subject had been treated by previous and contemporary poets. The audience wished to hear a novel description within the boundaries of Persian poetic conventions. The poet faced a hard task to satisfy his demanding audience when he tried his hand at describing a courtly object: he had to avoid both clichés and far-fetched allusions, finding images and metaphors that his audience could decipher and yet appreciate as new. The manner in which something was expressed was therefore much more important than the content.

Persian descriptive poetry, and notably that of Anwari, contains ekphrastic elements, using the term in its literary technical sense as “a verbal description of a work of art, of a scene rendered in a work of art, or even of a fictional scene the description of which unacknowledgedly derives from descriptions of scenes” (Hollander, p. 5). In these descriptions, it looks as if the poet is depicting an art object. To give only one example, in qaṣida number 58, Anwari first depicts a palace and then points specifically to the characteristic features of the palace-complex, describing patterns, motifs and paintings on the palace’s wall. The effect is not far removed from a riddle, and the problem is solved when we realize that the poem is not depicting the palace, but the scene in a painting in the palace:

A paradise in quality because, like angels

Wild animals and birds are exempt from eating and sleeping.

Your plants all bear leaves on their branches and trunks Without any effort to grow.

Your nightingale does not have the talent to sing

Otherwise, it would be always repeating the song of the rose.

Your falcon and partridge haste without movement,

Your elephant and wolf fight without malice.

(Anwari, Divān, I, p. 129, qaṣida no. 58, ll. 6-9)

The scene is frozen in motion. Using several rhetorical figures such as feigned astonishment (taʿajjob) and hyperbole (mobālaḡa), the poet emphasizes that everything in this royal palace is “even more amazing than in paradisiacal gardens: the birds and animals do not need to eat and sleep. The vegetables do not make any effort to grow but are always verdant. The nightingale, famous for its thousand songs, is frozen in time, singing to the rose, so it is at once singing and soundless. The same contrast is repeated in each hemistich of the fourth couplet: the falcon and partridge haste without movement, the elephant and wolf are locked in passionless combat. It is in such scenes that the elements come most clearly to the fore. The poet is applying ekphrastic principles to compare the flora and fauna immortalized by the artist to the real palace, and to Paradise. This is typical of the way poets use ekphrasis.” (Seyed-Gohrab, 2006)

Development in descriptive style. The way objects and ideas are described depends entirely on the literary style of the period. Descriptions of palace-complexes of the early Ghaznavid period are concrete and visual, although the poet is always trying to depict an ideal picture of the object he describes. The description of the palace becomes abstract as we enter the late Ghaznavid and the Seljuk (Saljuq) periods. The following depictions of two palaces by Farroḵi of Sistān and ʿOtËšmān Moḵtāri illustrate the development from concreteness to abstraction:

There was a kingly palace in the middle of the garden The top of the parapets was situated between two turrets

Within the palace, there were decorated porticoes

Each opening towards a belvedere

One was adorned like Chinese brocade

The other contained pictures as in Maniʾs Artang

In this palace, the images of the King of the East

Were carved/painted in several places:

In one place, he is fighting, holding in his hand a small javelin

In another place, he is feasting, holding in his hand a cup of wine.

(Farroḵi, Divān, p. 54, qaṣida no. 31)

Farroḵi’s style is straightforward and there is no attempt to depict an žideal,’ or imaginative representation of the reality. Actual events painted or carved on the walls of the palace are depicted. In this short piece, the poet refers to the locality of the palace: the palace has four porticos, which are situated in the middle of the garden in such a manner that each portico opens onto a different view. The parapets can be seen from between two turrets. The vaulted porticos are decorated either with motifs to be found in Chinese brocade, or with paintings in the style of Mani. Moreover, the poet juxtaposes the king’s two main activities, namely fighting and feasting (razmobazm): while in the battlefield, the king holds a javelin, whereas in the feast scenes he holds a cup of wine (for an analysis of this scene see Seyed-Gohrab, 2006; Meisami, 2001).

Descriptions by poets of the late Ghaznavid era are more abstract and the concrete depiction is lost (Seyed-Gohrab, 2006; Meisami, 2001). Moḵtāri’s description of a palace built by Arslān Shah (1116-17) does not have the palpability and concreteness of Farroḵiʾs description:

The ancient sphere established the centre of the world’s empire

Through this palace, from which Jupiter exercises its heavenly influence.

When the sun saw its parapets from the sky,

It bowed his head to the ground, and its eyes to the threshold.

[When] the virgins of paradise beheld it from their gardens,

They took this palace for gold and paradise as the mine.

They considered the earth insignificant because of its firm structure;

The air in this palace was so fine that the air (outside) was heavy.

The architect used his intellect and soul to design this edifice

through the firmness of his intellect and the grace of his soul.

(ʿOṯmān-e Moḵtāri, Divān, p. 51, qaṣida no. 15) Individual parts of the palace-complex are left unmentioned, and we cannot picture any concrete building. The poet focuses on a transcendent, ideal palace, rather than on a concrete, physical object. The language has lost its concreteness. The only concrete references are to the palace’s height and its exclusivity. The description refers to the king’s unique position on earth, as one who is appointed by God to order worldly affairs. The physical description is subordinated to the palace as a royal symbol.

In conclusion, descriptions are used for different purposes in various contexts and literary forms. In epic poetry, the description is a useful strategy to add embellishments or a meditative pause to the story, indicating time and setting, and revealing symbolically the psychological conditions of a character. While in epic poetry the poet usually depicts natural phenomena such as dawn and sunset, and a garden in spring or autumn, in panegyrics, the poet usually foregrounds courtly symbols, objects and abstract ideas, emphasizing an aspect of the patron’s power. As the poet is expected to be original in his use of images, similes and metaphors, he sometimes loses track of his primary enterprise, i.e. depicting his object of description in a vivid and transparent fashion, and employs enigmatic metaphors that give his description the appearance of a riddle.

Bibliography:

Primary sources.

Anwari, Divān, 2 vols., ed. Moḥammad Taqi Modarres Rażavi, Tehran, 1993.

Abu’l-Fażl Beyhaqi, Tāriḵ-e Masʿudi, ed. ʿA.-A. Fayyāż and Q. Ḡani, Tehran, 1946.

Farroḵi-ye Sistāni, Divān, ed. Moḥammad Dabir-ṣiāqi, Tehran, 1992.

Manučehri-ye Dāmˊgāni, Divān, ed. Moḥammad Dabir-ṣiāqi, Tehran, 1996.

ʿOṯmān Moḵtāri, Divān, ed. Jalāl-al-Din Homāʾi, Tehran, 1962. Šams-al-Din Moḥammad b. Qeys-e Rāzi, al-Moʿjam fi maʿāyer ašʿār al-ʿAjam, ed. S. Šamisā, Tehran, 1994.

Secondary sources.

A. Arazi, Art. “Waṣf,” EI² XI, pp. 153-58.

D. P. Brookshaw, “Palaces, Pavilions and Pleasure-Gardens: the Context and Setting of the Medieval Majlis” Middle Eastern Literatures 6/2, 2003, pp. 199-223.

J. W. Clinton, The Divan of Manuchehri Damghani: A Critical Study, Minneapolis, 1972.

E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Bern, 1948; tr. W. R. Trask as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, London, 1953.

C.-H. de Fouchécour, La description de la nature dans la poésie lyrique persane du XIe siécle, Paris, 1969.

W. L. Hanaway, “Blood and Wine: Sacrifice and Celebration in Manūchirī’s Wine Poetry,” Iran 26, 1988, pp. 69-80.

James A. W. Hefferman, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry, Chicago and London, 1993.

J. Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems speaking to silent works of art, Chicago, 1995.

P. Kunitzsch, “The ždescription of the Night’ in Gurgānī’s Vīs and Rāmīn” Der Islam 59, 1982, pp. 93-110. J. S. Meisami, “Palaces and Paradises: Palace Description in Medieval Persian Poetry” in Islamic Art and Literature, ed. O. Grabar and C. Robinson, Princeton, 2001, pp. 21-54.

H. Ritter, Über die Bildersprache Nizāmīs, Berlin and Leipzig, 1927.

A. A. Seyed-Gohrab, Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami’s Epic Romance, Leiden, 2003.

Idem, “The Art of Riddling in classical Persian Poetry” in Edebiyat: the Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures, vol. 12, 2001, pp. 15-36.

Idem, Courtly Riddles: Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry, Amsterdam, 2007.

M.-R. Šafiʿi-Kadkani, Ṣowar-e ḵayāl dar šeʿr-e fārsi, Tehran, 1987.

Annemarie Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry, Chapel Hill, 1992.

A. M. Sumi, Description in Classical Arabic Poetry: Wasf, Ekphrasis, and Interarts Theory, Leiden, 2004.

Ḡ.-Ḥ. Yosufi, Čašma-ye rowšan, Tehran, 1992, pp. 62-74.

R. Zipoli, “Semiotics and the Tradition of the Image” in Persica: Annual of the Dutch- Iranian Society, 2004-05, pp. 155-72.

April 7, 2008 (A. A. Seyed-Gohrab)

Originally Published: April 7, 2008

______

WATER

See ĀB.

ĀB

Persian word meaning “water.”

ĀB “water.”

i. The concept of water in ancient Iranian culture.

ii. Water in Muslim Iranian culture.

iii. The hydrology and water resources of the Iranian plateau.

Search terms:

aab ab آب

(Multiple Authors)

Originally Published: December 15, 1982

......

ĀB i. The concept of water in ancient Iranian culture

The ancient Iranians respected water as the source of life, which nourished plants, animals, and men. In their cosmology water was the second of the seven “creations.”

ĀB “water.”

i. The concept of water in ancient Iranian culture

Zoroastrians, it has been said, could as justly be termed worshippers of water as of fire; and in revering this element they plainly continued an even more ancient tradition. The ancient Iranians respected water as the source of life, which nourished plants, animals, and men. In their cosmology water was the second of the seven “creations” (Pahl. dahišnān) into which the world was divided. Water filled the lower half of the spherical “sky,” all of it thus lying beneath the earth. There was one great sea, called in Avestan Vourukaša (Pahl. Varkaš or Fraxvkard), which was “the gathering place of the waters” (Vd. 21.15). This was fed by a mythical river, *Harahvatī Arədvī Sūrā (see Ardwīsūr); and two other rivers flowed out from it, the Vaŋhvī Dāityā (Pahl. Veh Dāiti or Veh Rōd) to the east and the Raŋha (Arang) to the west. According to Bundahišn 11.100.2 and 28.8, these rivers, which encircle the earth, were cleansed in the tidal sea Pūtika (Pahl. Pūtīk); and their waters then flowed back into Vourukaša (Vd. 5.18-19; Bd. 10.8-9). In the center of Vourukaša rose the mountain Us.həndava, around whose summit gathered vapors which were scattered as rain clouds (Bd. 9.8). Hence all the water that flowed in or descended on the earth came from Vourukaša, and the smallest spring or dewdrop could be regarded as representing the whole creation of water. Since the creation was essential to their life, the ancient Iranians evidently made offerings to it, to keep it pure and vivifying.

The use of water in libations has continued in Zoroastrianism up to the present (see Āb- zōhr). It is poured on the ground before a sacrifice or at the beginning of certain acts of worship. Because of its sacredness it should never be drawn from well or stream during hours of darkness, which are demon-haunted; nor can āb-zōhr ever be offered by night. Apart from the āb-zōhr, made directly to water itself, other sacrifices (including the blood sacrifice) were offered to divinities connected with water, namely, Ābān, Apąm Napāt, and Arədvī Sūrā. In Zoroaster’s own teachings the creation of water was assigned to the guardianship of Haurvatāt (Hordād); its ancient sanctity was thus reinforced.

See also Āb-zōhr, Ābān, Āban Māh, Ābān Yašt.

Bibliography:

Boyce, Zoroastrianism I, pp. 147-91; and idem, Stronghold, p. 191.

Search terms:

aab dar farhange kohane irani آب در فرهنگ کهن ایرانی

(Mary Boyce)

Originally Published: December 15, 1982

......

ĀB ii. Water in Muslim Iranian culture

Water constitutes an essential element in Islamic ritual, as a means of purification, and serves as a common theme in folklore.

ĀB “water.”

ii. Water in Muslim Iranian culture

Water constitutes an essential element in Islamic ritual, as a means of purification, and serves as a common theme in folklore. The Koran, in describing the creation of life, indicates that water is its basis: “And of water We have made everything living” (21:30); and “Allāh has created every animal of water; some of them go upon their bellies, some upon two feet, and some upon four” (24:45). Ṭabarī discusses the Koranic verse “And He it is Who created the heavens and the earth in six days, and His throne was upon the water” (11:7). On the authority of many early commentators, he states that God first created water and from water created the heavens and the earth (Ṭabarī [Cairo2], I, pp. 39f.; cf. Kolīnī, Rawżat al-kāfī, Naǰaf, 1385/1965-66, pp. 80-81, 134).

A folktale tells how, when God willed the universe into being, he first created a substance which, when he looked upon it, became water, from which the heavens and the earth emerged (Ṯaʿlabī, Qeṣaṣ al-anbīāʾ, Cairo, n.d., pp. 3-4, 7; Kesāʾī, Qeṣaṣ al- anbīāʾ, ed. I. Eisenberg, Leiden, 1922, pp. 6-7; Nīšābūrī, Qeṣaṣ al-anbīāʾ, ed. Yaḡmāʾī, Tehran, 1961, p. 3). According to tradition (ḥadīṯ), the Prophet was asked about the beginning of the creation, whereupon he replied: “God existed and there was nothing before him, his throne being on the water. He then created the heavens and the earth” (Tabrīzī, Meškāt al-maṣābīḥ, ed. M. Albānī, Damascus, 1961-62, III, pp. 111f.).

Water, the source of life, is indispensable for the growth of crops, and prayer for rain is well known in Islam. A tradition states that when the people complained to the Prophet of the lack of rain, he took them out to the place of prayer and prayed for rain (Tabrīzī, Meškāt I, pp. 476-80). The bounties of rain are repeatedly stressed in the Koran: “The water Allāh has sent down from the heaven whereby he has revived the earth after its death” (Koran 2:164). “[He] has sent down water from the heaven, and thereby produced fruits as a provision for you” (ibid., 2:22).

Water is used for ritual purification (see Ablution [vożūʾ and ḡosl] in Islam: “He might purify you” (Koran 8:11). Purification is required before prayer, and a ḥadīṯ states that being purified is half of faith (Tabrīzī, Meškāt I, p. 93). In another, the Prophet is reported as saying, “When a believer washes his face during ablution, every sin he contemplated with his eyes will come forth from his face along with the water; when he washes his hands, every sin they wrought will come forth from his hands with the water; when he washes his feet, every sin toward which his feet have walked will come out with the water, with the result that he will come forth pure from offenses” (ibid., p. 94). According to its suitability for use in ritual purification, water is of two kinds. Māʾ-e maṭlaq (“absolute” water) is suitable, while māʾ-e możāf (“solute” water, to which something has been added [możāf], such as rose water) is not. Māʾ-e moṭlaq can be either running or standing. Running water is considered pure for ritual purposes unless its color, taste, or smell indicates the presence of impurities. Standing water in ponds or reservoirs whose capacity exceeds a certain limit (one ḵorr, or about 350 liters) is the equivalent of running water. Water in a vessel or container is polluted by admixtures. Well water, a kind of standing water, is considered pure unless obviously polluted (Ṭūsī, al-Nehāya, Beirut, 1970, pp. 2-5; idem., Tahḏīb al-aḥkām, ed. M. Ḵorāsānī, Tehran, 1959, I, pp. 214-31; Ḥellī, Šarāʾeʿ al-eslām, ed. ʿAbd-al-Ḥosayn, Naǰaf, 1969, pp. 12-16; Qāżī Noʿmān, Daʿāʾem al-eslām, ed. Fyzee, Cairo, 1963, I, pp. 111-13; Tabrīzī, Meškāt I, pp. 148-52; Šaʿrānī, Ketāb al-mīzān, Cairo, 1932, I, pp. 99-105; M. Maḡnīya, al-Feqh ʿalā al- maḏāheb al-ḵamsa, Beirut, 1967, pp. 14-21). Detailed rules are prescribed for removing various kinds of impurities (Šaybānī, Ketāb al-aṣl, ed. Afḡānī, Hyderabad, 1966, I, pp. 78-87; Ṭūsī, al-Nehāya, pp. 5-9; idem, Tahḏīb al-aḥkām, I, pp. 231-49; Ḥillī, Šarāʿeʾ, pp. 13-14; Maġnīya, Feqh, pp. 22-23). Rights regarding water and related matters are discussed elaborately in Islamic jurisprudence.

Revelation (tanzīl) is likened to “water sent down from the heaven by God”: Both are considered lifegiving (Martin Lings, “The Qoranic Symbolism of Water,” in Studies in Comparative Religion 23, 1968, p. 153). In the taʾvīl (esoteric interpretation) of the Koran by the Ismaʿilis, water is a symbol of knowledge. As water is indispensable for the preservation and growth of life, knowledge is vital for the soul. As water washes away the material pollution from the body, knowledge purifies the soul from spiritual impurities (Qāżī Noʿmān, Taʾwīl al-daʿāʾem, ed. M. Aʿẓamī, Cairo, n.d., I, pp. 72, 105f.). This symbolic meaning of water is espoused by the Sufis and the Imamis. On the verse “He sendeth down Water from the sky, so that valleys flow according to their measure” (Koran 13:17), Ḡazālī states, in comment on the text, that water is gnosis and the valleys are hearts (his Meškāt al-anwār, ed. ʿAfīfī, Cairo, 1964, p. 72). On the verse “If they trod the right path, We should have given them to drink of water in abundance” (Koran 72:16), Māǰlesī states in comment that water is knowledge (Qommī, Safīnat al-beḥār, Naǰaf, 1355/1936, II, pp. 562). Several verses of the Koran and traditions of the Prophet are similarly interpreted by Māǰlesī.

Muslim tradition abounds in references to Āb-e Zamzam, Āb-e Kawṯar, and Āb-e Ḥayāt. Zamzam is a sacred well near Kaʿba. It is said to have sprung miraculously for Ismael, the son of Abraham, when he was thirsty as a little child. His mother, Hagar, went seeking water but could not find it, so she went up to the hillocks al-Ṣafā and al-Marva, praying to God and imploring aid for Ishmael. God sent Gabriel, who with his heel hollowed out a place in the earth where water appeared. In the period of paganism, the well was filled in by Jorhomīs; then the Prophet’s grandfather ʿAbd-al-MoṭṭÂ¡aleb was ordered by God, in a vision, to dig it out. Performance of pilgrimage rites culminates in the drinking of Zamzam water, and the pilgrims carry it home to give it to the sick (Ebn Hešām, Sīra, ed. M. al-Saqqā et al., Cairo, 1936, I, pp. 150f.; Ṭabarī [Cairo2], I, p. 252; ibid. II, p. 240; Ṯaʿlabī, Qeṣaṣ, pp. 47-50; Kesāʾī, Qeṣaṣ, pp. 142-43; Nīšābūrī, Qeṣaṣ, pp. 67-68; EI2, s.v. Zamzam).

Kawṯar, mentioned in the Koran (108, the Sūrat al-Kawṯar), is described as a river (or water basin) in paradise intended for the Prophet and shown to him on his ascension there. This river is said to have beds of pearls and rubies and banks of gold. Its water is whiter than milk and sweeter than honey, its odor is more aromatic than musk, and its jugs are like stars in the sky. On the Day of Judgment the believers will drink from it, and one who drinks thereof shall never thirst (Ebn Hešām, Sīra II, pp. 34-35; Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, Cairo, 1322-30/1904-12, XXX, pp. 179-80; Ṭabresī, Maǰmaʿ al-bayān, ed. Maḥallātī, Tehran, 1339 Š., V, pp. 548-49; Tabrīzī, Meškāt III, pp. 68f.; EI2, s.v. Kawthar). The Shiʿi tradition describes ʿAlī (q.v.) as the sāqī of Ḥawż-e Kawṯar (Maǰlesī, Beḥār al-anwār, Tehran, n.d., VIII, pp. 16-29; ibid., XXXIX, pp. 211-19).

Āb-e Ḥayāt, also called ʿAyn al-Ḥayāt or Nahr al-Ḥayāt, meaning the fountain of life, is associated with Ḵeżr, who is identified with the unnamed companion of Moses in the Koran (18:65-82). Ḵeżr is the patron saint of wayfarers, appearing whenever a pious person is in need. He is immortal because he drank from the fountain of life which is hidden somewhere in the darkness (Ṭabarī, Taʾrīḵ I, pp. 365f.; Ṯaʿlabī, Qeṣaṣ, pp. 121f., pp. 205f.; Kesāʾī, Qeṣaṣ, pp. 230-33; Nīšābūrī, Qeṣaṣ, pp. 338-42; EI2, s.v. al-Khaḍir).

The Shiʿis, during Moḥarram, commemorate the sufferings of the Imam Ḥosayn, his children, and his followers at Karbalā, where they were martyred. In Shiʿi lore, their greatest trial was thirst, because their enemies denied them water from the Euphrates (see ʿAbbās b. ʿAlī, below). As part of Moḥarram observances, the faithful distribute drinking water in memory of Ḥosayn’s thirst. A pious act is widely observed in Islamic countries is the foundation of saqqāḵānas (q.v.), or public drinking fountains, again to commemorate the events at Karbalā. The Persian language is rich in proverbs and sayings alluding to water and the thirst of the martyrs of Karbalā.

Bibliography: Given in the text.

Search terms:

آب در فرهنگ مسلمانان ایرانی

ab dar farhange moslmanan irani

(I. K. Poonawala)

Originally Published: December 15, 1982

......

ĀB iii. The hydrology and water resources of the Iranian plateau

Over the most of the central part of the plateau, in the Dašt-e Kavīr and Dašt-e Lūt, annual precipitation averages less than 100 mm, making these among the most arid parts of the world.

ĀB “water.”

iii. The Hydrology and Water Resources of the Iranian Plateau

Introduction. The Iranian plateau is a large area of inland (endoreic) drainage in central Iran bounded to the north by the Alburz mountains, to the west and south by the Zagros mountains, and to the east by a series of ranges referred to as the Eastern Iranian Highlands (Figure 1). The plateau is about 1,000 km in length from northwest to southeast and about 600 km in width. With the exception of a small area in the southeast it is at least 500 m above sea level, while along the margins in the north and west it attains heights in excess of 3,000 m. The general topography of the plateau is varied, but it is characterized throughout by upland blocks of solid rock, surrounded by large alluvial fans and alluvial plains. In the lowest parts of the plateau salt deserts (kavīr) are a common feature.

The Iranian plateau has a long history of human occupation (see Archeology). Throughout history many settlements have been established on the plateau with the great majority located along alluvial fans and plains at the edge of the upland zones. Only in these peripheral zones can the two major needs of agriculture, flat land and water, be obtained in any quantity. The flat land is provided by the alluvial fans and plains and the water either from the rivers draining the highlands or from groundwater systems which are recharged by these rivers.

At present a surprisingly large number of major urban centers of Iran are located on the plateau. Of the fifty-nine towns with populations of more than 40,000 in 1976, twenty-two are situated on the plateau (Echo of Iran, Iran Almanac 1976, Tehran, 1976, p. 322). Among these are Tehran (4.4 million); Isfahan (800,000); Shiraz (380,000); Qom (170,000); Hamadān (150,000); Yazd (120,000); Qazvīn (110,000); and Kermān (110,000).

In 1976 the population of Iran was 34.1 million and growing at a rate of 3.0 percent per annum (Population Reference Bureau, Inc., World Population Data Sheet 1976, Washington, D.C., 1976). Estimates for the year 2000 A.D. suggest that the population may by then have grown to 67 million. The startling rise has put tremendous pressures on the available water resources. Exact figures on the population of Iran in the early 20th century are impossible to obtain. Estimates suggest a population of about 9.9 million in 1900 and about 14.6 million in 1940 (B. D. Clark, “Iran: Changing Population Patterns,” in Populations of the Middle East and North Africa, ed. J. I. Clarke and W. B. Fisher, 1972, p. 79). By the time of the first census in 1956 the population had grown to 19 million and a decade later, at the second census, to 25.3 million. These data show that the major phase of growth occurred in the period since 1940.

The natural watershed boundaries of the plateau do not coincide with the administrative boundaries of the census areas, and so it is difficult to estimate the number of people living on the plateau itself. Estimates made by the author using census and map data suggest that approximately 44 percent of the total population are inhabitants of the plateau. Most of these people are concentrated in the northwest and western parts of the plateau around the major urban centers of Tehran, Qazvīn, Hamadān, Qom, Isfahan and Shiraz. Population densities around the eastern and southern margins of the plateau are very low indeed, usually less than 5 people per square km. Climate. Owing to its altitude the plateau experiences an extreme climate with scorching summer temperatures almost everywhere. In June, July, and August, mean daily temperatures rise to more than 30° C (see Table 1), and there are only a few upland areas on the margins of the plateau where mean daily temperatures fall below 20° C. Summer evatranspiration values are high (for figures, see G. Perrin de Brichambaut and C. C. Wallen, A Study of Agroclimatology in Semi-arid and Arid Zones of the Near East, World Meteorological Organization Technical Note 56, 1963, p. 27). Monthly values from June to August are of the order of 200 mm.

In winter mean daily temperatures aver 10° C are recorded in the extreme southeast, but in most of the area mean temperatures are generally between 0° and 10° C (M. H. Ganji, “Climate,” in Camb. Hist. Iran I, p. 221). Along the foothills of the Alburz and Zagros mountains mean daily temperatures fall to below zero. The growing season on the plateau attains values of more than 240 days in the lower central portions. However, in the higher peripheral zones where almost all the settlement is concentrated, the growing season is generally between 180 and 240 days in length (P. Beaumont, G. H. Blake, and J. M. Wagstaff, The Middle East—A Geographical Study, London, 1976, p. 450).

The Iranian plateau is an extremely arid zone, but is bordered to the north and west by what are in Middle Eastern terms well-watered zones. Almost all the precipitation which falls in Iran is brought by low-pressure systems moving east-southeast from the Mediterranean Sea. During the winter months these depressions cross the country, bringing rain which decreases in amount in both easterly and southerly directions; most of it falls in the Alburz and Zagros mountains, to the north and west of the Iranian plateau, respectively.

In summer, as the overhead sun moves northward, so too do the major depression tracks, leaving the Iranian plateau under the influence of stable, subsiding air masses; and virtually no rain falls there.

Over the most of the central part of the plateau, in the Dašt-e Kavīr and Dašt-e Lūt, annual precipitation averages less than 100 mm, making these among the most arid parts of the world (Figure 2; see Climatic Atlas of Iran, Tehran, 1975). Toward the margins of the plateau, especially toward the north and west, precipitation gradients steepen quite markedly; in the watershed of the Alburz and Zagros mountains, annual precipitation often exceeds 400 mm. However, these well-watered zones make up only a very small proportion of the total area of the plateau. Despite their small size, these zones of moderate precipitation have permitted the widespread human settlement of the region. The seasonal distribution of precipitation on the plateau is seen in Table 1. Most stations receive very low precipitation totals in the period June to October inclusive.

Relatively little information is available about rainfall intensities on the Iranian plateau. However, work on the rainfall record of Tehran, the capital, suggests that a fall of 55 mm/day is likely to be equalled or exceeded only once in 100 years during the winter season (A. H. Gordon and J. G. Lockwood, “Maximum One-day Falls of Precipitation in Tehran,” Weather 25, no. 1, 1970, p. 6). In terms of a return period of ten years, a daily fall of 35 mm can be expected.

Surface water hydrology. The drainage of the plateau is internal or endoreic. As a result of topographic irregularities six separate basins of internal drainage can be recognized (Figure 3; P. Beaumont, River Regimes in Iran, University of Durhum, Dept. of Geography, Occasional Publications, New Series no. 1, 1973, p. 20). By far the largest is the Great Kavir, which covers about one-third of the total area. Along the edge of the Zagros mountains a series of smaller basins are found.

In the eastern and southern parts of the plateau annual water surpluses do not occur, and so streams only flow here for short periods following heavy rainfall. Perennial river systems are only found around the margins draining the inward facing slopes of the Alburz and Zagros mountains. These rivers, almost all of which are relatively small, are fed by water surpluses generated in the upland regions (Figure 4). These rivers carry considerable volumes of water onto the main part of the plateau. A characteristic feature of almost all these streams is that their regimes are dominated by snowmelt discharges. A large proportion of the precipitation during the winter months falls as snow. This water is held in the uplands in deep snowfields until late spring or early summer, when temperatures begin to rise. The snowmelt releases vast volumes of water into the river systems around the northern and western margins of the plateau, producing extremely well marked discharge peaks in March, April, and May, at a time when monthly precipitation totals are declining (J. S. Hopkins, “A Study of Snowmelt Floods in a Mountainous Catchment Using Limited Meteorological Data,” Meteorological Magazine 101, 1972, pp. 221-28).

Among the southern slopes of the Alburz detailed discharge records are available for four of the major river systems. Three of these, the Jāǰ-rūd, the Karaǰ, and the Kordān, have maximum discharges in late April to mid-May, while the Habla attains its peak between late March and mid-April (see Table 2). The Jāǰ-rūd and the Karaǰ, although they possess drainage areas only about 700 square kilometers above the gauging stations, have remarkably high annual discharge values of 256 and 385 million cubic meters respectively. As a result of these large discharges the runoff values for each square km are extremely high.

Information is also available for four rivers—the Vafreḡān, Qom-rūd, Zāyanda-rūd, and the Ḵorramšahr, which drain the Zagros mountains. Owing to the less precipitous nature of the Zagros when compared with the Alburz, these rivers tend to have larger drainage basins. However, as a result of the lower precipitation totals throughout the Zagros, the runoff rates for each square km of drainage basin are much lower on average than those recorded in the Alburz.

Of particular interest and importance is the Zāyanda river, on which the city of Isfahan is located. This river, unlike most others, has four gauging stations in its basin, which permits a study of discharge variations along its length (Table 2). In its upper reaches above Zamānḵān Bridge, the Zāyanda-rūd is a typical Zagros stream. It rises high on the flanks of Zard Kūh (4,548 m) and then flows eastward toward Isfahan. Owing to the high altitude in this part of the basin, snowfall is of great importance, and the regime of the river reveals a very marked snowmelt discharge peak in March-April. The average runoff in this part of the basin is 182,000 m3/km2. At each of the gauging stations below Zamānḵān Bridge the annual discharge in absolute figures declines markedly. This is the result of a number of natural and man-made conditions. The natural factors are evaporation losses from the water surface, and more importantly percolation into the river bed gravels as the flood plain begins to widen. This percolation water is not, of course, lost to the hydrological system, as it provides natural recharge of the groundwater reserves.

The most important man-induced water losses are the result of irrigation and associated evapotransportation. The main area of irrigation in the basin of the Zāyanda river begins downstream from the Mazraʿa Bridge and reaches its peak in the stretch about 25 km above and below the Ḵᵛāǰū Bridge. The Ḵᵛāǰū Bridge is situated in the center of Isfahan. By the time the river reaches Varzāna Bridge, just upstream from the salt desert known as the Gāv Ḵūnī, the annual discharge value dropped to 89 million m3—almost exactly one tenth the discharge recorded at the upstream gauging station of Zamānḵān Bridge. To what extent the man-induced water losses from the basin account for the spectacular decline in discharge along the Zāyanda river is uncertain owing to lack of detailed data. However, it is possible that irrigation accounts for at least 50 percent of the water losses.

Another fascinating feature of the Zāyanda river is the fact that in a downstream direction a greater proportion of the total flow is concentrated in the months of maximum runoff (Figure 5). For example at the Zamānḵān Bridge the peak flow during April represents only 17.5 percent of the total discharge, whereas at Varzāna Bridge it represents 39.5 percent. This illustrates that only during flood conditions in April and May do significant quantities of water pass down the total length of the river system to reach the salt desert of the Gāv Ḵūnī.

Conditions on the Zāyanda river have changed considerably since the construction of the Shah ʿAbbās dam (see Dam Construction in Iran, Plan Organisation, Bureau of Information and Reports, Tehran, n.d.). The purpose of the dam is to store the spring and early summer floodwaters of the river so that the late summer water demands can be met more efficiently. Since the dam was completed in the late 1960s, the height of flood flows downstream from the dam has been considerably reduced, and relatively little water now runs out into the salt desert.

To summarize the surface-water hydrological pattern of the Iranian plateau, one can note that the high runoff values associated with the Alburz and Zagros mountain zones grade off to virtually no runoff at all in the center of the plateau. However, during the late spring and early summer months, especially during years with high winter snowfalls, large quantities of water can flow down the many river systems fringing the plateau to form extensive shallow lakes in the lowest parts of the large basins. By late summer the water and salt mixtures which form the characteristic surface crust of the kavīr or salt desert regions (see D. B. Krinsley, “Geomorphology of Three Kavirs in Northern Iran,” in J. T. Neal, ed. Playa Surface Morphology; Miscellaneous Investigations, USAF Office of Aerospace Research, Environmental Research Papers no. 283, pp. 105-30).

Groundwater. Groundwater is a particularly important aspect of the hydrological cycle on the Iranian plateau. The groundwater reserves, like the surface water, are recharged mainly from precipitation which falls on the adjacent highland areas and then runs off toward the plateau (A. Issar, “The Groundwater Provinces of Iran,” Bulletin of the International Association of Scientific Hydrology 14, 1969, p. 94). At the edge of the foothills of the Alburz and Zagros most of the landforms are alluvial fans and plains made up of sand and gravel. Water infiltration rates into the alluvial deposits are high, and it is in these areas on the periphery of the plateau where almost all of the groundwater recharge takes place.

Once the water has entered the alluvial aquifers it flows down the hydraulic gradient, usually towards the central part of the enclosed basins. In general the water table, that is, the uppermost surface of saturated strata, tends to be deepest in the recharge areas along the foothills, where it can occur at depths of 20 to 200 m (P. Beaumont, “A Traditional Method of Groundwater Extraction in the Middle East,” Groundwater 11, 1973, pp. 23-30). Towards the middle of the basins the water table is found at decreasing depths, and in the center of some of them it even intersects the ground surface to produce areas of standing water. In nearly all the major basins of the plateau groundwater quality decreases towards the center of the basin, as a result of a marked increase in salt content (R. Ighanian, “Geochemistry of Groundwaters in Iran,” in Methods and Techniques of Groundwater Investigation and Development, ECAFE/UN Water Resources Series, no. 33, 1967, pp. 147-50).

Until very recently all of the settlements of the plateau region have been primarily dependent upon agriculture for their livelihood. In nearly all cases the lack of adequate precipitation has meant that cultivation has only been possible with the aid of irrigation. The traditional irrigation systems, which developed using both surface and groundwater resources, have often been exceedingly complex (P. Beaumont, “Water Resource Development in Iran,” Geographical Journal 140, 1974, p. 422). Surface water has been exploited by the use of unlined canals dug by hand in the alluvial material. The largest canals in any irrigation system can be 5 m or more in width at the point where they abstract water from the natural water source. However, these major canals soon divide into a series of small canals with average widths of around 0.5 m which convey the water to the individual fields of the cultivator. Water is usually led into the field either along furrows or by flood irrigation by digging away a portion of the bank of the irrigation channel. When a field has received sufficient water, the breach in the canal bank is stemmed and the water led off elsewhere.

A feature of these traditional irrigation systems is the absence of separate drainage canals. Although in some gentle gradient areas salination of the soil can be a serious problem, it is usually avoided by flushing out the salts into the canals, which thus serve both irrigation and drainage functions.

Until recently the groundwater resources of the Iranian plateau have been developed almost exclusively by annual engineering constructions known as qanāts. These are gently sloping tunnels which lead water from below the water table to the ground surface by gravity flow (Figure 6). The first stage in the construction of a qanāt is the sinking of a well to prove the presence of water and to ascertain its depth. This is known as the mother well. Work then begins on a tunnel at a point where the water is to be brought to the ground surface. All digging is by hand using picks and shovels. As construction of the tunnel progresses, new shafts are sunk to permit the extraction of spoil and to provide ventilation for the underground workers. The tunnel will eventually intercept the water table, but construction continues beyond this point, as it is only in this part where water actually flows into the tunnel. The water bearing sections of qanāts vary in length from about 100 m to distances of more than 1 km.

The lengths and depths of qanāts vary widely throughout the country according to local environment conditions such as surface gradients and the depths of the water table. From an analysis of qanāt systems from all over the Iranian plateau it has been found that most qanāts are less than 5 km in length, though some around Kermān are more than 50 km long (P. Beaumont, “Qanat Systems in Iran,” Bulletin of the International Association of Scientific Hydrology 16, 1971, p. 43). The depths of mother wells also show wide variations. Most range between 10 and 50 m in depth, though some from the eastern part of the plateau around Gonābād have recorded depths of more than 250 m. This fact clearly emphasizes the high value placed on water as a resource to warrant the construction of such deep qanāts.

Considering the huge investment of capital which the construction of a qanāt involves, the water discharge of most of them is surprisingly small. In most cases average discharge figures range between 10 and 80 m3/hr. The great advantage of the qanāt in a traditional society is that once it is constructed water will continue to flow without additional energy input.

The number of qanāts in Iran is not known in any detail, but is almost certainly in excess of 25,000, with the vast majority concentrated in the plateau region. Large qanāt systems with more than 100 qanāts are commonly found around the margins of the plateau on large alluvial fans associated with rivers draining the Alburz and Zagros mountains. Almost all these systems are found in zones with precipitation totals between 100 and 300 mm where cultivation is impossible without irrigation. Although groundwater is a major source of irrigation water in these areas, surface water supplies are also always utilized when available.

One of the largest qanāt systems on the plateau used to exist on the Varāmīn plain, some 40 km southeast of Tehran. Before 1955 more than 250 qanāts were in use and supplied up to 40 percent of irrigation water needs of the plain. From the mid-1950s onward pumped wells were introduced to the Varāmīn plain and the patterns of groundwater extraction changed considerably. During the mid-1960s groundwater, provided by wells and qanāts, was supplying up to 60 percent of the irrigation needs in dry years. Continued pumping from the wells, however, associated with a dry spell lasting a number of years, caused the water table on the plain to fall markedly. In turn this reduced the discharge from the qanāts, and many ceased to flow completely, causing severe social and economic problems (P. Beaumont, “Qanats on the Varamin Plain, Iran,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45, 1968, pp. 167-79). Water resource development. In an attempt to solve some of the water resource problems of the 1960s, the government decided to nationalize the country’s water resources. This was achieved with the enactment of the Nationalization of Water Resources Bill of July, 1968. One of the most important features of this act was that the future development of all water resources would be supervised and controlled by the Ministry of Water and Power, with permits required before new water resources could be developed.

A major feature of development planning in Iran over the last 20 years has been the construction of large reservoir dams and associated irrigation projects. The first dams were built during the Second Development Plan (1955-62). By 1976 twelve major dams have been completed and four others were under construction. The total investment on the completed structures has been more than 30 billion rials. This does not include investment on associated irrigation facilities. Of the twelve completed dams, six are on rivers draining into the basins of the plateau (Table 3, Figure 7). One of the dams under construction is also situated in the plateau region. The first dam to be built on the plateau was the Shah Esmāʿīl Dam on the Golpāyagān river near Aḵtovān. This is an earth dam, built for irrigation purposes, which brought 5,500 hectares under cultivation. A much larger dam is the Karaǰ (officially the Amīr Kabīr) Dam on the Karaǰ, opened in 1961. This concrete multipurpose structure provided water for irrigation some 21,000 hectares on the Karaǰ plain and for supplying water (144 million m3/year) and electricity to Tehran. East of Tehran the Jāǰ-rūd Dam had the same objectives; water to irrigate 30,000 hectares of the Varāmīn plain was made available, as well as water (80 million m3/year) and electricity for Tehran.

The much smaller dam, formerly called Šahnāz, is unusual insofar as it was a single- purpose construction to supply much needed domestic water supplies for the growing city of Hamadān. On the Zāyanda river the Shah ʿAbbās Dam was completed in 1970, a reservoir of 1,250 million m3 with the aim of supplying domestic, industrial, and agricultural water supplies for the whole of the Isfahan basin. Its three generators also produce 174 million kilowatt hours each year. The final dam, the Dāryūš Kabīr on the Ḵorramšahr river, was built to provide irrigation water for 41,000 hectares in the Marvdašt area. Water from the dam is also used for domestic and industrial purposes in the city of Shiraz, 100 km to the south.

During the Fourth Development Plan (1968-73) and the Fifth Plan (1973-78) it became obvious that the major water resource problems in Iran were associated with the supply of water to the rapidly growing urban areas. Nowhere was this more urgent than in the two largest cities of the plateau, Tehran and Isfahan. In Tehran the population grew from about 210,000 in 1922 to an estimated 4.4 million in 1976. This phenomenal rate of growth has severely strained the water supply systems of the city. Initially water was supplied from qanāts to the north of the city. During the 1920s an aqueduct was built to bring water from the Karaǰ river to the west, but by 1950 these supplies were fully committed, and work began on the Karaǰ and Jāǰ-rūd dams. By the early 1970s it became evident that these schemes were not enough, and an even more ambitious project was begun. This necessitated the damming of the Lār river, which flows into the Caspian, and the diversion of its waters through a 20 km long tunnel underneath the crest-line of the Alburz. The water will then enter the reservoir behind Jāǰ-rūd Dam before being pumped along the existing pipe networks to Tehran. Recent calculations, however, have shown that this project’s extra 180 million m3/annum will only supply the needs of Tehran until the early 1980s, when a new scheme will be needed. In 1978 plans were already being evaluated for a dam on the Šāh-rūd, a tributary of the Safīd- rūd, which would be able to supply Tehran with extra water.

Information on water use in Tehran for 1973 reveals wide variations. In poor areas of high density housing the daily per capita use of water varies between about 45 and 75 liters. In contrast, in the more affluent northern parts of the city per capita water demand ranges from 120 to as high as 500 liters per day. There seems little doubt, however, that the demands of the poorer sections of the community are likely to increase over the years to about 100 liters/person/day. As Tehran grows and the per capita use of water increases as living standards rise, ever greater pressures are being put on available water and other resources around Tehran. Inter-basin transfer of water has already been used to supply Tehran with water, and it seems likely that by the end of this century water will have to be transported at least 150 km to supply the capital. Such schemes will obviously be expensive and will mean that water prices, which have already increased fourfold in the last few years, will increase even more.

Conclusion. The water resources available on the Iranian plateau are meager, and the water supply position has reached a critical situation, especially with regard to the larger cities such as Tehran and Isfahan. Already these cities have had to resort to the inter- basin transfer of water, conveying large quantities of water from rivers beyond the limits of the plateau drainage systems onto the plateau itself. Given the scarce water resources of the plateau it seems inevitable that this procedure will have to continue in the future as other urban centers find that their local supplies are insufficient for their growing needs. As more of these projects are implemented, the costs of water will have to rise, possibly to such a degree that it may prove difficult for the industrial consumer who uses large supplies of water in his manufacturing process to compete with other firms situated in parts of the world where water resources are more abundant and cheaper. It also seems likely that irrigated agriculture will become less important as it becomes necessary to divert water to supply the needs of the growing urban populations.

For water resources and hydrology of the rest of the Iranian regions see Hydrology; see also Ābyārī, Afghanistan (Geography), Azerbaijan, Central Asia, and Ḵūzestān.

Bibliography: Given in the text.

Table 1. Climatological Stations on the Iranian Plateau

Table 2. Discharge of Selected Rivers on the Iranian Plateau

Table 3. Major Reservoir Dams on the Iranian Plateau

Figure 1. Major Topographical Features of Iran

Figure 2. Annual Precipitation of Iran

Figure 3. Major Drainage Basins of Iran

Figure 4. Annual Water Surplus (Precipitation- Evapotransportation) of Iran

Figure 5. River Regime Hydrographs for Four Gauging Stations along the Zāyanda River

Figure 6. Cross-Section and Plan of a Qanāt

Figure 7. The Major Reservoir Dams of Iran

Search terms:

manabe aab dar falat e iran منابع آب در فلت ایران

(P. Beaumont)

Originally Published: December 15, 1982

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WAṬWĀṬ, RAŠID-AL-DIN bilingual poet, philologist, and prose writer in Persian and Arabic, as well as a high- ranking official of the Khwarazmian court in the 12th century.

WAṬWĀṬ, RAŠID-AL-DIN Moḥammad b. Moḥammad ʿAbd-al-Jalil al-ʿOmari, commonly known as Rašid(-e) Waṭwāṭ (d. 578/1182), bilingual poet, philologist, and prose writer in Persian and Arabic, as well as a high-ranking official of the Khwarazmian court in the 12th century. There is considerable data on his biography, with the Dictionary of Learned Men by Yāqut (d. 1229) as the earliest source (see Yāqut, Moʿjam al-odabāʾ VII, pp. 91- 95); some details of his life also appear in ʿAlāʾ-al-Din ʿAṭā-Malek Jovayni's Tāriḵ-e Jahāngošā (see JAHĀNGOŠĀY-E JOVAYNI) in connection with the history of the Khwarazm (Ḵvārazm) rulers (Jovауni, Tāriḵ II, pp. 6-14) and in Qazvini’s Āṯār al-belād (pp. 223-24); also in the chapter in ʿAwfi’s Lobāb al-albāb on Montajab-al-Din al-Jovayni, chief secretary of Sultan Sanjar (Lobāb al-albāb I, pp. 80-86). Dawlatšāh consecrated a separate notice to Waṭwāṭin his Taḏkera al-šoʿarāʾ (pp. 69-73; the chapter is partially rendered in Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia II, pp. 330-33) and shaped his life story for later anthologists. The extensive biographical information has been summarized (with excerpts from primary sources) and discussed in the editor’s introductions to Waṭwāṭ’s works, especially by ʿAbbās Eqbāl (q.v.) in his edition of Ḥadāʾeq al-seḥr, as well as by Saʿid Nafisi in his edition of Waṭwāṭ’s Divān (Tehran, 1960).

Waṭwāṭ was born at an unknown date in Balkh (or perhaps in Bukhara) in a family that traced its lineage to the caliph ʿOmar. He received his education and acquired a profound knowledge of the Arabic philological tradition in the Neẓāmiya madrasa in Balkh, became a scribe (kāteb) by profession, and moved to Khwarazm, where he spent the rest of his long life at the service of its rulers. Rašid-al-Din was a prominent court poet; he also reached the post of ṣāḥeb divān al-enšāʾ (chief secretary) under the Ḵvarazmšāh Atsïz Ḡarčaʾi (1127-56) and maintained it under his successor Il-Arslān (d. 1172). The closing years of his life are obscure. He died in his 97th year in 573/1177-78 (according to Yāqut) or in 578/1182-83 (Dawlatšāh) somewhere in Khwarazm. The anecdotes handed down in the extant sources depict Waṭwāṭ as a person of insignificant appearance and unpleasant disposition but forceful eloquence. According to Dawlatšāh, he was given the nickname waṭwāṭ or “the bird farastuk”(a swallow) because of his small stature and glib tongue. (The other and more likely meaning of the sobriquet is a bat; see Krymskiy, p. 349.) Since his bad temper earned him the enmity of other poets and courtiers, and his small stature and his baldness invited their taunts at the court assemblies, Waṭwāṭ used his rhetorical skills to shield himself from mockery and to entertain his patron Atsïz. On one occasion he happened to be engaged in a disputation in a majles, with an inkbottle in front of him. Atsïz ordered the tiny bottle to be removed so “that we may see who is behind it.” Waṭwāṭ at once retorted with an Arabic proverb: “A man is a man by virtue of his two smallest parts, his heart and his tongue” (Dawlatšāh, p. 70; tr. E. G. Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia II, p. 330). Zakariyā(-ye) Qazvini provides another anecdote on the sovereign and his kāteb competing in witticism. Atsïz enjoyed the company of Waṭwāṭ, and he ordered him to build a house in front of his own so that they could converse with each other through the window at any time. On one occasion, when Waṭwāṭ looked out from the window, the sultan observed, “It is a head of a wolf that I see in your window.” “Oh no,” came the riposte from the kāteb, “it is not a wolf’s head, but a mirror that I have put onto the window.” Atsïz was much amused (Āṯār al-belād, p. 224).

Rašid-e Waṭwāṭ’s Persian Divān, edited by S. Nafisi(Tehran, 1960) consists of around 8,500 verses,mostly panegyric qaṣidas with Ḵvārazmšāh Atsïz as the most frequent addressee. Several qaṣida and qeṭʿa poems allude to Rašid-al-Din’s falling into disfavor or being banished from the court; the poet uses all the repertoire of conventional arguments and embellishments to prove his innocence and win the pardon of his sovereign (for a set of chosen examples, see Eqbāl’s Introduction to Ḥadāʾeq, pp. lām– mim). As a poet laureate of the court, Waṭwāṭ had various connections with the foremost poets of his epoch and produced an extensive poetic correspondence. He was eulogized by Ḵāqāni, Adib(-e) Ṣāber, and Anwari, the last regarding him as “superior to all the living celebrities, the Aḵtal and Ḥassān of his time” (Divān, ed. Rażawi, Tehran, 1959, p. 175). Waṭwāṭ in his turn praised them in his poems (the laudations of Adib-e Ṣāber seem most frequent and impressive in his Divān), but his panegyrics tended to give way to satirical verses with the change of political climate or because of his notoriously foul temper. For example, Anwari and Waṭwāṭ became at some point the leading poets of warring rulers. While the Saljuq Sultan Sanjar was besieging the fortress of Hazār-asp during his campaign against Atsïz in 1147-48, the two former friends exchanged taunts in verse inscribed on an arrow (see Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia II, pp. 309-10, based onJovayni’s report).

As a chief secretary of the Ḵvārazmšāhān, Waṭwāṭ engaged in diplomatic correspondence with the caliphs and their officials (in Arabic), and with the court of Sanjar and some local rulers (in Persian). The author himself compiled a book of highly embellished prose resālas in both languages, under the title of ʿĀrāʾes al-ḵawāṭer wa nafāʾes al-nawāder; nine Arabic and nine Persian letters are included into his Abkār al- afkār fi'l-rasāʾel wa'l-ašʿār; a later collection titled Rasāʾel ʿArabi is also extant.His Persian epistles have been edited by K. Toyserkāni (Rašid-al-Din Waṭwāṭ, Nāmahā, Tehran, 1960); a representative selection of his Arabic output was published by M. Fahmi (Majmuʿat rasāʾel Rašid-al-Din al-Waṭwāṭ, 2 parts, Cairo, 1315/1897-8). All those texts serve as useful primary sources for the historians of the period: see H. Horst, 1964; idem, 1966 (includes translation of 10 Arabic letters from Fahmi’s edition); also Z. M. Bunyatov, 1986, pp. 30, 94, 103.

Waṭwāṭ had a passion for rhetoric and ethical proverbs; he compiled ṣad kalema “One hundred words” collections of beautiful Arabic sentences attributed to Muslim leaders and literary celebrities, many with Persian translations and commentary.He was a widely reputed collector of the sayings of the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs. His book Maṭlob koll ṭāleb men kalām amir al-moʾmenin ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb ([Knowledge] sought by every seeker from the words of Commander of the Faithful ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb), or Tarjama-ye ṣad kalema (Translation of One hundred words) has gained popularity in Shi’i Iran; it was published by Maḥmud ʿĀbedi (Moʾassesa-ye Nahj-al-balāḡa, Tehran, n.d.). For early publications and translations into Latin, German, and English, see F. C. de Blois; books on the hundred sayings of the other three caliphs remain unpublished. Most notable among Waṭwāṭ’s collections of adages is Laṭāʾef al-amṯāl wa ṭarāʾef al-aqwāl. It contains 281 Arabic proverbs with the author’s explanations in Persian; it has been published by S. M. B. Sabzavāri (n.p., 1979), and also by Ḥabiba Dāneš-āmuz (Tehran, 1997); for similar books preserved in manuscript, see the full list of his works in Eqbāl’s Introduction to Ḥādaʾeq, pp. nun-hā – nun-ze. Rašid-e Waṭwāṭ won a high reputation for proficiency in rhetoric; it was his textbook on the poetic art by name of Ḥadāʾeq al-seḥr fi daqāʾeq al-šeʿr (Gardens of magic in the subtleties of poetry) that brought him posthumous fame. A small Arabic and Persian dictionary Noqud al-zawāḵer wa oqud al- jawāher, known as Ḥamd wa ṯanā by its first words and extant in numerous manuscripts, is also attributed to Waṭwāṭ.

Bibliography: Sadid-al-Din Moḥammad ʿAwfi, Lobāb al-albāb, ed. Edward G. Browne and Muḥammad Qazwini (Moḥammad Qazvini), 2 vols., Leiden and London, 1903-06.

F. C. de Blois, “Rashīd al-Dīn Waṭwāṭ,” in EI2 VIII, p. 445.

E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols., London, 1902-24.

Z. M. Bunyatov, Gosudarstvo Khorezmshakhov-Anushteginidov (The state of the Ḵvārazmšāhs-Anušteginids), Moscow, 1986.

Dawlatšāh Samarqandi, Taḏkerat al-šoʿarā', ed. M. Ramażāni, Tehran, 1959.

H. Horst, Die Staatsverwaltung der Grosselguqen und Horazmsahs (1038-1231), Wiesbaden 1964.

Idem, “Arabische Briefe der Ḫōrazmšāhs am den Kalifenhof aus der Feder des Rašid ad-Din Waṭwāṭ,” ZDMG 116, 1966, pp. 24-43.

ʿAlā'-al-Din ʿAṭā-Malek Jovayni, Tāriḵ-e Jahān-gošā, ed. M. Qazwini, 3 vols., Leiden and London, 1912-37.

A. E. Krymskiĭ, Nizami i ego sovremenniki (Nezami and his contemporaries), ed. Z. M. Bunyatov and G. Y. Aliev, Baku, 1981, pp. 348-54.

Zakariyā b. Moḥammad Qazvini, Āṯār al-belād, pub. as Zakarija Ben Mohammad Ben Mahmud el-Cazwini’s Kosmographie. Zweiter Teil. Kitāb Āṯār al-Bilād. Die Denkmäler der Länder, ed. F. Wüstenfeld, Göttingen, 1848.

Rašid-al-Din Waṭwāṭ, Ḥādaʾeq al-seḥr fi daqāʾeq al-šeʿr, ed. ʿAbbās Eqbāl, Tehran, 1929.

Idem, Divān, ed. Saʿid Nafisi, Tehran, 1960.

Šehāb-al-Din Abu ʿAbd-Allāh Yāqut b. ʿAbd-Allāh Ḥamawi, Eršād al-arib elā maʿrefat al- adib [Moʿjam al-odabāʾ], or Dictionary of Learned Men, ed. D. S. Margoliouth, 7 vols., Leiden and London, 1907-27.

(Natalia Chalisova)

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WAZIRITABĀR, Ḥosayn-ʿAli

(1906-1958) musician and prominent performer of the qaranei (clarinet).

WAZIRITABĀR, Ḥosayn-ʿAli (b. Tehran, 1285 Š./1906; d. Tehran, 1337 Š./1958) musician and prominent performer of the qaranei (clarinet). Because of the technical structure of the clarinet, which is a Western musical instrument, it is very difficult to use it to play Persian melodies. Waziritabār was the first person to do so.

Waziritabār was a music enthusiast from childhood. He entered the military music conservatory (Madrasa-ye musiqi-e neẓām), joining the military music band (Dasta-ye muzik-e neẓām) shortly thereafter. He later entered the government conservatory (Madrasa-ye musiqi-e dowlati) to learn the fundamentals of music and the performance of the clarinet (Ḵāleqi, p. 149), after which he studied the various Persian music repertoires with Ebrāhim Manṣuri, the renowned violinist. He later went to Iraq and worked as an instructor of music in the Iranian schools there. On his return to Iran, Waziritabār decided to continue his education in music and entered Honarestān-e ʿāli-e musiqi, obtaining a diploma in music from that institute. After graduation, he traveled to the city of Shiraz and taught music to elementary and high school students for four years. rafter returning to Tehran, he joined Radio Tehran, as well as the orchestra of Anjoman-e musiqi-e melli (National Music Society) as a clarinetist. When the Golhā music program began on Radio Tehran, Waziritabār joined and became one of its principal members (Naṣirifar, pp. 66-71). . Despite the fact that Waziritabar had a large number of students, none of them succeeded in performing Persian melodies on the clarinet as expertly as he did himself. For this reason Ruḥ-Allāh Ḵāleqi declared Waziritabā to be matchless in performing Persian melodies on the clarinet, considering his work to be unique.

Bibliography:

R. Ḵaleqi, Sargoḏašt-e musiqi-e Irān, III, Tehran, 2002, p. 150.

Ḥ. Naṣirifar, Mardān-e musiqi-e sonnati wa novin-e Irān, I, 4th ed., Tehran, 1991, pp. 66- 71.

(Morteżā Ḥoseyni Dehkordi)

Originally Published: December 10, 2010

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WEBLOGS

The vast majority of Iranian bloggers write in Persian, although other languages – chief among them English – are also used.

WEBLOGS, or ‘blog’s, websites consisting of regularly updated entries or “posts” that normally appear in reverse chronological order, with the newest entries on top. Most blogs are maintained by a single individual, called a “blogger,” but there are also “group blogs,” as well as blogs administered by corporations, political parties, music artists, radio and television networks, and government offices. The first handful of English- language websites of the kind that were later to be called blogs appeared between 1997 and 1999 (Blood, p. 7). Persian-language blogs followed several years later. In 2001, blogger and journalist Hossein Derakhshan wrote a simple tutorial for Persian-speakers to develop their own blogs using existing, free, English-language hosting services (Akhavan, p. 89). Iranian blogs began to proliferate, and within several years, estimates of their numbers were in the tens or even hundreds of thousands (Akhavan, pp. 88-89; Doostdar, p. 661).

The vast majority of Iranian bloggers write in Persian, although other languages – chief among them English – are also used (Akhavan, p. 88). The collectivity of Iranian or Persian-language blogs is sometimes referred to as “Weblogistan” (lit. ‘land of the weblogs’), a term that has become the Persian equivalent of the English “Blogosphere” (Akhavan, p. 84; Doostdar, p. 651). This collectivity spans the globe, with the majority of bloggers living in Iran and many residing in North America and Europe. As a transnational mesh of public media, Persian blogs have allowed for an unprecedented level of interaction and exchange among Iranians all over the world.

Blogs typically present a variety of materials in an informal first-person voice. Topics range from diary-like musings on everyday activities to commentary on news, entertainment, technology, and sports, as well as essays on spirituality, culture, politics, philosophy, and various other matters of interest to the bloggers. Many blogs act as “filters,” with links to selected news, web pages, and increasingly, multimedia content, followed by brief commentary (Blood, p. 9). Among Persian blogs, a significant number are devoted to poetry – both original and quoted from classical and contemporary poets – and a lesser number to short stories and other literary genres (Kelly and Etling, p. 13). Shiʿite devotional themes are also popular among Persian blogs, particularly among a younger segment of the blogging population (ibid). Increasingly, bloggers have been posting multimedia content, including photography, video, music, and first-person voice- recorded files called “podcasts.”

A distinct feature of blogs, including those in Persian, is their interconnectedness (Doostdar, pp. 654-57). Through their interconnections, blogs give rise to a vast, scattered, participative communications network with a peer-to-peer architecture distinct from the centralized, “hub-and-spoke” model of mass media like newspapers, radio, and television (Kelly and Etling, p. 45). Connections between blogs emerge in three ways:

First, a blog entry is rarely just a monologue: bloggers frequently write posts in response to other bloggers, or incite them to respond by writing provocative entries of their own (Doostdar, pp. 654-57). Dialogues among blogs are usually bolstered by hyperlinked references that create “virtual” connections in addition to topical ones. These connections lead to broad conversations that ebb and flow in various corners of the blogosphere. Occasionally, they may involve a vast number of bloggers, as during a presidential election or in response to a call for political action. Among devout Shiʿite bloggers, such interconnected conversations may arise during ritual mourning seasons like Moḥarram, when bloggers write and share devotional material and collaborate on building blogs of mourning that they compare to a ḥosayniya.

Second, bloggers often link directly to each other on what is called a “blogroll” – a hyperlinked list on each blog that can be used to connect to other blogs by clicking on their names (ibid). Blogrolls indicate circles of affiliation, friendship, and at times political alliance. These circles may be quite informal, as when someone links to every blog he/she finds interesting or that she regularly reads. At other times, a blogroll may signify a tight and exclusive network of allies which the blogger jealously maintains and safeguards.

Third, interconnections emerge among blogs through reciprocal commenting (ibid). Most bloggers allow visitors to record comments on their entries, along with their names and blog addresses. Bloggers – and blog readers who do not necessarily keep their own blogs – sometimes restrict their comments to brief expressions of approval and praise, or alternatively, of criticism or insult. A prevalent form of commenting, sometimes overlapping with more substantial forms, is a simple greeting that indicates that the visitor has read and enjoyed the post, or merely wants the blogger to know that he or she has visited his/her blog. This has led to a practice termed did o bāzdid (lit. seeing and re-seeing), among some members of the blogosphere (named after the offline Iranian custom of reciprocal visiting, particularly during Nowruz), where bloggers reciprocally visit each other’s blogs and record brief comments and greetings.

The diverse interconnections among blogs have facilitated the emergence of various loose and shifting “publics” that span the globe and are each held together by shared interests. These interconnections have also made it possible for bloggers to engage in online activism. For example, in 2002 bloggers drew up an online petition and campaigned vigorously for the release of Sinā Moṭallebi, who was arrested in Tehran on charges of threatening national security through, among other things, his blog (Akhavan, pp. 180-90). In 2003, women’s rights activists campaigned online and offline for the release of murder suspect Afsāna Nowruzi (Akhavan, pp. 190-95). In 2004, the inclusion of the label “Arabian Gulf” in National Geographic maps of the Persian Gulf angered Iranian bloggers who struck back with various forms of online activism (Akhavan, pp. 72- 75). In 2005, following an escalation in U.S. threats against Iran, bloggers collaborated in anti-war agitation, drawing up petitions, writing letters to members of Congress in the United States, and forming anti-war group blogs in English. And in 2007, nationalist sentiments again brought bloggers and others together to campaign online against the depiction of Persians in the Hollywood movie “300” (Joneidi). In 2009, bloggers of various political persuasions mobilized to debate the controversial presidential election and its turbulent aftermath. By this time, however, social networking tools such as Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter had also risen in prominence and seized much of the ground previously held by blogs.

A common feature of blog activism, as well as political discourse more generally, has been a state of hyper-awareness and self-reflection among the participants; that is, bloggers have used their blogs both to engage in activism and to discuss, reflect upon, and glorify this activism and its importance (Akhavan, pp. 183-84). At times this intense inward focus on the blogging medium, and the glorification of the imagined community of bloggers that it supports, has led to disappointment. During the 2005 presidential election, for example, numerous bloggers with reformist or dissident political views in Iran and in the diaspora campaigned online for the election of reformist candidate Moṣṭafā Moʿin. When the conservative candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, emerged as the victor, some of the same bloggers began to question the extent to which their community was representative of the Iranian population, and lamented that they had not been able to foresee a defeat of such magnitude.

One broad conversation among Iranian bloggers which has continued in various guises over the years has to do with the impact of blogging on the Persian language and on Iranian “culture.” Initially hailed as a vehicle for the propagation of Persian on the internet, blogging began to draw the criticism of some journalists and writers soon after it became widespread enough to warrant intellectual attention. These critics, most of whom were bloggers themselves, were concerned that blogging was weakening the Persian language with its facilitation of “personal publishing,” which, unburdened by the oversight of editors and the enforcement of writing standards, would allow anything, including flagrant violations of grammatical and orthographic rules, to be printed online (Doostdar, pp. 651-52). Although initial debates about this topic subsided in early 2004, there have been continuing conversations about related matters, including the use of obscene or sexually-explicit language, gendered norms of speaking and their perceived propriety or impropriety, and the unbridled expression of “amateur” opinion on matters that, in the opinion of some critics, ought to be left to the “experts.”

With the rise of internet censorship by the Iranian government, many blogs have also been targeted, and internet service providers (ISPs) have been obliged to block access to the offending sites (Kelly and Etling, p. 9). The filtered blogs consist mainly of political blogs with dissident or reformist content, although other blogs, including some administered by religious conservatives, are also blocked. Studies by the OpenNet Initiative have shown, however, that by far the greater part of weblogs, including a majority of dissident and reformist blogs, are visible inside Iran (ibid, pp. 37-38). Where blocks do exist, various anti-filtering tools are available to Iranian internet users for circumventing them.

The prevalent view of Iranian blogs popularized in the West has celebrated their emancipatory potential as vehicles of self-expression and political critique in a country where free speech is routinely stifled. In this account, Iranian bloggers are primarily young, educated, and secular, they hold politically dissident or reformist views, openly criticize and challenge the Iranian government, and are at times punished with state persecution and censorship (Alavi, pp. 1-34; Delio; Wall Street Journal). Blogging technology is seen as a blessing particularly for Iranian women who are eager to break free from the bonds imposed upon them by tradition, religion, and state (Amir-Ebrahimi, pp. 98-100; Hermida). The common thread that runs through these narratives describes a rebellious but oppressed population making use of a liberatory technology to make its voice heard in the face of a repressive state. This view has come under criticism from several quarters. Critics have argued that the celebratory narratives ignore the social processes and power dynamics that structure interactions among bloggers outside of a binary of repressive state versus subjugated population (Doostdar, p. 653), that they erroneously glorify blogging, in itself, as a subversive activity, and that they ignore the many blogs that fall outside of this categorization, such as those of religious conservatives and government officials (Akhavan, pp. 85-87; Kelly and Etling, p. 6).

The alternative approach to understanding weblogs is to examine them in relation to the multiple histories, ideologies, and sociopolitical contexts, both online and off, that give them shape, and that they shape in turn. The notion of rupture between online and offline contexts, which lies at the heart of the romantic tropes of subversion and transgression, is only one possible relationship, and fails to do justice even to an understanding of explicitly subversive blogs. Gendered norms still operate in Weblogistan, nationalist discourses make it difficult for minority concerns to be raised, and authorities of various kinds do their best to delineate what gets counted as legitimate knowledge and language. As spaces of expression, social interaction, and political activity, blogs are marked as much by exclusion as by inclusion. There are, to be sure, differences in the ways in which power and domination operate among blogs and the ways in which they shape modes of discourse and interaction in other, online and offline, contexts in Iran and the diaspora. Empirical studies of blogs, however, cannot afford to lose sight of the reproduction of older forms of power and inequality, as well as the emergence of new ones.

Bibliography:

N. Akhavan, “The Iranian Internet: Interventions in New Media and Old Politics,” Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 2007.

N. Alavi, We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs, New York, 2005.

M. Amir-Ebrahimi, “Transgression in Narration: The Lives of Iranian Women in Cyberspace,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4/3, 2008, pp. 89-118.

R. Blood, “Weblogs: A History and Perspective,” in Perseus Publishing and R. Blood, eds., We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture, Cambridge, 2002.

M. Delio, “Blogs Opening Iranian Society?,” Wired News, 28 May 2003, available online (accessed 20 July 2009).

A. Doostdar, “‘The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging’: On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan,” American Anthropologist 106/4, 2004, pp. 651-62.

A. Hermida, “Web Gives a Voice to Iranian Women,” BBC News, 17 June 2002, available online (accessed 20 July 2009).

M. Joneidi, “Iranian anger at Hollywood ‘assault’,” BBC News, March 16 2007, available online (accessed 20 July 20, 2009).

J. Kelly and B. Etling, “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere,” Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, 2008, available online (accessed 20 July 20, 2009). Wall Street Journal, “The Blog Shall Make You Free,” Editorial, 18 July 2003; login at online.wsj.com/login?URI=%2Farticle%2F0%2C %2CSB105848499831453000%2C00.html%3Fmod %3Dopinion_main_review_and_outlooks (accessed 20 July 20, 2009).

(Alireza Doostdar)

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WEIGHTS AND MEASURES i. PRE-ISLAMIC PERIOD

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

i. PRE-ISLAMIC PERIOD

Units of weight. The standard unit of weight in the ancient Middle East was the shekel (šiqlu), best known from that of the Babylonian standard. It was enforced throughout the Achaemenid Empire by Darius I the Great (r. 522-486) around 515 BCE. In this system, the shekel stood at 8.40 grams. This is in fact the key unit for understanding the ancient systems of weight, forming part of a sexagesimal table (see TABLE 1).

It seems likely that during earlier periods in Babylonia, the standard of the shekel was marginally lower, but it is then less easy to determine closely the intended norm. Again, there are indications in the system, and in certain archaic terms found in Avestan texts, that in Persia prior to the establishment of the Babylonian standards, a decimal reckoning of denominations had existed, of which the karša- (AirWb., col. 457) of ten shekels is a survival.

One of the indications for the value of the shekel under Darius is that the gold Daric coin, supposedly weighing a shekel, has a typical weight of 8.33 g. Some consider this as evidence that the shekel standard was minimally lighter than that quoted above, but more probably this figure provided a margin for seignorage, covering costs of minting uncoined, or alien gold brought to the mint. It supports this theory that the 4th-century BCE gold staters of the Greek city of Lampsacus on the Dardanelles, frequently within the Achaemenid jurisdiction, had indeed a typical weight of 8.4033 g, and were presumably intended for exchange against the Daric at par.

Other evidence for establishing the ancient standards is provided by the examination of actual weights surviving from antiquity, and again from the inspection of certain specimens of ingot currency (see below). Of the six surviving, well-preserved Achaemenid weights recorded in the literature and provided with inscriptions, three seem manifestly related to the shekel of Darius, though again marginally low: British Museum no. 91117 is inscribed 2 karša and has a current weight of 166.724 g, resulting in the figure of 166.724/20=8.33 g for the shekel, thus coinciding closely with the norm of the Daric coin. Two weights from the Persepolis excavations (Schmidt, pp. 105-7), PT3 283 and PT4 736, are inscribed respectively 20 minas/120 karša and 10 minas/60 karša and weigh 9,950 g and 4,930 g. These would provide a shekel of 8.29 g and 8.22 g, which are again low, but it should be noticed that boththese specimens are perceptibly chipped. The weight from Kermān carries simply the name and titles of Darius the Great, and weighs 2222.425 g. This does not seem to bear any intelligible relation to the shekel of 8.40 g, though William Trousdale contended that it represented a weight of 30 karša (2,520 g) reduced some 10 percent by damage. More probably, however, it was a special-purpose weight, designed (since 2,222.425 / 400 = 5.56) for weighing out bulk payments of 400 silver sigloi. These silver coins were the subsidiary denomination to the gold Daric, adjusted to be valued at 20 to the latter coin. An extremely large lion weight from Susa, weighing 121 kg, is evidently, as Mitchell (p. 174 and n. 12) observed, a unit of four talents, since 121 / 4 = 30.25kg, coinciding all but precisely with the theoretical standard of the Babylonian talent.

Finally, a puzzling item is the lion weight from Abydos in the Dardanelles at the British Museum (BM E.32625). This was indubitably intended as a full talent and has actually a Greek letter alpha for “one” on the back, but in fact it weighs 31,808 g, an approximate 5 percent excess over the theoretical Babylonian standard of 30,240 g. One can only assume that this weight was for checking payments subject to some kind of surcharge. The Aramaic inscription on the weight, reading ʾsprn l-qbl stryʾ zy kspʾ can be interpreted as “correct for (weighing) staters of silver” and suggests that tribute in Athenian silver tetradrachms was being discounted on payment into the Achaemenid treasury, since these were the coins known in the East as “staters.”

Before the time of Alexander the Great, the financial system of the ancient Near East operated chiefly on the basis of payments in bulk silver. This could be presented in any available form, and was evaluated on the balance rather than by counting. Thus value was determined by units of weight rather than by number. There is reason to believe that when state authorities wished to enlarge their tax take, instead of raising the assessment they increased the standard of the shekel. Thus, there are Assyrian “lion” weights that are evidently intended as talents but are double the regular standard, implying a shekel of 16.80 g. Although broken and bulk silver in any form could be employed for payment, in different periods and areas several standard forms of silver unit were typical. Thus spiral “ring-money” was found from very early dates, possibly even earlier than the second millennium BCE, in Babylonia. In Assyrian times, “Slab-ingots,” perhaps 2 cm thick and of rectangular form, seem also to have existed, though hardly any survive intact, since they were regularly cut up to make smaller payments. In southeastern Anatolia, notably at Zincirli, and in Syria, there were “cake-ingots,” shaped like round, flat, “cookies” and often approximating to the weight of a mina, but commonly falling short of the full standard. During the 7th century BCE in the area of the Median Empire in northern Persia, “bar-ingots” were favored. The weights of these pieces varied widely, with intact specimens in the Nuš-e Jān hoard reaching as much as 100 g. Nevertheless, certain examples seem to have been carefully adjusted, one offcut from Nuš-e Jān (Bivar, 1982, no. A 13), weighing exactly 8.40 g, and obviously calculated to represent an exact Babylonian shekel.

A later deposit from the residue of the first Mir Zakah hoard from eastern Afghanistan, datable around 385 BCE, had one carefully shaped astragloid bar weighing 8.34 g, the standard weight of the Daric coin, and so it was presumably Achaemenid. One could account for the decline from the theoretical standard of 8.40 g by assuming that Daric coins themselves were employed as weights in the provinces, or that modified weights were in use for weighing these. The same hoard also contained heavier specimens, including two of 11.12 g and 11.13 g respectively, thus each one having the precise weight of two Achaemenid sigloi. This was indeed a weight-standard exemplified in various regions, including possibly eastern Persia. Seven others were heavier still, running up to a maximum of 12.18, and 12.76 g. Though one cannot be sure that all, or any, of these ingots were precisely adjusted, they do suggest heavier standards than that of Darius, which had once prevailed in different parts of the Iranian world. Another interesting Mir Zakah piece was a fragment weighing 1.39 g, which could be identified as the dānake “grain”; since, when multiplied by eight, it equates with the unit of 11.12 g, and when multiplied by six results in the shekel of Darius at 8.34 g. Thus we see that the study of ingot hoards casts light on the development of weight standards in the Achaemenid world.

With the advent of Alexander of Macedon in 333 BCE, coined money began to circulate in the former Achaemenid territories. The conqueror adopted for his currency the widespread Attic (Athenian) standard, generally called the “Euboic,” with a stater of 17.3 g, and its quarter, the Attic drachma, at 4.32 g. Very soon, however, though fine presentation pieces may have maintained the higher standard, the coinage of Alexander’s successors in Asia (now being issued from mints at Ecbatana, Susa, Persepolis, and Bactra), tended to fall back to that of the Babylonian shekel, with the tetradrachm or stater at 16.80 g equating with two shekels, and the drachma of 4.20 g with the half- shekel or zwz. With some gradual slippage of the standard, these denominations survived throughout the Parthian and Sasanian dynasties. At the same time, commercial weight-standards began to diverge from that of the coinage, but they can, to some extent, be followed from the metrological inscriptions engraved on many silver dishes, evidently for purposes of accountancy.

These inscriptions were expressed in staters and drachmae, either spelt out phonetically (styr and drḥm), or with the use of the equivalent ideograms ḤṢY and ZWZN. Thus on a now well-known fluted dish bearing a device characteristic of the reign of Bahrām II (r. 274-91 CE) and weighing 650 g, a Pahlavi inscription reads TGDWN ʾsymy 20 10 9 ḤṢY 3 “Weighed, silver 39 staters and 3 drachmae.” Thus the calculation 39 x 4 + 3 = 159 gives the total weight of the object in drachmae, and 650 / 159 = 4.08 g will be the standard of the drahm (see DIRHAM) at that period. A cursive Pahlavi inscription on an evidently later silver pedestal cup in private possession reads Ḥ iii iii / ZWZN (i.e., drahm) ii, thus totaling 26 drachmae. Since the present weight of the vessel is 102 g, the calculation 102 / 26 = 3.92 g establishes the standard of the drahm at this later date as 3.92 g, which is probably not much earlier than the 6th century CE (Bivar, 1991, pp. 4, 8).

Thus after the earliest Sasanian reigns, the standard of the drahm coin, the dominant currency unit, had declined to a typical figure of around 3.90 g, which persisted until the fall of the dynasty in the mid-7th century. As Walter B. Henning (1961, p. 8, n. 18) observed: “The maximum average weight of the coins issued by the early Sasanian kings from Šāpur I [r. 240-70] to Bahrām V [ r. 420-38 CE] never falls below 3.90 nor rises above 4.05 g.”

In the more easterly territories of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, the earlier Bactrian kings issued coinage on a standard reduced only marginally, if at all, from that of their Seleucid predecessors, with a tetradrachm (stater) from 16.80 g to 16.50 g. Especially towards the decline of the kingdom and the Scythian invasions, the standard again fell substantially, to around 15.50 g in some examples. This figure for the stater of the later Bactrian kingdom is confirmed by two artifacts from the Tillya-Tepe find in northern Afghanistan. Though this treasure was probably deposited in graves towards the end of the 1st century BCE, it contains several “heirloom” pieces of evident Hellenistic manufacture. Here a cylindrical gold casket with leaf decoration bears an inscription CTA E t B “Sta(ters) 5, drachmae 2.” The weight of the object in drachmae is therefore 22, and its present weight 86 g. Consequently the calculation 86 / 22 = 3.90 gives the weight of the late Bactrian drachma, and 3.90 x 4 = 15.6 g is that of the stater. A closely similar result is obtained from a golden phiale weighing 638 g, and inscribed CTA MA “Sta(ters) 41.” Again, 638 / 41 = 15.56, giving the contemporary weight of the stater. In each case, the numerals use the Greek “alphabetic” system of numbering, and in the first a conventional sign tappears indicating the presence of drachmae (cf. Woodhead, p. 109, where the drachma sign has a slightly different form, and p. 111).

Very similar weight standards are found in a few substandard specimens of the earlier Greco-Bactrian coinage, but especially in the latest, “helmeted head,” issue of the coinage of Heliocles (e.g., Bopearachchi, p. 225, no. 23, 15.10 g). Thereafter, the designation of stater, attached to a variety of coin- and weight-standards, becomes widely diffused in Central Asia, and later in India. It survives in the New Persian designation sir and sēr as a commercial weight found in the markets of Persia and South Asia down to recent times.

Units of capacity. The dominant units of capacity in the Achaemenid period are defined by a vessel recovered in the excavations at Persepolis. As in the case of weight-units, the reforms of Darius seem to have made an attempt to harmonize the Babylonian and Old Iranian systems. Erich Schmidt (pp. 108-9), calculating from the estimated capacity of a cosmetic bottle found in Ernst Herzfeld’s excavations, reckoned the volume of the measure known by the Babylonian logogram QA as between 920.4 and 944.9 ml. A practical approximation would be 932 ml. It may be assumed that the QA was identical with the ḥōfan, the measure known in Aramaic texts as the ḥpn (cf. Akk. upnu), which constituted the standard daily ration of flour for a soldier or workman (Driver, pp. 28, 60). The hōfan (epigraphic spelling now ḥwpn) appears again in the inscription of Šāpur at Kaʿba-ye Zardošt (see Huyse, p. 49, l. 36) in a figure of one grīw, five hōfan. In the Greek version of the inscription, this is rendered as “one and a half modius,” thus equating the grīw with the Greek modius, and designating the hōfanas its tenth. Consequently the value of the grīw could be reckoned at 9.32 liters.

The next highest unit on the scale of capacity was the (Gk.) artabē, (Elam. irtiba; Aram. ʾrdb), approximately equivalent to the English “bushel,” and defined by Herodotus (1.192) as exceeding the Attic medimnus by three choenices. Since the choenix was established as 1.09 liters, the daily meal ration of an Athenian soldier, the excess would be 6/48ths, or 6.25 percent. The Attic medimnus has been calculated at 52.40 liters (Young), though different calculations result in slightly varying figures, and on this basis the artabē should amount to 55.67 liters. An even higher volume mentioned by Aristophanes (Acharnians 108) was the achanē, corresponding to a wagonload, and estimated as 45 medimni, or possibly 45 artabae, and therefore 55.67 x 45 = 2,505 liters.

The Elamite Fortification tablets from Persepolis also provide evidence for the Achaemenid systems of dry and liquid measure. The unit in dry measure, known by the logogram BAR, which must be identified with the grīw, evidently corresponds to the marriš, Gk. máris, in liquid measure. Both are composed of 10 QA, and should therefore amount to 9.32 liters. We find here, however, conflicting evidence for the artabē, which in these documents consists of only 3 BAR or grīw, amounting therefore to only 27.96 liters. Here we have therefore a contradiction with the evidence of Herodotus, and, if the equivalences of the Elamite tablets have to prevail, then all the values of the artabē and above need to be halved, though allowance should also be made for diachronic changes. A further unit occurring in these tablets is the bawiš, of which there are ten to the artabē. This will accordingly correspond to 3 hōfan, or 2.79 liters.

Liquid measures follow the same pattern as those of dry volumes. Here the main units are the maris, in Parthian documents mry, similar to the grīw, and the kapithē or kapezis, rendering the Parthian *kapīc and representing the quarter of the maris. In the wine documents from Nisa (Diakonoff and Livshits), these are often represented by the abbreviations m and k. In New Persian, *kapic survives as qafiz (see Hinz, tr., pp. 71-72, where a variety of qafiz is discussed) or kafiz. In the Šāpur KZ inscription l. 36, a further liquid measure is attested, the pās, but there is no evidence to definethis closely (see TABLE 2).

Units of length and distance. The principal units of length in the Near Eastern measurement systems were the foot and the cubit, standing in the ratio of 1:1.5. Subdivisions of the foot were its quarter, the palm, and its 16th, the finger. A higher unit, the fathom, consisted of four cubits. Michael Roaf (p. 68) has calculated from the measurement between builders’ marks on the palaces of Darius and Xerxes I (r. 486- 465) at Persepolis that the value of the cubit was there 52.1-52.2 cm, and of the foot 34.7 - 34.8 cm. An interesting parallel is provided by a metrological relief kept at the Ashmolean Museum (Michaelis, p. 335-38) in Oxford, which illustrates a “Samian” fathom of 208cm, implying (since 208 / 4 = 52) a cubit of 52 cm, thus effectively identical with the Perspolitan unit. This sculpture has also an added indication of the “Attic” foot, of 29.7 cm, evidently a lower standard implying a cubit of 44.5 cm. As Roaf has pointed out, drawing here mainly on Egyptian evidence, there are many allusions to the “royal” and the “common” cubit in ancient sources. The two standards exemplified on this metrological relief may effectively represent these two different standards. There exists, however, evidence also for intermediate figures at other sites, for example the minimally varied figures calculated by Carl Nylander (pp. 96-97) for Pasargadae, which suggests that the full picture may have been somewhat more complicated.

A link between the measures of length and of distance seems to be provided by the Attic foot of 29.7cm, which may have been identical with a “common” Babylonian foot. In the Greek measurement systems, 600 feet were equivalent to one stade, defining the Attic stade as 178.20 m. Herodotus (2.6) reports that the best-known Persian measure of distance, the parasang, was equivalent to 30 stades. The result is a parasang of 5.35 km, or 3.3 English miles. This fits well with the widespread tradition that the parasang represents the distance that men could march in an hour. The memory of this distance survives even today in the well-known, but nowadays more approximative, understanding in Iran of the farsang or farsaḵ (today about 6 km, see Hinz, tr., p. 91, probably indicating the horseman’s parasang).

John Hansman (1981, p. 3) in his search for the site of Hecatompylos (Qumes) worked with a somewhat shorter stade (of 164 m), derived from distances on the ground. He reckoned, as a rule of thumb, 10 stades to the English mile (1.609 km) and 3 miles (4.48 km) to the parasang, which is somewhat short of the above figures but produced excellent results in practice.

Herodotus (2.6) notes a further unit of distance, the Greek schoenē “rope,” which he defines as 60 stades or two parasangs, consequently 10.7 km. This unit seems identical with the Babylonian bēru. François Thureau-Dangin estimated the bēru at 3600 qanu “reeds” of 2.97 m, or 10.69 km. It is the “reed” that provides a common factor between the Babylonian and Attic systems, since it is evidently equivalent to ten Attic feet.

The discovery in situ of contemporary distance-stones would be of the greatest value. However, though Assyrian distance-stones have actually been reported (Olmstead, pp. 271, 334, 556; Nemet-Nejat, pp. 273-74), efforts to derive the word “parasang” from the OP aθanga- “stone” seem not to be substantiated, and no distance-stone of Achaemenid date, from which measurements could be taken, is so far recorded. It is possible that the Achaemenids reckoned road-distances not by chain-survey but by the timings of marching men, measured with some device similar to an hour-glass.

An even longer measure of distance possibly used by the Achaemenids is reflected in an Aramaic inscription of the Indian emperor Aśoka (r. 269–32 BCE) found at Laḡmān in Afghanistan (Dupont-Sommer, pp. 165-66), where the distance from that spot to Tadmor (Palmyra) is quoted at 200 qštn “bows.” André Dupont-Sommer estimates the distance from the find-spot to Palmyra as 3,800 km, which would result in a unitof 19 km, suitable for a day’s stage. In routine marches under tropical conditions, four hours per day on the road might be reasonable travel, resulting in a parasang of 4.75 km, intermediate between the extreme figures we have been contemplating.

Numerous measures of length and of distance are mentioned in Avestan and Pahlavi texts, notably in the Vidēvdād and the Nērangistān. Walter B. Henning (1942, pp. 235- 37) concluded that these late works were influenced by the Attic-Roman systems, but there is little evidence for the absolute values of the terms. The terms recorded are: Av. paδa- (Mid. Pers. pāy) “foot,” Av. frārāθni- (Mid. Pers. frārāst) “cubit,” Av. gāya-, gāman- (Mid. Pers. gām) “pace,” Av. vibāzu- (Mid. Pers. ǰud-nāy) “fathom,” and Mid. Pers. nāy “reed” (AirWb., cols. 522, 842, 1021, 1448). A different system is reflectedby presumably earlier texts such as the Yašts, involving the hāθra-, and its double, the tačar or čarətu- (AirWb., cols. 582, 628, 1802). Efforts by the Pahlavi glossarists to define the first are puzzling, since it is explained as the parasang, as an hour’s journey, or conflictingly as a quarter-parasang, or even as 1000 paces (the Roman mile). Ernst Herzfeld (p. 21) explained the tačar- as related to the term for horse-race. He observed that nine circuits of the great ʿAbbasid race-track at Sāmarrāʾ,a typical endurance course, measure 10.5 km, and are thus a double-parasang, which fits well with the first interpretation of the hāθra-. Thus the tačar- would coincide with the Babylonian bēru. One might seek a semantic link with the name of the palaceof Darius the Great at Persepolis, also called Tačara, if a possible shade of meaning were a “grandstand” or “pavilion,” naturally associated with a racecourse.

Bibliography:

A. D. H. Bivar, “Achaemenid Coins, Weights and Measures,” in Camb. Hist. Iran II, pp. 610-39.

Idem, “A Hoard of Ingot-currency of the Median Period from Nūsh-i Jān, near Malayir,” Iran 9 1971, pp. 97-111.

Idem, “Bent Bars and Straight Bars: An Appendix to the Mir Zakah Hoard,” Stud. Ir. 11, 1982, pp. 49-60.

Idem,“The Ideogram for ‘Staters’ in Pahlavi,” in Ronald E. Emmerick and Dieter Weber, eds., Corolla Iranica: Papers in Honour of Prof. Dr. David Neil MacKenzie on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday on April 8th, 1991, Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1991, pp. 3-14.

Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecs: catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1991.

I. M. D’iakonov and V. A. Livshits, Parthian Economic Documents from Nisa I. Corpus Inscr. Iran., London, 1977.

Godfrey Rolles Driver, Aramaic Documents of the Fifth Century B.C., Oxford, 1957.

André Dupont-Sommer, “Une nouvelle inscription araméenne trouvée dans la vallée de Lamghan (Afghanistan),” Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 1970, pp. 158-73, esp. 165-6.

Richard Treadwell Hallock, Persepolis Fortification Tablets, Chicago, 1969.

John Hansman, “The Problems of Qumis,” JRAS 1968, pp. 111-39.

Idem, “The Measure of Hecatompylos,” JRAS 1981, pp. 3-9.

Walter B. Henning, “An Astronomical Chapter of the Bundahishn,” JRAS, 1942, pp. 229- 48.

Idem, “A Sasanian Silver Bowl from Georgia,” BSO(A)S 24/2, 1961, pp. 353-56.

Ernst Herzfeld, The Persian Empire: Studies in Geography and Ethnography of the Ancient Near East, ed. Gerold Walser, Wiesbaden, 1968. Walther Hinz, Handbook Islamische Masse und Gewichte: umgerechnet ins metrische System, tr. M. I. Marcinkowski as Measures and Weights in the Islamic World, Kuala Lumpur, 2003.

Philip Huyse, Die dreisprachische Inschrift Šābuhrs I. an der Kaʿaba-i Zardušt (ŠKZ), Corpus inscr. Iran. 3, Pahlavi Inscriptions, Royal Inscriptions, with Their Parthian and Greek Versions, London, 1999.

A. Michaelis, “The Metrological Relief at Oxford,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 4, 1883, pp. 335-50.

T. Mitchell, “The Bronze Lion Weight from Abydos,” Iran 11, 1973, pp. 173-75.

Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, London, 1998.

Carl Nylander, Ionians at Pasargadae: Studies in Old Persian Architecture, Uppsala, 1970.

Albert T. Olmstead, History of Assyria, New York, 1923. Michael Roaf, “Persepolitan Metrology,” Iran 16, 1978, pp. 67-78.

E. S. G. Robinson, “The Beginnings of Achaemenid Coinage,” NC, 6th Series 18, 1958, pp. 187-93, especially p. 190.

Viktor Ivanovich Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria: From the Tillya-Tepe Excavations in Northern Afghanistan, New York and Leningrad, 1985.

Erich Friedrich Schmidt, Persepolis II: Contents of the Treasury and Other Discoveries, Chicago, 1957, pp. 105-9.

Angelo Segré, Metrologia e circolazione monetaria degli antichi, Bologna, 1928. Idem, “Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian Measures,” JAOS 64, 1944, pp. 73-81.

François Thureau-Dangin, “Numeration et metrologie sumerinnes,” Revue asiatique 18, 1921, pp. 123-42.

William Trousdale, “An Achaemenid Stone Weight from Afghanistan,” East and West 18, 1968, pp. 277-80.

Arthur Geofrey Woodhead, The Study of Greek Inscriptions, Cambridge, 1959, p. 111.

S. Young, “An Athenian Clepsydra,” Hesperia 5, 1939, pp. 279-80.

(A. D. H. Bivar)

______

WELLHAUSEN, JULIUS scholar of Biblical studies, who primarily gained renown as an Old Testament scholar and Semitist.

WELLHAUSEN, JULIUS (b. Hameln, Germany, 17 May 1844; d. Göttingen, 17 January 1918, Figure 1), scholar of Biblical studies, who primarily gained renown as an Old Testament scholar and Semitist.

Following in the footsteps of his father August Wellhausen, who was a Lutheran pastor (d. 1861), he studied Protestant theology in Göttingen from 1862 to 1865, during which time, except for two digressions into German history prior to his ecclesiastical examination, the only lectures he attended were in theology. After graduation, he worked for two years as a private tutor. He subsequently returned to Göttingen, where he became a tutor in a theological seminary (Stift) and studied with Heinrich A. Ewald (1803-75), focusing on Oriental languages. In addition to Semitic languages, Ewald offered also courses in Sanskrit in the Faculty of Philosophy, and occasionally Persian and Turkish. After receiving his doctorate in theology, Wellhausen taught for two years in Göttingen before being appointed professor of theology at Greifswald University. His teaching contract included only theological courses and Hebrew, but his research efforts involved intense scrutiny of Arabic.

Over time, the training of theologians to serve the Church became increasingly burdensome to him, so he requested and ultimately convinced the Ministry of Education to transfer him to Halle in 1882 as an associate professor in the Faculty of Philosophy. In addition to Arabic and Syriac, Wellhausen sometimes taught the basics of Persian, but he deplored the lack of a Persian chrestomathy that he could use and make available to his students (Letter to Albert Socion, 6 June 1885; Smend et al., p. 179). In 1885, he was appointed at Marburg University, where he joined the Faculty of Philosophy and taught the Semitic languages, including Arabic and Syriac. Persian was taught by his Indo-Europeanist colleague Ferdinand Justi, with whom Wellhausen developed a close friendship bond and thanks to whom he enriched his knowledge of Persian. When Paul de Lagarde, a biblical scholar and orientalist, died in 1891, Wellhausen was designated as his successor in Göttingen. After some hesitation, he accepted the appointment to take over the professorship of his former teacher Heinrich A. Ewald, and he remained there until 1913, the year of his retirement.

Although he cast doubt on the “abstract antithesis of Semites and Indo-Europeans,” he continued to focus on Semitic languages and only sporadically offered lectures on Persian. This focus was the result of both his teaching duties and his research interests.

He first concentrated his research on the history of the sources of the Old Testament, working intensively on the Book of Job and teaching the history of Israel and Judaism. During the years at Greifswald University, as already mentioned, Wellhausen had developed an antipathy towards theological education, and he came to view working on the history and languages of the Semitic peoples as a way out of this drudgery. Due to his good knowledge of Arabic, he directed his research toward the early history of Arabic and Islam. The first fruit of this effort was “Muhammed in Medina,” which he published in 1882, the year of his move to Halle. He explained his pursuit of Arabic studies with the intention of gaining familiarity with the “wildling” upon which “the scion of the Yahweh’s Torah is grafted” (Wellhausen, 1882, Preface, p. 5). From this point on, Wellhausen’s bibliography increasingly displays work on the history of early Islam, drawing on Arabic sources, whether written in poetry or prose. He always extracted the very essence from his sources and subjected it to intense critical investigation in order to draw attention to possibly tendentious accounts, a process that drew comments of admiration from his colleagues.

His methodological approach, which is sometimes called Wellhausen's immanentism, is based on the concept that all the seeds of future development were to be found in the earliest times. This led him to focus his biblical studies on the ancient Hebrews. In his scientific investigations of Islam, he knowingly set his magnifying glass on the ancient Arabs, with the songs of the Hoḏayl, a tribe of the Arabian peninsula (Wellhausen, 1884), constituting a base through which he sought to grasp the mindset of the Bedouins. He saw their importance for Arab antiquity on a par with those of the Roman and Greek inscriptions. By examining the construct of communities in early Islam, he anticipated being able to explain the role of religion in the creation of a community. According to him, through Prophet Moḥammad and the way in which he organized his community, religion became the foundation of the community, replacing blood, which had previously functioned in this role for the tribes (Wellhausen, 1887, pp. 228, 234; idem, 1902, p. 4; tr., p. 6).

His studies of the Arabs proceeded from the earliest history of Islam and ended with the fall of the Omayyads. In his work, he traces the development of strategic alliances and parties to religious sects, as well as their limits. In his most comprehensive historical work about the Arabs, Wellhausen described how the various alliances and fractions in which the tribes were involved contributed to destabilization of the Omayyad dynasty (Wellhausen, 1902, pp. 306-52; tr., pp. 492-566.). He saw the beginnings of destabilization of the Islamic empire in the Battle of Karbala. In his eyes, this event launched the resistance against the Omayyads, which thereafter could no longer be prevented by changes in the system of taxing the non-Arab Muslims (mawāli). He regarded the revolt of the Shiʿite Iranians in Khorasan as decisive for the final overthrow of the Omayyads and thus for the end of the Arab aristocracy’s dominant role. The link between Arabism and Islam was dissolved, and the mawāli gained important positions in the government, becoming part of the official court hierarchy.

Their successors, the ʿAbbasids, were not an Arab dynasty, but rather a theocracy interspersed with Persians. This, however, no longer fell within the range of Wellhausen’s interests since the original Arabism was now overshadowed or adulterated. In a letter, he expressed his view somewhat casually, saying “to hell with the ʿAbbasids” (Letter to Ferdinand Justi, 26 March 1901; Smend et al., p. 395). His occupation with Persian language and history was one of the concomitants of his study of the history of “the Arab empire” (das arabische Reich). It was based primarily on Ṭabari’s Taʾriḵ al-rosol wa’l-moluk, a multi-volume historical work that had been edited by a number of orientalists at the end of the 19th century. In general, Wellhausen was against any historiography that conceded to the Persians what, in his view, was excessive influence on history. After all, he viewed the province of Khorasan as the empire’s “storm center” and the region in which developments played a greater role in the history of the Arab empire than other areas that had been conquered by the Muslims.

After his study of the fall of the Arab empire, Wellhausen never published another major work on the Arab region. He continued to lecture on Semitic languages, especially Arabic and Syriac, and he remained actively present within the academic arena of his orientalist colleagues by the wealth of reviews of works on Arab studies that emanated from his pen during those years. To his colleagues’ amazement, his own publications after the turn of the century dealt with topics from the Old and the New Testaments; he never explained why he decided to return to theological subjects. In the words of Otto Eissfeldt (pp. 194-95), there is a need for a biography of Wellhausen that demonstrates the oneness of the researcher and the man. In addition to the scholar’s letters, this could illustrate how his “humanness” unfurls in his works.

Bibliography:

For a comprehensive bibliography, see below, Alfred Rahlfs, and the expanded version in Rudolf Sment et al.

Selected works by Wellhausen.

“De gentibus et familiis Judaeis quae 1. Chr. 2.4. enumerantur,” Thesis, Academia Georgia Augusta, Gottingae, 1870. Geschichte Israels I, Berlin, 1878.

Muhammed in Medina: Das ist Vakidi’s Kitab al-Maghazi in verkürzter deutscher Wiedergabe herausgegeben, Berlin, 1882 (an abridged tr. of Wāqedi’s Ketāb al-maḡāzi).

Abriss der Geschichte Israels und Juda’s: Lieder der Hudhailiten, arabisch und deutsch, Skizzen und Vorarbeiten I, Berlin, 1884.

Reste arabischen Heidentumes, Skizzen und Vorarbeiten III, Berlin, 1887.

Medina vor dem Islam: Muhammads Gemeindeordnung von Medina: Seine Schreiben und die Gesandtschaften an ihn, Skizzen und Vorarbeiten IV, Berlin, 1889.

“Die Ehe bei den Arabern,” Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Phil- hist. Kl. 11, 1893, pp. 431-81.

Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, Berlin, 1894.

Prolegomena zur Ältesten Geschichte des Islams: Verschiedenes, Skizzen und Vorarbeiten 6, Berlin, 1899.

“Die religiös-politischen Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam,” Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil.-hist. Kl., N.F., 5, 1901, pp. 414- 47.

Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz, Berlin, 1902; tr. Margaret Graham Weir, as The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall, Calcutta, 1927; repr., London and New York, 2000.

Grundrisse zum Alten Testament, ed., Rudolf Smend, Munich, 1965. Evangelienkommentare, Berlin and New York, 1987.

Selected literature about Wellhausen.

Carl Heinrich Becker, “Julius Wellhausen,” Der Islam 9, 1919, pp. 95-99.

Otto Eissfeldt, “Julius Wellhausen,” in Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 14, 1920, pp. 193–08, 325–38.

Enno Littmann, “Erinnerungen an Wellhausen,” ZDMG 106, 1956, pp. 18-22.

Peter Machinist, “The Road not Taken: Wellhausen and Assyriology,” in Gershon Galil, Markham J. Geller, and Alan R. Millard, eds.., Homeland and Exile: Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honour of Bustenay Oded, Leiden and Boston, 2009, pp. 469- 531.

Alfred Rahlfs, “Verzeichnis der Schriften Julius Wellhausens,” in Karl Marti, ed., Studien zur semitischen Philologie und Religionsgeschichte: Julius Wellhausen zum siebzigsten Geburtstag am 17. Mai 1914 gewidmet von Freunden und Schülern, Beiheft der Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 27, Giessen, 1914, pp. 351-68.

Kurt Rudolph, “Wellhausen als Arabist,” Sitzungsberichte der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. phil.-hist. Kl 123, Berlin, 1983, pp. 1-57.

Eduard Schwartz, “Julius Wellhausen,” Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Geschäftliche Mitteilungen, 1918, pp. 43–70.

Rudolf Smend, Julius Wellhausen: ein Bahnbrecher in drei Disziplinen, Munich, 2006.

Idem, “Julius Wellhausen, 1844-1918,” in idem, From Astruc to Zimmerli: Old Testament Scholarship in Three Centuries, Tübingen, 2007, pp. 91-102. Rudolf Smend et al., eds., Julius Wellhausen: Briefe, Tübingen, 2013, pp. 818-37.

Josef van Ess, “From Wellhausen to Becker: The Emergence of Kulturgeschichte in Islamic Studies,” in Malcolm H. Kerr, ed., Islamic Studies. A Tradition and Its Problems, Proceedings, Seventh Giorgio Levi Della Vida Biennial Conference, Malibu, Calif., 1980, pp. 27-51.

(Ludmila Hanisch)

______

WERTIME, Theodore

(b. Chambersburg, Pa., 31 August 1919; d. Chambersburg, 8 April 1982), diplomat and scholar, expert on the history of technology in the ancient Middle East.

WERTIME, THEODORE (b. Chambersburg, Pa., 31 August 1919; d. Chambersburg, 8 April1982), diplomat and scholar, expert on the history of technology in the ancient Middle East. Upon graduating from Haverford College (Pennsylvania) in 1939, Wertime earned M.A. degree in history from the American University in Washington, D.C. and did additional graduate work in history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. During World War II he served in the Office of Strategic Services in China and subsequently joined the State Department as a China analyst. From 1960 to 1963, he was the Cultural Attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and in 1969-72 he served in the same capacity in Athens. Wertime was actively engaged in the study of early fire-based technologies and organized and headed a number of archaeological surveys, including five in Persia. As an employee of the U.S. Information Agency, he edited the Voice of America’s Forum and was an officer of its energy program. Upon retiring from government service, he joined the Smithsonian Institution as a research associate and was a visiting scholar at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Wertime wrote and edited a number of books and articles, and arranged several symposia to promote the study of ancient pyrotechnology.

As scientific archaeological investigations in the Middle East intensified during the 20th century, the West was to discover that a multitude of mechanisms of civilization, from farming technology to early metals, writing, and state societies and empires, had evolved in and spread to Europe from the East. In the 1960s Wertime wrote: “Forty years ago a number of European countries were vying to be known as the original home of the blast furnace—today the competition has moved in space to the Middle East and in time to the much earlier beginnings of the smelting of ores and metals” (Wertime, 1968a, p. 927).

Theodore Wertime made significant contributions to the understanding of the role of Persia and the Middle East in the development of metallurgy. He considered metallurgy to be a part of the technological art, which he called “pyrotechnology” (Goodway, p. 82). Wertime “was not persuaded” by the argument of “independent invention of metallurgy in Europe” (Goodway, p. 82) and wrote that “the uplands of the Middle East” offered a “favourable juxtaposition of mineral and fuel resources” necessary for the emergence of metallurgy (Wertime, 1964b, p. 1258).

Interested in humankind’s use of fire to shape materials, Wertime selected excellent expedition members, whose expertise he sought to explicate the superbly chosen sites to which, in his capacity as a diplomat, he was able to negotiate access. Wertime’s search for the earliest beginnings of pyrotechnology led him to organize the following expeditions in Persia: metallurgical reconnaissance of archaeological sites in the north with the Ministry of Mines of Iran in 1961 (Wertime, 1968a; Idem, 1968c); a follow-up survey with Cyril Stanley Smith in 1962 (Wertime, 1968a, pp. 931, 934); a survey covering “The Great Persian Desert” as an adjunct to the excavations by Caldwell at Tal- e Eblis in 1966 (Wertime, 1968a, p. 927), a reconnaissance coordinated with Lamberg- Karlowsky’s field survey in 1967 (Wertime, 1968c).

Wertime had gained considerable experience and knowledge during expeditions he undertook in the region together with various experts before planning the 1968 survey, which was the largest and the most ambitious of them all and was funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic. The team included, in alphabetical order, Robert Brill (glass, glazes, and metals), Sam Bingham (photographer), Fred Klinger (geologist), Fred Matson (ceramics), ʿEzzat-Allāh Negahbān (archaeology), Rodemir Pleiner, Beno Rothernberg and Ronnie Tylecote (archeometallurgists), and John Wertime (one of Theodore Wertime’s sons who acted as interpreter). The members of the expedition collected samples according to their own briefs and interests; not all of them were present at all sites, and some of them visited other sites individually.

The surveybegan in Afghanistan on 29 July 1968. By 12 August, the members had reached the border of Persia, from where they went on to Uzbeg Kuh (Ozbagu?), Deyhuk, Tappa Yaḥyā, Deh-e Sard, Sečāh, Tal-e Eblis, Qatru (Qaṭruya), Kuh-e Sorḵ, Estebanat (Eṣṭehbānāt), Persepolis, Zar-Češma, Pasargadae, Hanašk (Henešg), Talmessi (Tolmešgi), and Miskenni. The toponyms above are spelled as they given in Rodemir Pleiner’s unpublished data (Pleiner), and some of them remain ambiguous. After Miskenni, further visits were made to Talmessi, before moving on to Tappa Sialk near Kāšān, and finally to Ahaer. The expedition then moved on to Turkey on September 16 and finished in Ankara on September 25.

The majority of the sites they visited were archeological in nature, but some were modern cities, local bazaars, museums, and modern production centers. Sam Bingham mentions that, wherever an audience could be found, the team would display the material they were interested in, with the curious ones amongst the audience being invited to comment on where they may have seen anything resembling the displayed items (Bingham). These ethnographic and other experimental approaches they employed were modern for that time.

Samples of ceramics were taken to the U.S. by Fred Matson, while Fred Klinger brought with him geological samples that later became the subject of analysis funded by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (Domenico et al.). The metallurgical samples from the 1968 survey got tied up in bureaucratic knots in Turkey and were later retrieved by Beno Rothenberg. A few of them were sent to Ronnie Tylecote in England, and the rest were stored in Israel, until Beno Rothenberg and the author of this article, then a student, met by chance, and the samples were transferred from Israel to the Institute of Archaeology of the University College of London in 2002. Since then, the artifacts have been catalogued and cross-referenced with textual data to facilitate research into this important material (Arab). The catalogue has since become the subject of a website to make the artifacts and textual appendix accessible to scholars worldwide: www.ucl.ac.uk/iams/iransurvey. The website also contains scanned images of unpublished documents and reports referred to in this article.

Theodore Wertime organized and headed further expeditions after his surveys of Persia. In 1970 and 1971 he carried out surveys in Turkey, followed by a journey in 1973 to sites in Turkey, Cyprus, and the Balkans. The “Eastern desert of Egypt” expedition was next in 1976, and finally an expedition to Greece and Cyprus took place in 1980 (Goodway, pp. 81-82). Wertime published various articles and books, and set up several symposia to promote the study and understanding of “pyrotechnology.” The valuable artifacts remaining from the 1968 survey are a testament to Wertime’s profound understanding of the true beginnings and spread of “pyrotechnology,” as well as the crucial role of Persia and the Near East in the development of metallurgy and “other urbanizing technologies” (Wertime, 1973a, p. 886). Bibliography:

Works.

T. A. Wertime, The Coming of the Age of Steel, Chicago, Ill., 1962.

Idem, “Asian Influences on European Metallurgy,” Technology and Culture 5/3, Summer 1964a, pp. 391-97.

Idem, “Man’s First Encounter with Metallurgy,” Science 146, December 1964b, pp. 1257- 67.

Idem, “A Metallurgical Expedition through the Persian Desert,” in Investigations at Tal-i- Iblis , ed. J. R. Caldwell, Springfield, Ill., 1967, pp. 327-39.

Idem, “A Metallurgical Expedition through the Persian Desert,” Science 159, March 1968a, pp. 927-35.

Idem, “Argonauts in the Persian Desert,” Foreign Service Journal, June 1968b, pp. 19- 23, 60.

Idem, “A Proposal for a Pyrotechnological Reconnaissance in Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey,” 1968c, unpublished; available at www.ucl.ac.uk/iams/iransurvey as A01.

Idem, “The Beginnings of Metallurgy: A New Look,” Science 182, November 1973a, pp. 875-87.

Idem, “Pyrotechnology: Man’s First Industrial Uses of Fire,” American Scientist 61/6, November-December 1973b, pp. 670-83. Idem, “National Geographic Society-Smithsonian Pyrotechnical Reconnaissance of Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey 1968,” National Geographical Society Research Reports, 1968 Projects, Washington, 1976, pp. 483-92.

Idem, “Tin and the Egyptian Bronze Age,” in Immortal Egypt, ed. D. Schmandt-Dessarat, Malibu, Calif., 1978, pp. 37-42.

Idem, “Pyrotechnical Studies in Europe and in the Middle East,” National Geographic Society Research Reports, 1972 Projects, vol. 13, Washington, 1981a, pp. 683-91.

Idem, “Whence Early Technology? East, West, or Nowhere,” Technology and Culture 22/1, January 1981b, pp. 122-24.

Idem, “The Furnace Versus the Goat: The Pyrotechnologic Industries and Mediterranean Deforestation in Antiquity,” Journal of Field Archaeology 10/4, Winter 1983, pp. 445-52.

Idem “Unpublished report, 1968 survey,” in Arab, “Catalogue, Context and Discussion: The 1968 Pyrotechnological Survey of Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey,” Ph.D. diss., London, 2003; available at www.ucl.ac.uk/iams/iransurvey as A01.

T. A. Wertime, A. D. Franklin, and J. S. Olin, eds., The Search for Ancient Tin, Washington, D.C., 1978.

T. A. Wertime and J. D. Muhly, eds., The Coming of the Age of Iron, New Haven and London, 1980.

T. A. Wertime and S. F. Wertime, eds., Early Pyrotechnology: The Evolution of the First Fire-Using Industries, Washington, D.C., 1982.

Studies. R. Arab, “Catalogue, Context and Discussion: The 1968 Pyrotechnological Survey of Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey,” BA diss., Institute of Archaeology, University College of London, 2003 (available at www.ucl.ac.uk/iams/iransurvey).

R. Arab and Th. Rehren, “The Pyrotechnological Expedition of 1968,” in Persiens Antike Pracht, ed. Th. Stöllner, R. Slotta, and A. Vatandust, Bochum, 2004, pp. 550-55.

S. Bingham, “F04, Personal correspondence, 2003,” in Arab, “Catalogue, Context and Discussion: The 1968 Pyrotechnological Survey of Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey.”

J. A. Domenico, W. C. Overstreet, A. E. Hubert, and R. B. Tripp, “Tin and Other Elements in Sediments and Beach Sands from Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey,” United States Department of Interior Geological Survey, Project Report 1978, (IR) AF-4; available at www.ucl.ac.uk/iams/iransurvey as D02.

M. Goodway, “Historical Metallurgy,” Journal of the Historical Metallurgical Society 17/2, 1983, pp. 81-82.

R. Pleiner, “A11, Unpublished report, 1968 survey,” in Arab, “Catalogue, Context and Discussion: The 1968 Pyrotechnological Survey of Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey.”

C. S. Smith, T. A. Wertime, and R. Pleiner, “Preliminary reports of the metallurgical project,” in Investigations at Tal-i-Iblis ed. J. R. Caldwell, Springfield, Ill., 1967, pp. 318- 26.

December 15, 2008

(Roya Arab)

Originally Published: December 15, 2008 ______

WESTERGAARD, NIELS LUDVIG

(1815-1878), Danish orientalist scholar with special interest in Indology.

WESTERGAARD, NIELS LUDVIG, Danish orientalist scholar with special interest in Indology (b. Copenhagen, 27 October 1815; d. Copenhagen, 9 September 1878; Figure 1).

Westergaard, the son of a master carpenter, started in 1833 studying Old Nordic and Sanskrit languages at Copenhagen University. His interest in these languages had been aroused by one of his teachers at the grammar school through the well-known works of Rasmus Kristian Rask (d. 1832), a language scholar and a leading promoter of comparative linguistics. In April 1838, he went for a few months to Bonn to study Avestan and New Persian with Christian Lassen, one of the then leading research scholars concerning the Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions. He then turned to Paris, London, and Oxford, where he studied and copied Sanskrit manuscripts, before returning to Copenhagen in September 1839 (see Schmitt, 1993, p. xi, with further references).

At the beginning of his career (before 1841), Westergaard’s scholarly work was concentrated on Sanskrit, because his main purpose was to make available the native Indian writings of Sanskrit grammar and lexicography. His first book, Radices linguae Sanscritae (1841), a dictionary of the Old Indo-Aryan verbal roots arranged according to the final letters and presenting also detailed references to the literary sources, resulted from extended studies of Sanskrit manuscripts kept in the above-mentioned libraries. To that book he added also a critical edition of Pāṇini’s Dhātupāṭha, which was his basic text. The Radices linguae Sanscritae is one of his major books, if not the most important one, since it was of great significance for the Sanskrit philology of that time, and it became dispensable only in 1875, when the great, so-called Petersburg dictionary by Otto von Böhtlingk (1815-1904) and Rudolf von Roth (1821-1895) was completed. At the same time, he wrote also a small comparative study (1840-44a) about the connections between Sanskrit and Icelandic, which in a way is a supplement to Rasmus Rask’s famous work of 1818 about the origin of the Old Nordic language.

A three-year trip to India and Persia (May 1841-May 1844), financially supported by the Danish king Christian VIII, to whom Westergaard had dedicated the Radices, brought him into contact with the Zoroastrian communities (see PARSI COMMUNITIES i) both in Bombay and in Persia. He had had it in mind, since a young age, to work on and publish the manuscripts once brought to Copenhagen by Rask, whom he admired and revered all his life. In Bombay he dealt in particular with the Parsis’ traditional languages, namely Avestan and Middle Persian (Pahlavi). Then in January 1843 he turned to Persia to see the famous cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings. There he was able to buy in Yazd and Kerman, the main centers of the Persian Zoroastrians, eight Zoroastrian manuscripts, among them Dādestān ī mēnōg ī xrad and Dādestān ī dēnīg. They are all now parts of the famous Codices Hafnienses, kept at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. He was even allowed there to study their shrines in all details and to see also a Zoroastrian burial place (daḵma; see Schmitt, 1993, pp. xii f., with further references).

The more significant outcome of his trip to Iran, however, is the fact that on three occasions he collated again the Persepolis cuneiform texts that had been known since Carsten Niebuhr, who, during his short visit to Iran in 1765, copied a good number of Achaemenid inscriptions. Westergaard copied for the first time the great inscriptions of Darius I’s tomb in Naqš-e Rostam; he did this in summer 1843 under great difficulties in the blazing sun that detracted from his view of the target. The fact that he was the first traveler well acquainted with the research in the field and with the related Avestan and Sanskrit languages made his copies most reliable. At his last visit in Naqš-e Rostam in the first days of July 1843, he had a serious attack of fever and survived only because of the devoted care by some clergymen in Shiraz and both the Catholic and the Armenian archbishops of Isfahan (Thomsen, p. 254). Westergaard came back from the Orient with a wealth of numerous manuscripts as well as copies of inscriptions he had made in Persia and India (here esp. Ashoka’s inscription of the Girnār mountain). Immediately after the return from India and Persia, he became a lecturer in Copenhagen University, in 1845 he was appointed extraordinary professor, and in 1850 full professor, of Indian and Oriental philology (Thomsen, p. 255; Christensen and Seemann, p. 442).

Westergaard gave the copies of the Old Persian texts to his teacher Christian Lassen (1800-1876) and devoted himself to the study of the inscriptions of the second type of cuneiform writing in the language we now call Elamite, which he first called “Median” and later “Sakian” (Westergaard, 1856; Thomsen, pp. 257-58). He was the first to make serious attempts to decipher the more complicated Elamite script with its more than 100 characters, but without a word-divider (as we have it in Old Persian) and to analyze the Elamite language by means of the bilinguistic method of comparing with a text in a better-known language. With use of the Naqš-e Rostam text (DNa), which contains names of several countries and peoples, he had increased the number of longer bilingual texts known, and above all the number of proper names known, in a decisive measure, thereby becoming a forerunner of Elamite studies. In two rather long articles (1840-44b and 1845), which are basic means to the understanding of the Elamite writing system and the Elamite inscriptions, he was able to establish with a measure of certainty the phonetic value of some 80 characters by comparing proper names with their Old Persian equivalents. On the basis of the results achieved by the names, he tried also to isolate the other single words of the text, to read them, and to establish their meaning. Later, when he examined the more extensive Elamite version of the Bisotun text as edited by Edwin Norris in 1855, he could modify considerably the results that his British friend had achieved (Westergaard, 1856), owing to his sound sense of judgement, his keen power of observation, and his stringent methodology. Regrettably this study remained quite unknown (presumably because of its language) and was only rarely quoted by subsequent scholars, although Westergaard had established the phonetic value of several characters more correctly than Norris.

After he had published some Indological teaching materials (1846a and 1846b) and also, depending on the preliminary work of Friedrich Spiegel, a catalog of the Indian and Iranian manuscripts of the Copenhagen libraries (1846c), he edited for the first time in Europe a complete Middle Persian text, the Bundahišn, on the basis of some Copenhagen manuscripts (1851); it is a facsimile edition after codex K 20, to which is added a publication of the Sasanian King Šāpur I’s rock inscriptions at Ḥājiābād in order to make clear the difference between Book Pahlavi and the inscriptional language. Following this, he published the exemplary first edition of the complete corpus of the Avestan texts (Westergaard, 1852-54) after having also collated in 1850 the Avestan manuscripts kept in the libraries of London, Oxford, and Paris. This edition, titled Zendavesta, was printed in Copenhagen with very fine types cut on Westergaard’s advice after the letters of the best and oldest manuscripts (K 1 and K 5).

Westergaard’s Zendavesta, which was printed in four installments from 1852 to 1854, was the first edition containing the entire corpus of the texts and is the final point and the highlight of the first period of Avestan studies marked by Rasmus Rask and Eugène Burnouf. The editor’s intention was “to give as good and correct a text as possible, attempting thereby to reach the Sasanian original” (p. 23), without intending, however, to record all the orthographic variants of the manuscripts. Only on the foundations laid by Westergaard was it possible to begin the thorough study of the texts and their language, although Westergaard himself did not realize the plan to follow it up with a complete dictionary, a grammar, and edition of the Middle Persian translation of the Avesta with an English translation (see below). In his edition are missing, moreover, texts not available to him or not yet known at all at that time, such as Aogəmadaēčā, Nērangistān, Pursišnīhā, Vaeθā, and Frahang ī Oīm (for the contents of Westergaard’s edition, esp. in comparison with Karl F. Geldner’s edition, see Schmitt, 1993, pp. vi-ix). After having finished the edition of Zendavesta in 1854, which marks the point separating two quite different periods in his scholarly work, Westergaard in some kind of self-isolation confined himself to publish only in Danish (and no more in German or English) and on entirely different fields, above all on Indian history. The two main reasons for that were, on the one hand, his patriotism and nationalist views concerning the tight political situation in Denmark in those years of the Schleswig-Holstein question (a controversy between Denmark, Prussia, and Austria over the status of Schleswig and Holstein), and, on the other, the premature death of his wife, which caused him to care for his four little children all by himself. Nevertheless, his later historical works on the most ancient period of Indian history, which were based on Vedic sources, and on the date of Buddha were of some influence (e.g., Westergaard, 1862), because they were translated by a friend of his (A. F. Stenzler) into German.

Bibliography:

Major works.

“On the Connexion between Sanscrit and Icelandic,” Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord 1840[-1844]a, pp. 41-74.

“On the Deciphering of the Second Achaemenian or Median Species of Arrowheaded Writing,“ Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, 1840[-1844]b, pp. 271-439.

Radices linguae Sanscritae: ad decreta grammaticorum definivit atque copia exemplorum exquisitiorum illustravit, Bonn, 1841.

“Zur Entzifferung der Achämenidischen Keilschrift zweiter Gattung,“ Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 6, 1845, pp. 337-466.

Sanskrit Læsebog med tilhörende ordsamling, Copenhagen, 1846a.

Kortfattet Sanskrit Formlære, Copenhagen, 1846b. Codices Orientales Bibliothecae Regiae Havniensis … enumerati et descripti. Pt. 1: Codices Indici, with an appendix: Index codicum Indicorum et Iranicorum Bibliothecae Universitatis Havniensis (pp. 97-115), Copenhagen, 1846c; repr., Osnabrück, 1987. Bundehesh, liber pehlvicus e vetustissimo codice Havniensi descripsit, duas inscriptiones regis Saporis primi adjecit, Copenhagen, 1851.

“Bemærkninger om Zendavestas Alder og Hjemstavn,” Oversigt over Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Forhandlinger, 1852, pp. 207 ff.

Ed. and tr., Zendavesta, or the Religious Books of the Zoroastrians I. The Zend Texts, Copenhagen, 1852-54; new ed. by Rüdiger Schmitt, Wiesbaden, 1993.

“Beitrag zur altiranischen Mythologie,” Indische Studien 3, tr. Friedrich Spiegel, 1855, pp. 402-48.

“Om den anden eller den sakiske Art af Akhæmenidernes Kileskrift,” Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter V/2, 1856, pp. 39-178.

Ueber den ältesten Zeitraum der indischen Geschichte mit Rücksicht auf die Litteratur. Ueber Buddha’s Todesjahr und einige andere Zeitpunkte in der älteren Geschichte Indiens: Zwei Abhandlungen, Breslau, 1862.

“Om de indiske Kejserhuse fra det fjerde til det tiende Aarhundrede og nogle ældere Fyrsteslægter efter samtidige Aktstykker,” Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter V/3, Copenhagen, 1869 (description and partial Eng. tr. by E. Strandberg, 1978, pp. 7-19).

Other references. O. Böhtlingk and Rudolf von Roth, Sanskrit-Wörterbuch, 7 vols., St. Petersburg, 1875.

A. Christensen and V. Seemann, “W., N. L.,” Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 3rd ed., XV, Copenhagen, 1984, pp. 440-44.

J. Eyser, “Vore verdensberømte gammeliranske haandskrifter,” in Ex Bibliotheca Universitatis Hafniensis, Copenhagen, 1920, pp. 144-82, esp. pp. 165-81.

Christian Lassen, “Die Altpersischen Keilinschriften nach Hrn. N. L. Westergaard’s Mittheilungen,” Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 6, 1845, pp. 1-188, 467-580.

Edwin Norris, “Memoir on the Scythic Version of the Behistun Inscription,” JRAS 15, 1855, pp. 1-213.

Rasmus Kristian Rask, Undersögelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse, Copenhagen, 1818; tr. Niels Ege, as Investigation of the origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language, Copenhagen, 1993.

Rüdiger Schmitt, “Dänische Forscher bei der Erschließung der Achaimeniden- Inschriften,“ Acta Orientalia 47, 1986, pp. 13-26.

Idem, “Niels Ludvig Westergaard und seine Avesta-Ausgabe,” in Niels Ludvig Westergaard, ed., Zendavesta, or the Religious Books of the Zoroastrians I: The Zend Texts, new ed. by Rüdiger Schmitt, Wiesbaden, 1993, pp. v-xiv.

Elisabeth Strandberg, “N. L. W. 1815-1878,” Acta Orientalia 39, 1978, pp. 5-22. Vilhelm Thomsen, “N. L. W.,” Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen 5, 1880, pp. 248-64.

Ernst Windisch, Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und Indischen Altertumskunde, 2 vols., Berlin and Leipzig, 1917-20, II, pp. 234-36. (Rüdiger Schmitt)

Originally Published: February 20, 2015

______

WHEAT

See GANDOM.

GANDOM

“wheat,” both the plant and the grain. Wheat bread has been the staple of local diets throughout Iranian plateau for millennia. A very broad range of bread wheat varieties has traditionally been grown in the Iranian lands, especially in Afghanistan.

GANDOM, the New Persian word for wheat designating both the plant and the grain. All New Iranian names of wheat derive from Av. gantuma-. The middle consonant is unstable (Bal. gandim, Ṭālešī gandəm, Par. and Orm. ganom, Kurd. ganim, Khot. ganama), Yaghnobi (ḡantum/amtun < Sogd. γnt[w]m: γantom) being the only New Iranian language to have retained the Av. -t-. Initial g->ḡ- in most Eastern Iranian languages (Pash. ḡanəm, but Wanetsi ḡandəm, Eškašmī ḡundəm, Sanglechi ḡōndəm, Munjī ḡo[n]dəm, Yid. ḡādəm, Wakhi ḡ[ə]dīm), and ž- in the northernmost Pamir languages (Shugh., Bartangī, and Rōšanī žindam, Sar. žandam). Local names for some of the numerous varieties of wheat cultivated in the Pamir and Hindukush region are listed in Steblin-Kamenskiĭ (pp. 20 ff.; see also Morgenstierne, ss.v.; Bailey, Dictionary, p. 79; Mayrhofer, Dictionary I, pp. 347-48).

Wheat bread has been the staple of local diets throughout Iranian plateau for millennia, except in the southern Caspian lowlands, where it is replaced by rice (see BERENJ), in the Solaymān Mountains, where maize bread is dominant, and in Nūrestān, where everyday bread is made from a mixture of millet and maize flour, millet and pulse, or barley and peas (Edelberg and Jones, p. 54; see figs. 1-3 for the comparatively low level of wheat cultivation in Gīlān and eastern Afghanistan). It is, however, not unusual to mix the flour of wheat with that of barley or maize to make bread, especially in times of scarcity. In Persia, wheat may also be consumed as balḡūr (Turk. bulgur, boiled pounded wheat, totally unknown in Afghanistan). According to nutrition surveys, wheat consumption diminishes along with urbanization and westernization: while it furnishes 55 to 86 percent of the daily adult calorie intake among peasant families in Persia and Afghanistan respectively, the proportion drops down to 18 and 51 percent respectively among provincial urban middle classes (Bazin, 1973; Fischer, pp. 51 ff.; Oberlin-Faure, p. 83). On the other hand, wheat consumption hardly differs among settled wheat- producing villagers and their pastoral nomadic non-wheat-producing neighbors: it amounts to 87 percent of the daily calorie intake among the nomads of western Afghanistan (Casimir, p. 100). Only in the case of peripatetic nomads does it drop down to 50-64 percent (Rao and Casimir, p. 373). Moreover, many pastoral nomadic groups actually do grow wheat, either near their summer pasture lands or on both their winter and summer quarters.

Cytogeneticists consider that bread wheat (Triticum aestivum ssp. vulgare) has no wild counterpart in nature. It would have appeared by hybridization of cultivated emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), a “Mediterranean” cereal largely unsuitable for bread-making whose center of dispersion lies in the upper Jordan basin, and a wild goat-face graminea. Aegilops Tauschii (= Ae. squarrosa), widespread in the cold continental steppes from the Caucasus to Central Asia and especially frequent in north Persia, Transcaspia, and north Afghanistan below 2,000 m, where it is also a successful and aggressive weed in cereal fields (Zohary, pp. 60 ff.). Therefore, in contrast to emmer wheat, which was probably domesticated on the Mediterranean side of the Fertile Crescent and had already reached the western part of the Iranian plateau by the 8th millennium B.C.E. (Flannery, p. 82) but seems to have never reached its eastern part where only the naked T. durum is recorded in archaeological sites (Willcox, p. 183), bread wheat is likely to have appeared in the northern Iranian plateau. This probably spontaneous hybridization process cannot be located or dated with precision and may well have taken place in various sites at various dates. Anyhow, the most probable cradle of bread wheat lies at the interface of the respective areas of diffusion of T. dicoccum and Ae. squarrosa, perhaps “near the southwest corner of the Caspian Sea” (Zohary, p. 63). The earliest mentions of bread wheat on the western Zagros piedmont (Dehlorān, q.v.) date back to the 6th millennium B.C.E. (Flannery, p. 90). Due to its hybridization, bread wheat was far more adapted to extreme continental conditions than emmer wheat, which easily accounts for the large dissemination of the former towards Central Asia and the almost disappearance of hard wheat (T. durum), now restricted to a few isolated places in eastern Afghanistan, Kurdistan, and Fārs (Roemer and von Rosenstiel, pp. 77 f.; Bor, p. 208).

A very broad range of bread wheat varieties has traditionally been grown in the Iranian lands, especially in Afghanistan, where N. I. Vavilov and D. D. Bukinich (pp. 238 ff.) have recorded the unusually high number of sixty varieties of soft wheat (T. aestivum) and fifty of club-wheat (T. compactum; gandom-e kalak), several of them endemic. While the latter are restricted to an altitudinal belt of 1,700 to 2,300 m, the former are ubiquitous up to 3,400 m above sea level (Vavilov and Bukinich, p. 272; Kussmaul 1965, p. 44). In the 1960s and 1970s, foreign improved, high-yielding and rust-resistant varieties, such as Mexipak, Chenab, etc., have been introduced in Persia and Afghanistan (Djalali; Étienne, pp. 68 ff.). They soon hybridized with indigenous varieties, thus contributing to enhancing the botanical differentiation of local wheats.

Wheat has always been the dominant crop in the Iranian lands. However, the areas devoted to it have been evolving under the effect of contradictory factors: While demographic growth favored their increase, agricultural diversification and the progression of state-fostered industrial crops contributed to their decrease. Nowadays, wheat is grown on 49 percent of the cultivated land of Persia (6,209,000 ha out of a total of 12,580,000 in 1370 Š./1991-92; only 18 percent of all farmers producing none), 59 percent in Afghanistan (1,670,000 ha out of 2,839,000 in 1369 Š./1990-91), but only 17.5 percent in Tajikistan (144,000 ha out of 821,000 in 1991). Such contrasts are quite recent. They stem from three divergent evolutions at the national level: a steady expansion in Persia (1942-44: 1,600,000 ha), a structural decline in Tajikistan as a consequence of heavy emphasis put on cotton cultivation (410,300 ha, 51 percent of cultivated land in 1940), and a conjectural war-caused decline in Afghanistan (2,348,000 ha, 61 percent of cultivated land in 1978; see Table 1 and Figure 1).

Figure 3. Geographical distribution of wheat production in Afghanistan by province, 1983.

Figure 4. Wheat production in Afghanistan by province, 1983.

Wheat is grown both as an irrigated and rainfed crop, with techniques quite similar to those for barley (q.v.; see also Beckett; Wulff). The proportion of irrigated (ābī; q.v.; see also ĀBYĀRĪ) wheat fields varies from 35 percent in Persia to 96 percent in Tajikistan (56 percent in Afghanistan: Koenig and Hunter, p. 6; see also Gentelle, pp. 103 f.), but these figures are only rough estimates since areas of unirrigated agriculture are poorly registered. Dry-farmed (deymī in Persia, lalmī in Afghanistan, bogarī in Tajikistan) wheat is restricted to areas receiving more than 210-230 mm of precipitation in the year (see BĀRĀN), where it occupies the slopes up to 3,400 m in the Hindukush (Kussmaul 1965, p. 44). Irrigated wheat is grown in the valleys or at the mouth of subterranean channels (kārī/ēz, qanāt) and does not seem to be cultivated at elevations above 3,150 m (Grötzbach, p. 111). Rainfed wheat is sown in autumn in Persia (mid-October to mid-November), but in spring (mid-March to mid-April, or even May) in more continental Afghanistan and Tajikistan (gandom-e bahārī) and in higher elevations in Persia (Mortensen, p. 213). Fields are plowed with various kinds of traditional plows (Wulff, pp. 262-65; Bazin and Bromberger, p. 24 and map 6; Digard, pp. 80-84; Mortensen, pp. 206-13), or more rarely with imported disk-plows pulled by a tractor. The weight of wheat seeds needed to sow a field is the traditional way of estimating its surface (e.g., see Bazin, n.d., p. 41). Wheat is harvested from June to October, according to elevations (Pikulin, p. 122), mainly with a sickle (dās) since the use of combines remains strictly limited to a few large estates located on a flat topography. Threshing was traditionally performed by flails, draught animal treading or threshing boards or wains, depending on the location; nowadays, however, it is more and more done with a threshing machine or a tractor pulling a disk- plow. Rainfed wheat being an unfertilized crop, one or two years of its cultivation must be followed by a long fallow which can last from two to ten years, depending on the availability of land (Kussmaul 1965, pp. 46f.); sometimes, however, barley or pulses (lentils, chick-peas) are sown in spring in rotation with rainfed wheat.

Irrigated wheat, on the other hand, is a typical winter crop sown in autumn and harvested from April (in Ḵūzestān) up to the late August at higher elevations; above 2,800 m, however, only spring wheat can be cultivated on irrigated fields (Grötzbach, p. 111). Irrigated winter wheat is sown on fertilized fields and in rotation with various summer crops (maize, beans, cotton, etc.) whenever the cropping season is long enough and shortage of water not a frequent problem (see typical rotation schemes in Bazin, n.d., pp. 46 ff.). Fields are divided into small quadrangular patches of land separated by low dikes and watered from three to ten times according to climatic conditions and the availability of water.

Rainfed and irrigated wheat varieties differ from one another. Bread made form the rainfed wheat flour is considered of higher quality and more tasty than that made out of irrigated wheat flour which contains less gluten. This used to be a reason for smuggling rainfed wheat from Afghanistan into Pakistan (Koenig and Hunter, p. 35). On the domestic markets, rainfed wheat flour also sells higher than irrigated wheat flour (in Afghanistan the gap reaches 3-5 percent). In areas with extensive dry-farming, many peasants take this opportunity to sell their rainfed wheat and buy irrigated wheat instead for their own consumption (Kussmaul, 1965, p. 46).

Wheat yields are low according to world standards: in the early 1990s they ranged from less than 10 q/ha in both Afghanistan and Tajikistan to less than 15 in Persia (Table 1). Such average yields at the national scale have only limited value, however. Rainfed wheat actually produces about three times less than the irrigated one: in Afghanistan 5 against 13.3 q/ha in the decade 1963-72 (Koenig and Hunter, p. 7); and in Persia 4.7 against 14.5 q/ ha in 1973, and 7 against 18.3 q/ha in 1988 and 23 q/ha in 1991. Moreover, rainfed is a risky crop, totally dependent on highly variable rainfall. Exceptionally good years with unusual high yields may therefore succeed exceptionally bad ones with crop failures which also affect the irrigated wheat, though to a more limited extent. In Afghanistan, for example, a severe drought in 1970-71 caused famine in some of the country’s most remote areas (Rathjens).

Given sporadic irregularities, wheat yields have slowly increased over the last decades (Table 1; Grötzbach, p. 109), a trend which has been, however, almost entirely restricted to irrigated lands and has lately reversed in Afghanistan on account of the war and subsequent interruption of support services such as distribution of selected seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides; in northern Afghanistan, outbreaks of once- eradicated locusts (malaḵ) and senn bugs (kafšak-e gandom “stinkbug,” Eurygaster integriceps) have been resurgent since 1988, causing losses in wheat crops and food shortages (Agricultural Survey of Afganistan).

Increases in yields explain that the overall productions of wheat have actually grown faster than the lands devoted to it (Table 1). Despite subsidies to producers, including a guaranteed purchase price, the domestic supply of wheat per head has nevertheless decreased, putting an end to the long-established self-sufficiency in wheat in each country. Before mid-century, imports of wheat were only occasional in Persia and Afghanistan, and aimed at smoothing crop failures of drought or pestilence origin. They became more and more regular during the 1950s-60s, and finally emerged as a permanent and more or less important item of foreign trade since 1957 in Afghanistan and 1973 in Persia. For the decade 1971-80, the Afghan annual production averaged an estimated 2,648,000 metric tons (out of which about 75 percent was from irrigated wheat), and imports 79,000 metric tons (mostly from the United States and the Soviet Union, including quantities received under aid), therefore accounting for some 3 percent of the national supply of wheat. During the following decade 1981-80, official figures have been respectively 2,164,000 metric tons (-18 percent) and 213,000 metric tons (+170 percent), with imports accounting then for 9 percent of the total supply, and even 14.5 percent in 1990, the highest percentage ever recorded (own calculation). In Persia, where domestic output supplied 129 kg per head in 1986 against 178 kg a decade earlier, wheat imports doubled between 1980 and 1984 to 3.2 million tons, and has since remained in the 1.5 to 5 million range (McLachlan, pp. 230 ff.; Amuzegar, p. 278). Similar developments also occurred in Tajikistan, although they used to be concealed behind the economic integration of the republic within the Soviet Union.

On a regional basis, some regions are normally surplus producers, serving as breadbaskets for deficit areas and towns. In Persia, four provinces have significantly improved their contribution to the national production: Ḵūzestān, in spite of the war with Iraq; Māzandarān, thanks to the vigorous development of the southern Turkmen Steppe; Khorasan, due to the progressive waqf estates of the Āstān-e qods-e rażawī (q.v.; Hourcade); and Fārs (q.v.), which experienced the sharpest increase in yields from 7.6 q/ha in 1973 to 26 in 1992 (Figure 1 and Figure 2).

Grain is obviously the most important product of wheat. It is sold, either rough or more usually milled into flour (see ĀSĪĀ), in special areas of the traditional urban markets called manda(w)ī-e ārd (often abridged to manda[w]ī) in Afghanistan, where a total of 48 were recognized in 1973 (Koenig and Hunter, p. 17; see examples in Centlivres, p. 71; Hakimi; Haider, pp. 151 ff.). Besides grain, however, chopped straw is a noteworthy by- product of wheat well cared for. It is used both as a winter fodder and as a temper added to clay to get building bud (kāh-gel). It is frequently piled up on the flat roofs of the houses (Kussmaul, 1971).

Bibliography:

Given the importance of wheat in the Iranian-speaking lands, almost all regional monographs deal with its cultivation and utilization. Only more specific titles are quoted here.

Agricultural Survey of Afghanistan, 7th Report: Northern Afghanistan Crop Protection Programme, Peshawar, 1990.

Idem, 8th Report: Northern Afghanistan Insect Damage Survey, Peshawar, 1990.

J. Amuzegar, Iran’s Economy under the Islamic Republic, rev. ed., London, 1997.

M. Bazin, “Quelques données sur l’alimentation dans la région de Qom,” Stud. Ir. 2/2, 1973, pp. 243-53. Idem, La vie rurale dans la région de Qom, Paris, n.d. [1974].

Idem and C. Bromberger, Gilân et Ãzarbâyjân oriental: cartes et documents ethnographiques, Paris, 1982.

P. H. T. Beckett, “Agriculture in Central Persia,” Tropical Agriculture 34, 1957, pp. 9-28.

N. L. Bor, Gramineae, Flora Iranica 70, Graz, 1970.

M. J. Casimir, Flocks and Flood: A Biocultural Approach to the Study of Pastoral Floodways, Kölner Ethnologische Mitteilungen 10, Cologne, 1991.

P. Centlivres, Un bazar d’Asie centrale: forme et organisation du bazar de Tāshqurghān (Afghanistan), Wiesbaden, 1972.

H. Desmet-Grégoire, “Le pain dans la région d’Hamadân,” Stud. Ir. 9/2, 1980, pp. 251-76 (mostly useful for the technology of bread-making).

J.-P. Digard, Techniques des nomades baxtyâri d’Iran, Cambridge etc. , 1981.

M. Djalali, “Anbauversuche mit mexikanischen Weizen im südlichen Iran,” Der Tropenlandwirt 73, 1972, pp. 23-30.

L. Edelberg and S. Jones, Nuristan, Graz, 1979.

G. Étienne, L’Afghanistan ou les aléas de la coopération, Paris, 1972. L. Fischer, “Ernährung und neuzeitlicher Ernährungswandel in Afghanistan,” in W. Kraus, ed., Steigerung der landwirt schaftlichen Produktion und ihre Weiterverarbeitung in Afghanistan, Afghanische Studien 6, Meisenheim am Glan, 1972, pp. 22-56.

K. V. Flannery, “Origins and Ecological Effects of Early Domestication in Iran and the Near East,” in P. J. Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby, eds., The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals, London, 1969, pp. 73-100.

P. Gentelle, “Le blé en Afghanistan,” Stud. Ir. 1/1, 1972, pp. 103-14. Geographical Handbook Series, Persia, n.p., 1945.

Yu. M. Golovin, Afghanistan: Ekonomika i vneshnaya torgovlya, Moscow, 1962.

E. Grötzbach, Afghanistan: Eine geographische Landeskunde, Wissenschaftliche Länderkunde 37, Darmstadt, 1990.

H. Haider, “Contribution à l’étude de la commercialisation des produits agricoles en Afghanistan,” Ph.D diss., Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, 1976.

M. Y. Hakimi, Notes on the Lashkargah Grain Bazaar, USAID, Kabul, 1973 (mimeo).

B. Hourcade, “Vaqf et modernité en Iran: les agrobusiness de l’Ãstân-e qods de Mašhad,” in Y. Richard, ed., Entre l’Iran et l’Occident: adaptation et assimilation des idées et techniques occidentales en Iran, Paris, 1989, pp. 117-41.

Ch. Issawi, ed., The Economic History of Iran, 1800-1914, Chicago and London, 1971.

N. Koenig and H. V. Hunter, A Wheat Stabilization Program for Afghanistan, USAID, Kabul, 1973.

F. Kussmaul, “Badaxšan und seine Tağiken,” Tribus 14, 1965, pp. 11-99. Idem, Tadschiken (Afghanistan, Badakhshan). Weizenschnitt. Dreschen und Worfeln von Weizen. Mahlen von Getreide. Brotbacken, Encylopaedia Cinematographica, E 712- 15, Göttingen, 1964-71 (unique cinematographic documentation on the traditional wheat cycle in Badaḵšān).

K. McLachlan, The Neglected Garden: The Politics and Ecology of Agriculture in Iran, London, 1988.

Markaz-e āmār-e Īrān, Natāyej-e tafṣīlī-e āmār-gīrī-e zerāʿat, Tehran, 1990-95.

Markaz-e eḥṣāʾīya, Sāl-nāma-ye eḥṣāʾīwī 1358, Kabul, 1359 Š./1980.

G. Morgenstierne, Indo-Iranian Frontier Languages, 3 vols., Oslo, 1929-56.

I. D. Mortensen, Nomads of Luristan: History, Material Culture, and Pastoralism in Western Iran, Copenhagen, 1993.

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(Daniel Balland and Marcel Bazin)

Originally Published: December 15, 2000

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WHITE SHEEP DYNASTY

A confederation of Turkman tribes who ruled in eastern Anatolia and western Iran until the Safavid conquest in 1501. See AQ QOYUNLU.

AQ QOYUNLŪ or WHITE SHEEP, a confederation of Turkman tribes who ruled in eastern Anatolia and western Iran until the Safavid conquest in 1501.

AQ QOYUNLŪ or WHITE SHEEP, a confederation of Turkman tribes who ruled in eastern Anatolia and western Iran until the Safavid conquest in 907-08/1501-03. The confederation (īl or ūlūs) was led by members of the Bayandor (Bāyandor) clan, who traced their lineage to Bayandor Khan, the eponymous founder of one of the twenty-four Oḡuz tribes and grandson of the legendary Oḡuz Khan. (On the vocalization Bayandor/Bayındır, see J. E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire. A Study in 15th/9th Century Turko-Iranian Politics, Minneapolis and Chicago, 1976, p. 39, n. 5.) The name Āq Qoyunlū is first mentioned in late 8th/14th century sources, and, like that of the rival Qara Qoyunlū (Black Sheep), is of uncertain significance. It has been suggested that these names refer to old totemic symbols, but according to the historian Ḵᵛāǰa Rašīd-al-dīn Fażlallāh (d. 718/1318), the Turks were forbidden to eat the flesh of their totem-animals; given the importance of mutton in the diet of pastoral nomads, it is hardly possible that the tribes observed this taboo. Another hypothesis is that the names refer to the predominant color of their respective flocks (H. R. Roemer, “Das turkmenische Intermezzo: Persische Geschichte zwischen Mongolen und Safawiden,” AMI, N.S. 9, 1976, pp. 263-97).

The origin of the Āq Qoyunlū tribes likewise remains obscure. Certain groups may have migrated from Central Asia to Anatolia in the 5th/11th century under Saljuq leadership and others in the wake of the 7th/13th-century Mongol invasion. By the end of the Il- khanid period in the mid-8th/14th century, the Āq Qoyunlū were migrating between summer pastures (yeylāq) in Armenia around Sinir, east of Bayburt, and winter pastures (qešlāq) around Kiḡi, Palu, and Ergani in Dīār Bakr.

Their political organization was loose. The highest decision-making authority was a council (kengač) of amirs and tribal chiefs (boy ḵānları) who determined military matters and the recurrent issue of succession to the sultanate; the council’s decisions were binding on the sultan. Military and political control of the adjacent villages and towns, necessary for the safety of the pasturage, was maintained by the army, which consisted largely of tribal levies supporting themselves through their own lands and booty. In addition, the sultan maintained a force of paid personal guards (ḵawāṣṣ) who were recruited from several different nomadic and semi-nomadic groups. The revenue of the Āq Qoyunlū came from taxes and dues levied on the sedentary population of Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs, as well as tolls collected along the main trade routes through eastern Anatolia.

Their territory bordered on lands occupied by other Turkman confederation, namely the Qara Qoyunlū area north of Lake Van, the steppe grazed by the Döḡer east of the middle Euphrates around Rohā (Orfa), and the Ḏu’l-Qadr region west of the river. The Ḏu’l-Qadr confederation had submitted to the suzerainty of the Egyptian Mamluks, whose empire thus stretched up to Malaṭya. Further west lay the Qaramān principality and, north of it, the Eretna principality centered on Kayseri and Sīvās, the strongest of the small states formed in Central Anatolia after the collapse of the Il-khanid Empire. To the north of the Āq Qoyunlū were the Christian kingdoms of Trebizond and Georgia.

In the decade 740-50/1339-49 there were frequent armed clashes between the forces of Trebizond and those of Ṭūr-ʿAlī b. Pahlavān, the first Āq Qoyunlū leader mentioned in mutually independent sources. Peace was arranged in 753/1352 through the marriage of Maria Komnene, a sister of the ruler of Trebizond, Alexios III (1349-90), to Ṭūr-ʿAlī’s son Faḵr-al-dīn Quṭlu. Renewed matrimonial links in later generations maintained the peace, and Trebizond was free from Āq Qoyunlū attacks until it fell to the Ottomans in 865/1461. Ṭūr-ʿAlī died some time between 753/1352 and 764/1363. Under his successor Quṭlu, the Āq Qoyunlū began to intervene in the internal conflicts of the Eretna state. They became its nominal vassals in 783/1381 but supported rebellious military chiefs at Arzanǰān (Erzincan) when Qāżī Borhān-al-dīn (also a prominent poet in Turkish) made himself sultan at Sīvās. When Quṭlu died in 791/1389, the leadership first passed to his son Aḥmad, but Aḥmad’s reckless wavering in the struggles between Sīvās and Arzanǰān finally led to his replacement by his brother Qara Yoluz (or Yülük) ʿOṯmān Beg (on this name, see Roemer, “Das turkmenische Intermezzo,” p. 271, n. 26). In 800/1398 Qara ʿOṯmān revolted against Qāżī Borhān-al-dīn and killed him in battle.

Disorders in northern Syria following the deaths of Qāżī Borhān-al-dīn and the Mamluk sultan Barqūq (r. 784-801/1382-99) gave occasion for conflict between the expanding Ottoman power and the westward-moving conqueror Tīmūr. Voluntarily joining Tīmūr in 802/1399-1400, Qara ʿOṯmān led the vanguard in Tīmūr’s campaigns against Sīvās, whose defenders received Ottoman support (802-03/1402), and against the Mamluk dependencies; he also participated in the battle of Ankara (804/1402), which ended in a crushing defeat for the Ottomans. In recompense, Tīmūr granted him the rank of amir, confirmed his leadership of the Āq Qoyunlū confederation, and made the Bayandor family custodians of the fortress city of Āmed (Dīār Bakr) which before 796/1394 had been held by the Artuqids, a clan of the Döḡer tribe. This is apparently how the Āq Qoyunlū first came into possession of Āmed, which was to be their capital for almost seventy years.

After Tīmūr’s death in 807/1405, Qara ʿOṯmān maintained good relations with his successors. By contrast, the Qara Qoyunlū who had been forcibly subdued by Tīmūr, shook off Timurid suzerainty. Under Qara Yūsof, their leader from 792/1390 to 823/1420, they expelled Tīmūr’s grandson Abū Bakr and killed the latter’s father, Mīrānšāh, the governor of Azerbaijan; they then defeated the Jalayerids to gain control of Baghdad and ʿErāq-e ʿArab (Mesopotamia), conquered parts of Georgia, and penetrated deeper into Iran. The Timurid sultan Šāhroḵ was obliged to launch three campaigns (823-24/1420- 21, 832/1429, and 838-39/1434-35) to check their expansion and reimpose his suzerainty. Šāhroḵ’s interventions, together with conflicts among the sons of Qara Yūsof, who had died at the time of the first campaign, weakened the position of the Qara Qoyunlū. In the following years they lost large areas in the west to the Āq Qoyunlū.

Between 823/1420 and Qara ʿOṯmān’s death in 839/1435, the Āq Qoyunlū established their authority in Armenia and Dīār Bakr and moved into Dīār Możar and the western part of Dīār Rabīʿa, an expansion which brought them in conflict with the formerly friendly Egyptian Mamluk sultanate. Accordingly, the Qara Qoyunlū allied themselves with Egypt while the Āq Qoyunlū joined with the Timurids, who were then contesting Egyptian hegemony in the Red Sea; Qara ʿOṯmān also provided support for Šāhroḵ’s expeditions into Azerbaijan. During the third campaign, the aging Āq Qoyunlū leader, at Šāhroḵ’s behest, challenged Qara Yūsof’s son Eskandar to battle near Erzurum, but suffered a severe defeat; he was put to death in Ṣafar, 839/August-September, 1435, and his head was sent by Eskandar to the Mamluk sultan Barsbay (r. 825-41/1422-38) in Cairo. Qara ʿOṯmān was the real founder of the Āq Qoyunlū state. Under his rule, the confederation not only acquired more territory but also gained support through additional tribes drawn to him by his successes. There are indications that the mainly Christian sedentary inhabitants were not totally excluded from the economic, political, and social activities of the Āq Qoyunlū state and that Qara ʿOṯmān had at his command at least a rudimentary bureaucratic apparatus of the Iranian-Islamic type. Even so, the Turkman military elite clearly remained dominant. From 827/1424 onward, in the hope of counteracting the centrifugal tendencies inherent in a tribal confederation and making the principality more cohesive, Qara ʿOṯmān assigned newly conquered territories to his sons rather than to tribal chefs, but this policy did not produce the expected results (Wood, The Aqquyunlu, pp. 66-70).

Qara ʿOṯmān’s death was followed by prolonged succession struggles in which not only the Mamluks, who had gained temporary recognition from some of the Āq Qoyunlū chiefs, but also the Ottomans, intervened. Qara ʿOṯmān’s designated successor, ʿAlī, could not hold his ground against the claims of his brothers, uncles, and cousins, and in 841/1438-39 he abdicated and went into voluntary exile in Egypt. His brother Ḥamza was then the most powerful Āq Qoyunlū chief, but he died in 848/1444 before he had been able to eliminate all rivals. The struggle for leadership resumed between Shaikh Ḥasan, a son of Qara ʿOṯmān, and ʿAlī’s son Jahāngīr. The situation in eastern Anatolia became critical when Šāhroḵ, the Āq Qoyunlū’s protector and the Qara Qoyunlū’s nominal suzerain, died in 850/1447. Succession disputes in Herat gave the Qara Qoyunlū chief, Jahānšāh b. Qara Yūsof, the chance to secede from the Timurid empire and proclaim himself sovereign. With support from certain Āq Qoyunlū tribal chiefs, he set out on a campaign against Jahāngīr in 854/1450 and, after conquering large parts of Armenia, besieged him in Āmed. Jahāngīr surrendered in the spring of 856/1452 and acknowledged Jahānšāh’s suzerainty. The peace treaty was concluded without the knowledge of Jahāngīr’s younger brother Ḥasan, known as Uzun Ḥasan (Long Ḥasan), who considered it a betrayal. Uzun Ḥasan successfully resumed the war with the Qara Qoyunlū and in the autumn of 856/1452 seized Āmed in a bloodless coup while Jahāngīr was away on a military expedition in Kurdistan (Woods, The Aqquyunlu, p. 91). Repudiating the Qara Qoyunlū suzerainty that his brother had recognized, he sent the keys of the fortress as a token of vassaldom to Cairo and received in return a diploma of appointment to the governorship of Āmed. Jahāngīr made several attempts to recapture Āmed; despite reinforcements from Jahānšāh’s army, he was finally defeated in 861/1457.

Reunited under Uzun Ḥasan’s leadership, the Āq Qoyunlū began to regain strength. His attitude toward their Christian neighbors in the north was ambivalent: From 862/1458 onward his raids into Georgia brought him prestige as a ḡāzī (fighter for the faith) together with human and material spoils, but at the same time, he renewed his family’s friendship with the ruling house of Trebizond, now in danger of imminent Ottoman invasion; he treated its people as ḏemmīs, married the Komnenian princess Theodora, and joined with them in an anti-Ottoman alliance. The decisive clash with the Ottomans was postponed when Sultan Mehmed II (r. 855-86/1451-81) led an army equipped with artillery into Trebizond in 865/1461, and Uzun Ḥasan refrained from a military response on account of Ottoman superiority in weapons. During the subsequent interlude, Uzun Ḥasan was able to make big military gains on other fronts. In 866/1462 he conquered Ḥeṣn Kayfā, the last Ayyubid principality, and in 869-70/l465, the fortress of Ḵarpūt, which had belonged to the Ḏu’l-Qadr state. Jahānšāh Qara Qoyunlū, who had meanwhile extended his rule over ʿErāq-e ʿAǰam, Fārs, and Kermān at the expense of the Timurids, at first avoided conflict with the Āq Qoyunlū despite some provocation from their side. Among his preoccupations was the revolt of his son Pīr Būdāq in Baghdad; only when this had been crushed did he set out in 871/1467 for war with Uzun Ḥasan. Obliged by the premature onset of winter to send most of his troops back to their winter quarters, he was routed when Uzun Ḥasan attacked his camp. He and his son Moḥammad lost their lives during the retreat, and two other sons perished a short time later. With no leaders remaining, the Qara Qoyunlū confederation ceased to be politically operative, and Uzun Ḥasan was able to take over Azerbaijan in the summer of 873/1468.

The Timurid Abū Saʿīd, ruling in Herat since 855/1451, saw the Qara Qoyunlū chief’s death as a good occasion for recovery of the Iranian provinces that had been lost to the Turkmans. Hastily advancing from Khorasan, he overran ʿErāq-e ʿAǰam but lacked adequate reinforcements and had to seek shelter in winter quarters in Qarabāḡ, where the Āq Qoyunlū besieged him. He was taken prisoner in an attempted breakout in Raǰab, 873/January, 1469, and put to death soon afterward. With his last rival for hegemony over western Iran eliminated, Uzun Ḥasan immediately annexed the Iranian provinces up to the borders of Khorasan and moved his government from Āmed to Tabrīz, the traditional seat of authority that had been the capital of not only the Qara Qoyunlū and the Jalayerids but also the Il-khans. Although Uzun Ḥasan had still seen fit in mid- 873/early 1469 to send the keys of the newly acquired cities of Azerbaijan, together with a request for formal confirmation of his authority, to the Mamluk sultan in Cairo, he used the language of a sovereign ruler and indeed of a renewer of the might of Islam when he sent Abū Saʿīd’s severed head and the triumphant report of his victory to the sultan, Qāʾet Bey (r. 872-901/1468-96). Uzun Ḥasan also attempted to assert suzerainty over the Timurids of Khorasan, but without success; Prince Yādgār Moḥammad, whom he enthroned at Herat, could not hold out for long against the local notables, who supported another Timurid prince, Ḥosayn Bāyqarā (r. 875-912/1470-1506). An Ottoman intervention in the Qaramān principality in late 875/early 1471 alarmed Uzun Ḥasan so much that he moved his garrison from Khorasan to the western frontier; relations between Tabrīz and Herat subsequently took a friendly turn, to their mutual benefit. In Qaramān, Ottoman and Mamluk interests clashed with those of Uzun Ḥasan. The principality blocked the way to the Mediterranean and Cyprus, then virtually a protectorate of the Venetians, allies of the Āq Qoyunlū against the Ottomans since 868- 69/1464. After his victory over the Qara Qoyunlū and Abū Saʿīd, Uzun Ḥasan promised the Signoria in 875/1470 that in the event of a Venetian attack on Ottoman-controlled territories from the sea, he would undertake a support operation on land. For this purpose he asked the Venetians to supply firearms; these were shipped in the spring of 877-78/1473 but were to reach him too late. Expecting Venetian support, the Āq Qoyunlū invaded the Ottoman dominions in the late summer of 877/1472; they ravaged Ṭoqat and thrust past Sīvās and Kayseri into Qaramān but were pushed back by Ottoman troops. An incursion into the Mamluk dependencies for the purpose of exacting recognition of Uzun Ḥasan’s sovereignty was also repulsed. Two years later, in Rabīʿa I, 878/August, 1473, Uzun Ḥasan was soundly defeated in a pitched battle near the village of Baškent (Başköy) on the Otluqbeli, where Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror was able to bring artillery and muskets into action with decisive effect (Woods, The Aqquyunlu, pp. 131-37). Although the Āq Qoyunlū escaped with only minor territorial losses, and despite intensified Venetian pressure in the following years for joint anti-Ottoman action, Uzun Ḥasan made no further attempt to extend his sway westward beyond the Euphrates. During the last years of his reign he had to deal with the repeated insubordination of his son Oḡurlū Moḥammad, the governor of Shiraz, who received support from his half- brother Maqṣūd in Baghdad and his uncle Oways in Rohā. Oḡurlū was killed in battle in the winter of 881/1476-77 by the faction supporting his brother Ḵalīl, Uzun Ḥasan’s designated successor. The sultan himself, his already ailing health impaired by a successful campaign against the Georgians, died on the eve of Šawwāl, 882/5-6 January 1478.

The Āq Qoyunlū empire reached its zenith under Uzun Ḥasan. He was the first of their rulers to declare himself an independent sultan, and as a token of this status, he began to send a splendid maḥmel (brocade-covered litter) with the annual pilgrim caravan to Mecca. While he patronized the urban religious establishment with grants or confirmations of endowments and tax privileges and persecuted extreme Shiʿite and antinomian sects, he also maintained contact with representatives of popular dervish orders that were generally inclined toward Shiʿism. He married one of his daughters to his nephew Ḥaydar, the contemporary head of the Ṣafawīya order at Ardabīl. The argument that there was a clear-cut contrast between the Sunnism of the Āq Qoyunlū and the Shiʿism of the Qara Qoyunlū and the Ṣafawīya rests mainly on later Safavid sources and must be considered doubtful.

With the conquest of Iran, not only did the Āq Qoyunlū center of power shift eastward, but Iranian influences were soon brought to bear on their method of government and their culture. In the Iranian provinces, Uzun Ḥasan maintained the preexisting administrative system along with its officials, whose families had in some cases served under different dynasties for several generations (see J. Aubin, “Ētudes Safavides I: Šāh Ismāʿīl et les notables de l’Iraq Persan,” JESHO 2, 1959, pp. 37-81). The sources mention only four top civil posts, all held by Iranians, in Uzun Ḥasan’s time: those of the vizier, who headed the great council (dīvān); the mostawfī al-mamālek, who was in charge of the financial administration; the mohrdār, who affixed the state seal, and the mīrāḵor (stablemaster), who looked after the royal court. The post of ṣadr (head of the religious dignitaries) is only attested to from the reign of his son Yaʿqūb but may have existed under Uzun Ḥasan. Yaʿqūb’s ṣadr was also empowered to act as his wakīl or proxy (W. Hinz, Irans Aufstieg zum Nationalstaat im 15. Jahrhundert, Berlin and Leipzig, 1936, pp. 101f). The responsibilities of the various offices are hard to define, especially because there is no known manual of statecraft from the Āq Qoyunlū period.

Uzun Ḥasan appreciated the worth of the rural as well as the urban population, or at least showed awareness that there were limits to the productive capacity of the peasantry. With the aim of preventing arbitrary exploitation, he caused the statutes— probably existing regulations for the most part—to be codified in a digest called the Qānūn-nāma-ye Ḥasan Pādšāh, which remained in force long after his time. Large parts of his tax and trade laws are recorded in Ottoman sources (Ö. L. Barkan, “Osmanlı devrinde hükümdarı Uzun Ḥasan beye ait kanunlar,” Tarih Vesikları 1, 1941, pp. 91-106, 184-97; W. Hinz, “Das Steuerwesen Ostanatoliens im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” ZDMG 100, 1950, pp. 177-204), but none of his civil and penal legislation has been preserved.

Although the urban elite gained increasing influence from their monopoly of administrative skills, they continued to be debarred from military functions. The gap between nomadic warriors and sedentary residents, which was also an ethnic barrier between Turkmans and Iranians, remained unbridgeable. After the defeat and collapse of the Qara Qoyunlū confederation, many of its former constituent tribes joined the Āq Qoyunlū and so added to the strength of Uzun Ḥasan’s army. According to an eyewitness account of a military review held by Ḵalīl b. Uzun Ḥasan, the governor of Fārs, in 881/1476, this governor alone commanded a standing force of 25,000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry plus auxiliaries. The total strength of Uzun Ḥasan’s army, including all the provincial contingents, may well have exceeded 100,000 men; its strike capacity was derived mainly from the cavalry, while its great weakness was its lack of firearms (V. Minorsky, “A Civil and Military Review in Fārs in 881/1476,” BSOAS 10, 1939, pp. 141- 78; Jalāl-al-dīn Davānī, “ʿArż-e sepāh-e Uzun Ḥasan,” ed. Ī. Afšār, MDAT 3, 1335 Š./1956).

Uzun Ḥasan’s successor Ḵalīl went in for a policy of tighter centralization of power in the suftan’s hands but he was soon killed, in Rabīʿa II, 883/July, 1478, in a fight near Ḵoy with rebellious partisans of his fourteen-year-old brother Yaʿqūb; among them were many Āq Qoyunlū tribesmen from Anatolia aggrieved by the decline of their influence since the removal of the central authority of Iran.

Yaʿqūb’s twelve-year reign was a spell of relative calm. He and his advisors prudently won over Ḵalīl’s former supporters by letting them stay at their posts. Revolts in Kermān (884/1479) and Hamadān (886/1481) presented no serious danger and were soon quelled, while external threats were virtually nonexistent. The Ottoman annexation of a small district north of Bayburt in the spring of 884/1479 was an isolated incident, and a Mamluk attack on Rohā in 885/1480 was repulsed. The one grave danger to the dynasty, if not to Yaʿqūb himself, lay in religiously motivated stirrings. Yaʿqūb, unlike his father, took no interest in popular religious feelings and practices and alienated large sections of the people, especially Turkmans. Whole groups of the latter were drawn into the Ṣafawīya order, which had been transformed by its leader Shaikh Ḥaydar into a militant organization with an extremist Shiʿite ideology. Yaʿqūb initially sent Shaikh Ḥaydar and his followers to fight a holy war against the Circassians but soon grew wary of their military might. On the occasion of a foray into Georgia, Ḥaydar sought to avenge the death of his father, Shaikh Jonayd (killed in 864/1460), by attacking the Šervānšāh, who was one of Yaʿqūb’s vassals; Yaʿqūb sent troops who defeated and killed Ḥaydar and captured his three sons. This event only strengthened the pro-Safavid feeling among the Turkmans of Azerbaijan and Anatolia. Equally fruitless was Yaʿqūb’s attempt in the same year to destroy the power of the Mošaʿšaʿ clan, who were also extremist Shiʿites; he only succeeded in driving them back from southern Mesopotamia into Ḵūzestān, where they maintained their long-established rule.

Yaʿqūb also made enemies among the official religious dignitaries with a tax reform that significantly impaired their material position. The reform, instigated by Qāżī Ṣāʾen-al-dīn ʿĪsā Sāvaǰī, his tutor and then wakīl, was intended to make possible a centralized monarchy but failed to achieve its purpose. A lasting weakness of the central government lay in the land grant system practiced since Saljuq times or earlier, whereby amirs did not receive salaries from the ruler but were rewarded with de facto heritable grants of seigneurial rights over designated areas. The grant, known since Jalayerid times by the Mongol term suyūrḡāl (benefice) but in fact a development of the original institution of the eqṭāʿ, included not only free disposal of the area’s revenues but also exemption from tax liability and, in the case of a large suyūrḡāl that might cover a whole province, administrative autonomy and judicial immunity. Small and medium-sized suyūrḡāls were often granted to ʿolamāʾ without any requirement of reciprocal service. Since the big beneficiaries were too powerful, Qāżī ʿĪsā began by canceling small and medium-sized suyūrḡāls; his pretext was the un-Islamic origin of the benefice system, but paradoxically, his action injured religious dignitaries. He likewise pleaded the desirability of replacing Mongol law (yasa) with Islamic law (šarīʿa) when he abolished the tamḡā (excise on merchandise); this had largely gone into the coffers of the big suyūrḡāl-holders, who collected it in cities or as a toll on road traffic in their areas (B. Fragner, “Economic and Trade Affairs from the Mid-Fourteenth Century to the End of the Safavids,”Camb. Hist. Iran VI (forthcoming); V. Minorsky, “The Aq Qoyunlu and Land Reform,” BSOAS 17, 1955, pp. 449-62). These reforms did not outlast the reign of Yaʿqūb, who died mysteriously—from the effects of either plague or poison—on 11 Ṣafar 896/24 December 1490. A few weeks later Qāżī ʿĪsā was put to death by rebellious amirs.

After Yaʿqūb’s death, the Āq Qoyunlū engaged in ceaseless power struggles. The chiefs of the strongest tribes used princes, often of minor age, as tools for their own aggrandizement. Yaʿqūb’s eight-year-old son Bāysonḡor was enthroned in 896/1491 under the tutelage of Ṣūfī Ḵalīl Beg Mawṣellū and ejected from Tabrīz in Raǰab, 897/May, 1492 by his cousin Rostam b. Maqṣūd b. Uzun Ḥasan, who had the backing of the Pornāk and Qajar tribes under the leadership of Ebrāhīm b. Dānā Ḵalīl Bayandor (known as Ayba Solṭān). Bāysonḡor made several unsuccessful attempts to return before he was killed in 898/1493. Rostam, anxious to conciliate both the religious establishment and the popular Sufi orders, promptly allowed the sons of Shaikh Ḥaydar Ṣafawī to return to Ardabīl in 897/1492. Two years later Ayba Solṭān ordered their rearrest because their movement was again threatening, but the youngest son, Esmāʿīl, then aged seven, escaped and was kept in hiding by supporters at Lāhīǰān. In 902/1497 Rostam was overthrown by his cousin Gövde ( " dwarf’) Aḥmad b. Oḡurlū Moḥammad, who had returned from exile in Ottoman territory. Aḥmad immediately reimposed centralizing measures, which provoked a revolt of the amirs led by Ayba Solṭān, and he was defeated and killed near Isfahan in Rabīʿa II, 903/December, 1497.

After Aḥmad’s death, the Āq Qoyunlū empire underwent further disintegration. None of the tribal factions could secure more than provincial recognition of its favored throne- claimant, with the result that three sultans reigned concurrently: Alvand b. Yūsof b. Uzun Ḥasan in the west, Uzun Ḥasan’s nephew Qāsem b. Jahāngīr in an enclave in Dīār Bakr, and Alvand’s brother Moḥammadī in Fārs and ʿErāq-e ʿAǰam (until his violent death in the summer of 905/1500, when he was followed by Morād b. Yaʿqūb). The collapse of Āq Qoyunlū rule in Iran began in the autumn of 907/1501 with their defeat by Esmāʿīl Ṣafawī, who had left Lāhīǰān two years earlier and used his charisma to rally a large following of Turkman warriors. He conquered ʿErāq-e ʿAǰam, Fārs, and Kermān in the summer of 908/1503, Dīār Bakr in 913-14/1507-08, and Mesopotamia in the autumn of 914/1508. The last Āq Qoyunlū sultan, Morād, who hoped to regain the throne with the help of Ottoman troops, was defeated and killed at his last stronghold, Rohā, by Esmāʿīl’s Qizilbāš fighters. The Safavid conquest did not wholly blot out the posterity of Qara ʿOṯmān Bayandor, for branches of the family are known to have lived on at Yazd and Bayburt. The surviving Āq Qoyunlū tribes and groups were absorbed, in some cases years later, into the Qizilbāš tribes; in this process, the Afšār retained their tribal identity while others, such as the Ḥāǰǰīlū, Döḡer, Mawṣellū, and Pornāk, were merged into a new tribe called Turkman.

Bibliography:

The most important narrative sources for the history of the Āq Qoyunlū are Abū Bakr Tehrānī, Ketāb-e Dīārbakrīya, ed. N. Lugal and F. Sümer, 2 vols., Ankara, 1962-64 (written between 875/1469 and 883/1478, covering the period from 791/1389 with some lacunae), and Fażlallāh b. Rūzbehān Ḵonǰī, Tārīḵ-e ʿālamārā-ye Amīnī, abridged tr., V. Minorsky, Persia in A.D. 1478-1490, Royal Asiatic Society Monographs 26, London, 1957.

For the period 736-850/1335-1446 see Ebn Bahādor, Waqāyeʿ al-torkomān awlād b. Ḏu’l-qāder wa ḡayrehem, ed. B. Kellner-Heinkele, forthcoming; cf. idem in CAJ 27, 1983, pp. 46-54.

M. Schmidt-Dumont, Turkmenische Herrscher des 15. Jahrhunderts in Persien und Mesopotamien nach dem Tārīḫ al-Ġiyāṯī (with excerpts), Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 6, Freiburg, 1970.

Maqrīzī, Ketāb al-solūk le-maʿrefat dowal al-molūk, ed. M. M. Zīāda and S. ʿA ʿAšūr, 4 vols., Cairo, 1934-73.

Ebn Taḡrīberdī, al-Noǰūm al-zāhera fī molūk Meṣr wa’l-Qāhera, ed. W. Popper, 6 vols., Berkeley, 1909-29; tr. W. Popper, History of Egypt, 1382-1469 A.D., Berkeley, 1954-63.

Idem, Ḥawādeṯ al-dohūr fī mażā al-ayyām wa’l-šohūr, ed. W. Popper, Berkeley, 1930- 42.

The already known and published state documents of the Āq Qoyunlū rulers have been collected by B. G. Fragner, Repertorium persischer Herrscherurkunden der Aq Qoyunlu, Islamkundliche Materialien 4, Freiburg, 1980.

Further bibliography is available in Woods, The Aqquyunlu (a detailed account of the history of the Āq Qoyunlū with the thorough analysis of the sources), and more briefly in Roemer, “Das turkmenische Intermezzo.”

See also: V. Minorsky, La Perse au XVe siècle entre la Turquie et la Venise, Paris, 1933.

İ. H. Uzunçaṛşılı, Anadolu beylikleri ve Akkoyunlu, Karakoyunlu devletleri, Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınlarından, ser. 8, no. 2, Ankara, 1937.

M. H. Yınanç, “Akkoyunlar,” İA 1, 1940, pp. 251-70.

J. Torābī Ṭabāṭabāʾī, Sekkahā-ye Āq Qoyunlū wa mabnā-ye waḥdat-e ḥokūmat-e Ṣafawīya dar Īrān, Publication of Mūza-ye Āḏarbāyǰān, no. 7, Tabrīz, 2535 (= 1355 Š.)/1977.

(R. Quiring-Zoche)

Originally Published: December 15, 1986

______

WIKANDER, Oscar Stig

WIKANDER, Oscar Stig (b. 27 August 1908, Norttälje, Sweden; d. 20 December 1983, Uppsala, Sweden; FIGURE 1), Iranist, comparatist, and historian of religions.

i. Biography.

ii. Account of his Works.

i. BIOGRAPHY

Wikander was born in a small town in Central Sweden, as the son of a pharmacist. He graduated from high school in Uppsala at seventeen, and immediately enrolled at the city’s university. Before he had turned nineteen, he had obtained his M.A. with highest grades in Latin and Greek, a remarkable accomplishment, and afterwards he went to Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen, where Arthur Christensen (1875-1945) was professor, to study Iranian and Indian languages and religions (see IRANIAN LANGUAGES, INDO- IRANIAN RELIGION).

Wikander soon became known as a brilliant young scholar with wide interests and a deep knowledge of many fields. In 1935 and 1936, he and Geo Widengren (1907-1996) were among the members of the Avesta seminars, held by his older compatriot, the professor of Semitic languages at Uppsala University, H. S. Nyberg (1889-1974). These seminars informed Nyberg’s much debated book about ancient Iranian religions. Wikander defended in 1938 his dissertation at the Faculty of Arts of Uppsala University, thus becoming the first Ph.D. of Iranian languages and religions in Sweden. His research about the lexical evidence in Sanskrit and the Avestan language for the religious importance of young warrior bands (Ger. pl. Männerbünde; cf. Lincoln, p. 193) appeared under the title Der arische Männerbund. This work was greatly influenced by research of the Austrian folklorist Otto Höfler (1901-1987), who between 1928 and 1934 had taught German at the University of Lund. In January 1938, Höfler was appointed professor of German philology and folklore at the University of Munich, Germany, where Wikander taught Swedish in 1938-39. In 1941, he published his study about the Indo-Iranian wind god Vayu. Subsequently, the University of Lund granted Wikander a venia legendi (lit. the licence to teach university courses) and appointed him lecturer (docent) of Iranian languages. At the end of World War II, he served as a Red Cross delegate in Greece and Turkey. During the academic year of 1947-48, Wikander taught history of religions as visiting associate professor (preceptor) at Uppsala University, where in 1953 he was appointed chair of Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European philology. Wikander retired in 1974, and amongst his students are Folke Josephson (b. 1934), Professor of Comparative Indo-European Philology at the University of Gothenburg, Gunilla Gren-Eklund (b. 1938), Professor of Indology, and Bo Utas (b. 1938), Professor of Iranian studies, both at Uppsala University. Wikander’s wife Gunnel Heikel (1911-73) was a nurse, and they had three daughters.

Wikander was internationally active, and maintained lively contacts with leading scholars of religions. The extent of his friendship with Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) is documented by their recently published correspondence (Timuş, 2005). Early in his career Wikander had become friends with Georges Dumézil (1898-1986), who taught French at Uppsala University between 1931 and 1933. Dumézil drew on Wikander’s research (1947, 1949) for his influential theory of Indo-European religion (Lincoln; Littleton, pp. 157-58). In the academic year of 1959-60 Wikander was visiting professor at Columbia University, New York, and in 1967 he taught at the Colegio de México, Mexico City. In October and November 1967, Wikander delivered, on Eliade's invitation, the Haskell Lectures about Mythic Epic and National Epic at the University of Chicago (Timuş, 2004).

Wikander probably had a greater impact on the development of new views on the history of religions than may be concluded from his publications. His wide-ranging ideas about Indian and Iranian religions and the comparative study of philology and religion were published in small articles, often only available in Swedish, and consequently little known. His second monograph, Vayu, was originally envisioned as the first volume of the new series Quaestiones indo-iranicae, which he had founded with his friend and colleague, the Indologist Kasten Rönnow (1897-1943). Shortly after World War II, Wikander published Feuerpriester in Kleinasien und Iran. His third major monograph must be regarded as his most important study, in which he analyzed evidence for the Iranian fire cult (see ATAŠ) drawing on a wide range of sources in various Iranian languages, aside from Greek, Armenian, and Sanskrit literature.

Wikander had many interests. In 1947, the renowned linguist Bertil Malmberg (1913-94) founded with Wikander the journal Studia linguistica, which became a major journal of general linguistics. In the 1950s, Wikander became interested in Kurdish studies, and published a Recueil de texts kourmandji in 1959. Later he turned to more speculative research, and published a series of articles about the relationship between the Maya language and the Altaic languages (1967, 1970, 1972). His last monograph was a slim volume about the contacts between Arabs and Vikings, based on medieval Arabic sources. During his final years Wikander focused on the Romantic Swedish poet Erik Johan Stagnelius (1793-1823), and published a number of original articles about his mystical poetry. For a fuller account of Wikander's works, see the following entry.

Bibliography:

Wikander's personal papers are available in the library of Uppsala University, Sweden.

Obituaries.

F. Josephson, “Stig Wikander 1908-1983,” Svenska Forskningsinstitutet i Istanbul, Meddelanden 9, 1984, pp. 78-79.

S. Y. Rudberg, “Stig Wikander,” Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund: Årsbok 1986, Lund, 1988, pp. 167-70.

Selected works of Wikander.

For a selected bibliography, see Bio-Bibliographies de 134 savants, Acta Iranica 20, Leiden, 1979, pp. 548-49. For a commented bibliography, see M. Timuş, ”La bibliographie annotée de Stig Wikander (1908-1983),” Studia Asiatica 1, 2000, pp. 209- 234.

Der arische Männerbund: Studien zur indo-iranischen Sprach- und Religionsgeschichte, Lund, 1938.

Vayu: Texte und Untersuchungen zur indo-iranischen Religionsgeschichte, Quaestiones Indo-Iranicae 1, Uppsala and Leipzig, 1941.

Feuerpriester in Kleinasien und Iran, Acta Regia Societatis humaniorum litterarum Lundensis 40, Lund, 1946. “Pāṇḍavasagan och Mahābhāratas mystiska förutsättningar,” Religion och Bibel 6, 1947, pp. 27-39; tr. as “La légende des Pândava et la substructure mythique du Mahâbhârata,” in Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus: IV – Explication de textes indiens et latins, by G. Dumézil, Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des hautes études: Section des sciences religieuses 62.4, Paris, 1948, pp. 37-53.

“Sur le fonds commun indo-iranien des épopées de la Perse et de l’Inde,” La nouvelle Clio: Revue mensuelle de la découverte historique 1-2, 1949, pp. 310-29.

Recueil de texts kourmandji, Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift 10, Uppsala, 1959.

“Maya and Altaic: Is the Maya Group of Languages Related to the Altaic Family,” Ethnos 32, 1967, pp. 141-48.

“Maya and Altaic II,” Ethnos 35, 1970, pp. 80-88.

“Maya and Altaic III,” Orientalia Suecana 21, 1972, pp. 186-204.

Araber, vikingar, väringar (Arabs, Vikings, Varangians), Svenska humanistiska förbundet 90, Lund, 1978.

Studies.

U. Brunotte, “Männerbund zwischen Jugend- und Totenkult: Ritual und communitas am Beginn der Moderne,” in Religion in Cultural Discourse: Essays in Honor of Hans G. Kippenberg on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. B. Luchesi and K. von Stuckrad, Berlin, 2004, pp. 401-422; places Höfler’s research in the political and cultural context of the interwar years.

J. Duchesne-Guillemin, The Western Response to Zoroaster, Ratabai Katrak Lectures 1956, Oxford, 1958.

G. Dumézil, Entretiens avec Didier Eribon, Paris, 1987, esp. pp. 76, 157-58 for his friendship with Wikander.

S. Kahle, H. S. Nyberg: En vetenskapsmans biografi (H. S. Nyberg: A scholar's biography), Stockholm, 1991.

B. Lincoln, “Rewriting the German War God: Georges Dumézil, Politics and Scholarship in the Late 1930s,” History of Religions 37, 1998, pp. 187-208.

C. S. Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil, 3rd ed., Berkeley, Calif., 1982, pp. 156-61 about Wikander; orig. ed., 1966.

H. S. Nyberg, Irans forntida religioner, Stockholm,1937; tr. as Die Religionen des alten Iran, by H. H. Schaeder, Leipzig, 1938; repr., Osnabrück, 1966.

J. Puhvel, “Indo-European Prehistory and Myth,” Yearbook of the Estonian Learned Society in America 4, 1964-67, New York, 1968, pp. 51-62.

S. v. Schnurbein, “Geheime kultische Männerbünde bei den Germanen: Eine Theorie im Spannungsfeld zwischen Wissenschaft und Ideologie,” in Mänerbande, Männerbünde: Zur Rolle des Mannes im Kulturvergleich, ed. G. Völger und R. König, 2 vols., Cologne, 1990, II, pp. 97-102; places Höfler’s research in the context of gender studies.

M. Timuş, “Les «Haskell Lectures» de Stig Wikander,” Archaeus 8, 2004, pp. 265-322.

Eadem, Întotdeauna orientul: Corespondenta Mircea Eliade - Stig Wikander 1948-1977 (Always the Orient: The correspondence between Mircea Eliade and Stig Wikander), with a preface by Giovanni Casadio and an afterword by Frantz Grenet, Iaşi (Rumania), 2005. Eadem, “Quand l’Allemagne était leur Mecque: La science des religions chez Stig Wikander,” in The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism, ed. H. Junginger, Leiden, 2008, pp. 205-225.

(Bo Utas)

March 20, 2009

ii. ACCOUNT OF HIS WORKS

Wikander was an inventive, rather controversial scholar, mostly active in Indo-Iranian studies, but also interested in several other fields. In his first book, Der arische Männerbund (1938) Wikander compared Skt. marya “young man, lover, suitor” with Av. mairiia-. Christian Bartholomae (1855-1925), deeming the words unrelated, had translated mairya- as “betrügerisch, schurkisch, Schurke” (Altiranisches Wörterbuch, col. 1151). Wikander, however, concluded the existence of Männerbünde, already postulated by several scholars (see i. above), in the Indo-Iranian period. He argued that these young warrior bands, though they had left only pale traces in Indian and Iranian literatures, were reflected in the legends of Ferēdūn and of the banner of the Kavis (see DERAFŠ-e KĀVIĀN), the mythical predecessors of the Parthian kings (r. ca. 247 BCE- 224 CE), and are comparable to the 16th-century Safavid order.

In his second bookVayu (1941) Wikander stressed the importance of the Indo-Iranian wind god in Iran. His thesis was originally very much contested, but later supported by Helmut Humbach (b. 1921).

In Feuerpriester in Kleinasien und Iran (1946) Wikander argued that under Artaxerxes II (r. 404-359 BCE) statues of Anāhita were erected everywhere, from Iran to Asia Minor. Wikander suggested that these statues had been housed in temples, and adduced as the only extant building structure Kaʿba-ye Zardošt, which undoubtedly was not such a temple. Since Sāsān, the ancestor of the Sasanian dynasty (224-650 CE), was a priest of Anāhita at Eṣṭaḵr in Fārs, Wikander concluded that the first Sasanian kings were Anāhita worshipers who did not mind favoring Manicheism. Only with the reign of Hormozd I (r. 303-309) did Mazdean orthodoxy prevail, and after the hērbeds had succeeded the mobads as high priests of the fire cult, statues of Anāhita in the temples were replaced by fire altars. Yet, according to Mary Boyce (1920-2006), Zoroastrian iconoclasm originated in the 3rd century CE, and Ardǎsir I (224-41/42) was known to have started with the destruction of images, notably in his conquest of Armenia. The fight against idols ended in the 6th century with their complete suppression by Ḵosrow Anūšervān (r. 531-79).

Wikander’s article about mythical pre-suppositions in the Pāṇḍava saga and the Mahābhārata (“Pāṇḍavasagan och Mahābhāratas mystiska förutsättningar,” 1947) presents his chief discovery. He argued that the Indian epic corroborated Dumézil’s thesis of an Indo-European trifunctionalism, and Dumézil, in turn, included the article’s translation in his Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus (1948). Wikander extended the argument, less convincingly, in “Sur le fonds commun indo-iranien des épopées de la Perse et de l’Inde” (1949), an article about the Persian epic.

“Indoeuropeisk Religion” (1961) is a short review of the successive approaches, up to Dumézil, to the Indo-European religion. In “Épopée et mythologie” (1974b) Wikander examined Dumézil's recent publications about epic and myth.

In “Nakula et Sahadeva” (1957), Wikander analyzed the differences between the epic sons of the Aśvins, the Indian Dioscures. Nakula is brave and handsome, while Sahadeva is intelligent and pious. Nakula is a groom, but Sahadeva prefers bulls, and is the perfect human embodiment of the Indo-Iranian fire.

In “Från indisk djurfabel till isländsk saga” (1964) Wikander explored the relationship between Indian animal fables and the Icelandic sagas.

In “Hethitiska myter hos Greker och Persar” (1951) and “Histoire des Ouranides” (1952) Wikander explored the relationships between Iranian and Hurrito-Hittite myths. It is generally admitted that Hesiod’s story of the Ouranos-Kronos-Zeus dynasty was borrowed from a Hurrito-Hittite myth, yet Wikander tried to argue the same origin for the stories of Jamšid, Aždahā, and Ferēdun as preserved in the Šāh-nāma. But it is unwarranted to identify as an Indo-European myth the story of the dragon Aždahā, which is a late and only partial imitation.

In “Mithra en vieux perse” (1950b) Wikander convincingly argued that meso- in Gk. mesoromadēs “mediator,” the term used by Plutarch (46-ca.122 CE) in “Isis and Osiris” (Moralia, vol. V, pp. 112-13 = 46.266), is the Old Persian form of the name Mithra.

In “BAPZOXAPA” (1972b), Wikander correctly analyzed that Gk. barzochara, an epithet of Anāhita, which corresponds to Av. vərəčah- “splendor” and OPers. farnah “royal glory” (see FARR(AH)).

In “Études sur les Mystères de Mithra” (1951a) Wikander followed up on Eliade's suggestion, and tried to explain why the god of the Roman mysteries is not the Iranian Mithra, but a Balkanic equestrian god. This thesis is still unproven.

“Un témoignage kurde sur les Yezidis du Djebel Sindjar” (1953) and “Ein Fest bei den Kurderi und im Avesta” (1960) are based on Wikander’s own recordings of Kurdish poems and songs.

In “Armenian avazan” (1972a) Wikander explained Arm. avazan by interpreting Pahl. afzōn “warm bath” (cf. Kārnāmak, chap. 1,17) as Pahl. āpzan, thus rejecting the etymology previously suggested by Oswald J. L. Szemerényi (1913-96).

Wikander's article “Problèmes irano-arméniens” (1948) examines the Armenian borrowing from Iranian languages, in particular of initial fr- and intervocalic δ.

In “Germanische und Indo-iranische Eschatologie” (1960b) and “Från Bråvalla till Kurukshetra” (1960c) Wikander analyzed the relationship between Norse and Indo- Iranian eschatology, though Dumézil had already compared Norse and Zoroastrian mythical eschatologies with the eschatological features in the Mahābhārata. Wikander observed that in the Norse and the Iranian traditions dualistic thought and the eschatological perspectives are reflected in two types of narrative: on the one hand, myths, such as theVöluspá, the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), and the Pahlavi works, and on the other side, epics, such as the Brávellir traditions and the Šāh- nāma. In India, however, only an epic tradition is known. Wikander ends the juxtaposition with Dumézil’s words: “more than the Iranian version of these cosmic events, it is the Indian epic which is revealed as parallel to the Scandinavian myth” (p. 89). In Araber, vikingar, väringar (1978) Wikander collected the descriptions of the Vikings in Arabic sources, which he translated into Swedish.

“Sur la langue des inscriptions sud-hispaniques” (1966) presents an analysis of funerary inscriptions from southern Spain with regard to the frequency of a final -be and the variety of preceding sounds. Wikander concluded, rightly in the author's opinion, that this -be represents Indo-European -bhi, which occurs in both Mycenian and Homeric Greek. Wikander argued that the word keonii corresponds to Ved. śaye and Gk. keītai, while the word keonabe is an equivalent, in the instrumental, of Skt. śayana “bed, couch” and Av. sayana- “habitat, country.”

Wikander studied in three articles about “Maya and Altaic” (1967, 1970, 1972c) the Proto-Altaic initial p- in the Maya language. He collected a Maya-Altaic word list, explored the evidence for an initial voiceless labial in Proto-Altaic, and enumerated Maya-Altaic sound-laws. It is, of course, beyond doubt that America was populated from Asia.

Wikander argued in “Jehova-Jova” (1975-76) that the Romantic poet Stagnelius used the term Jova to refer to Jehova, the god of the Old Testament.

Wikander gave the 1967 Haskell Lectures about Mythic Epic and National Epic at the University of Chicago. They were only posthumously published (Timuš, 2004), although the manuscript has not been preserved in its entirety and the text of the fourth lecture about the Indian epics is lost. Wikander began with an examination of 19th century European scholarship about the origin of epics to explore “The Ideology of the National Epic” (pp. 274-84). He juxtaposed the Greek notions of a heroic and a mythic age in the second lecture (pp. 285-96), though he did not discuss the notion of a divine age, as proposed by Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). The Šāh-nāma was the focus of Wikander's third lecture (pp. 297-301). He discussed the term kavi, since in the 5th century CE the Avestan names of the Kavis suddenly became popular among the Sasanian royal family, and compared the deeds of Ferēdun and Indra. In the fifth lecture (pp. 302-312), Wikander explored the relationship between myth and history, raising the question of transforming history into myth. Wikander argues that the traditions about Zoroaster and his age are mythical so that that the historical origins of Zoroastrian mythology are difficult to analyze. Goštāsp, however, is depicted in dark colors, though such a negative interpretation can hardly be reconciled with his role as protector of Zoroaster, which Christensen had already observed. In the sixth and final lecture (pp. 313-22), Wikander discussed Indo-European eschatology, proposing a quite fantastic interpretation of Zoroaster. Wikander explained the similarities between Norse and Indo-Iranian eschatologies through a common heritage. Yet he projected “dualism, the limited linear history, developing under divine guidance” (p. 321) unto Zoroastrianism, in order to claim it as part of the shared Indo-Iranian heritage. Consequently, Wikander doubted the historicity of Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, and suggested that this Near Eastern prophet originated because of the pressure of the prophetic religions of Judaism and Christianity.

Întotdeauna Orientul is the Rumanian translation of the French correspondence between Wikander and Mircea Eliade between 1948 and 1977. Frantz Grenet observed in the afterword that “Wikander remained the man of enthusiastic but unaccomplished projects” (pp. 327-28). Amongst those tackled by the two friends is the creation of a science of religions distinct from the history of religions as usually taught, historicism being their bête noire.

Bibliography:

Selected works of Wikander.

Der arische Männerbund, 1938, please see above.

Vayu, 1941, please see above.

Feuerpriester in Kleinasien und Iran, 1946, please see above.

“Pāṇḍavasagan och Mahābhāratas mystiska förutsättningar,” 1947, please see above.

“Problèmes irano-arméniens,” Studia Linguistica 2, 1948, pp. 48-53.

“Sur le fonds commun indo-iranien des épopées de la Perse et de l’Inde,” 1949, please see above. “Hethitiska myter hos Greker och Persar,” Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund, Årsbok, 1950a, pp. 37-56.

“Mithra en vieux perse”, Orientalia Suecana 1, 1950b, pp. 66-68.

“Etudes sur les mystères de Mithra,”Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund, Årsbok, 1951a, pp. 5- 46.

“Védique KṢAITA – avestique KHSHAĒTAU: Essai de sémantique structurale,” Studia Linguistica 5, 1951b, pp. 89-94.

“Histoire des Ouranides,” Cahiers du Sud 36, 1952, no. 314, pp. 9-17.

“Un témoignages kurdes sur les Yezidis du Djebel Sindjar,” Orientalia Suecana 2, 1953, pp. 112-18.

“Nakula et Sahadeva,” Orientalia Suecana 6, 1957, pp. 66-96.

“Ein Fest bei den Kurden und im Avesta,” Orientalia Suecana 9, 1960a, pp. 7-10.

“Från Bråvalla till Kurukshetra,” Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi 75, 1960b, pp. 183-93; tr. as ”Brávellir und Kurukshetra,” in Europäische Heldendichtung, ed. Klaus von See, Wege der Forschung 500, Darmstadt, 1978, pp. 61-74.

“Germanische und indo-iranische Eschatologie,” Kairos 2, 1960c, pp. 81-88.

“Indoeuropeisk religion,” Religion och Bibel 20, 1961, pp. 3-13.

“Från indisk djurfabel till isländsk saga” (From Indian animal fable to Icelandic saga), in Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund: Årsbok, 1964, pp. 89-114.

“Sur la langue des inscriptions sud-hispaniques,” Studia Linguistica 20, 1966, pp. 1-8.

“Maya and Altaic,” please see above.

“Maya and Altaic II,” please see above.

“Armenian avazan,” Orbis 21, 1972a, pp. 183-84 “BAPZOXAPA,” Acta Orientalia 34, 1972b, pp. 13-15.

“Maya and Altaic III,” please see above.

“Aramäisch sprb, sanskrit śvabhra,” in Księga pamiątkowa ku czci Eugeniusza Słuszkiewicza (Festschrift for Eugeniusz Słuszkiewicz), ed. Jan Reychman, Warsaw, 1974a, pp. 271-72.

“Epopée et mythologie: Examen critique de récentes publications de Georges Dumézil,” Revue de l'histoire des religions, 1974b, pp. 3-8.

“Jehova-Jova: En Stagnlius studie,” Lychnos: Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society, 1975-76, pp. 58-67.

Araber, vikingar, väringar, please see above.

Studies.

M. Boyce, “Iconoclasm among the Zoroastrians,” in Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty, ed. J. Neusner, Leiden, 1975, pp. 93-111.

G. Dumézil, Mythes et dieux des Germains: Essai d’interprétation comparative, Paris, 1939; repr. as Les dieux des Germains: Essai sur la formation de la religion scandinave, Paris, 1959.

H. Humbach, “Vayu, Śiva und der Spiritus Vivens im ostiranischen Synkretismus,” in Monumentum H. S. Nyberg I, Acta Iranica 4, Leiden, 1975, pp. 397-408.

M. Timuş, “Les «Haskell Lectures» de Stig Wikander,” 2004, please see above.

Eadem, Întotdeauna orientul, 2005, please see above.

(Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin)

March 20, 2009

(Bo Utas; Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin)

Originally Published: July 15, 2009

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WILD RUE

See ESFAND.

ESFAND a common weed found in Persia, Central Asia, and the adjacent areas.

ESFAND (sepand, sepanj, espanj < Proto-Ir. *svanta; Ar. háarmal, Lat. Peganum harmala; wild rue), a common weed found in Persia, Central Asia, and the adjacent areas (for the the plant’s name in other Iranian languages see Flattery and Schwartz, p. 40).

Esfand was well known among the ancient Indo-Iranians. Dioscorides provides in the 1st century C.E. the earliest description of the plant, calling it pêganon agrion. Later Greek authors refer to it as persaia botane (Flattery and Schwartz, pp. 35-42, 144-48).

Two varieties of the plant are mentioned in the early medical texts, the white rue and the more potent black rue. The plant is considered to be hot by nature, and can be used as a diuretic, a vomitive, and an agent to facilitate menstruation in cases of amenorrhea (Ebn Rabban, pp. 415, 469; Jamālī Yazdī, p. 173). Although the most important use of esfand in Persia involves magical practices, its various parts were used in cures for a variety of ailments (e.g., throat diseases; Ebn Rabban, p. 466; cf. Lazard, Premiers poètes II, p. 190). It was considered efficacious to cold swellings, and some classical physicians such as Kendī also used it in treating epilepsy and insanity (Jamālī Yazdī, p. 75; Samarqandī, p. 206).

Aphrodisiacal properties have been suggested for the plant. Crushed seeds of esfand may be used in the preparation of a fertility drug for women, while smoke from its burning roots can help determine whether or not the woman is barren (Ḥāseb Ṭabarī, p. 108; for other medical benefits of the plant see Andalosī, pp. 311-16).

Folk medicine practices reflect a classical belief in the medical properties of esfand, while attributing a number of magico-medical properties to it. It is considered to be a divinely favored plant which can cure seventy-two varieties of ailments the least severe of which is leprosy (Majlesī, pp. 220-21; Qomī, I, p. 245). Furthermore, the smoke from its burning seeds is believed to ward off harm from persons or places that are exposed to its smoke. Thus esfand is burned at potentially harmful moments such as during circumcision ceremonies or for the protection of the woman in childbed (Šakūrzāda, pp. 152, 160, 610-11). The burning of the seeds is accompanied by the recitation of a magical formula. Purely curative uses of esfand are occasionally encountered in folk medicine. For example, the smoke from burning a combination of rue seeds, a bit of Bulgarian leather, and a piece of crab shell is used as a remedy for nosebleed. Another non-magical practice involves applying a concoction of roasted esfand seeds and other materials to the head and hair of a new mother to improve both her health and the condition of her hair (Šakūrzāde, pp. 147, 245). The practice of burning esfand seeds to avert the evil eye is widely attested in early classical Persian literature (e.g., Lazard, Premiers poetes II, p. 12; Šāh-nāma, ed. Khaleghi, I, p.337; Farroḵī, p. 106). This practice may have been influenced by the association of esfand with haoma (q.v.), the sacred beverage of Zoroastrian lore (for argument in favor of such identification see Flattery and Schwartz).

The continuity of Persian tradition has brought the ancient sacred plant into Islamic sources. A Shiʿite tradition states that there is an angel in each of the plant’s leaves and seeds. Its root drives away sorrow and magic, and the devil stays a distance of seventy houses away from homes in which it is kept (Šakūrzāda, pp. 611, 629). Shiʿite sources tell of the benefits of ingesting esfand or its juice. For instance, drinking a bit of esfand juice every day for forty mornings brings about wisdom in addition to fortifying the imbiber against seventy varieties of diseases (Qomī, I, p. 245). The apotropaic value of esfand is reflected in its burning against evil presence. In a curious ceremony to counteract effects of evil upon a child, which is manifested in the condition called bača- ye ʿaważī (changeling), burning of esfand is required (Šakūrzāda, p. 235). In some villages of Khorasan, a new mother will be given a concoction to clear her bowels on the third day after she has given birth. Then, forty pebbles, forty balls of sheep dung, forty raw chickpeas, and forty esfand seeds are placed in a large bowl of water (jām-e čehel kelīd), dipped in the bowl forty times, and the water is ritually poured over a cloth, held above the woman’s head. This ritual purges the woman from the effects of evil spirits and harmful entities (Šakūrzāda, p. 141). During the ceremony presenting a new child, esfand seeds are burned to avert the evil eye during the ceremony of presentation. Each of those present give a piece of thread from their clothing to be burned with the esfand seeds and other items, while a certain formula is recited (Hedāyat, pp. 43-44; for examples of the formula see also Horn, translator’s note, p. 107; Flattery and Schwartz, pp. 49-50).

Evidently esfand seeds were also used to produce an invisible ink. The process involved pounding the seeds before soaking them in water for two days. The juice thereafter functioned as an invisible ink when written on paper. In order to read it, the paper is brought close to a flame and the heat make the writing visible (Ḥāseb Tabarī, p. 55).

Bibliography: ʿAbd-al-Malek b. Ḥabīb Andalosī, al-Ṭebb al-nabawī, ed. M.-ʿA. Bār, Damascus and Beirut, 1413/1993.

Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī, Ṣaydana, ed. M. Saʿīd and R. Eḥsān Elāhī, Karachi, 1973, pp. 155- 56.

ʿAlī b. Sahl Ebn Rabban Ṭabarī, Ferdaws al-ḥekma, ed. M. L. Siddiqi, Berlin, 1928.

Farroḵī Sīstānī, Dīvān, ed. M. Dabīrsīāqī, 3rd ed., Tehran, 1363 Š./1984.

D. Flattery and M. Schwartz, Hoama and Harmaline, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1989.

Moḥammad b. Ayyūb Ḥāseb Ṭabarī, Toḥfat al-ḡārāʾeb, ed. J. Matīnī, Tehran, 1371 Š./1992.

Ṣ. Hedāyat, Neyrangestān, Tehran, 1342 Š./1963.

Horn, Etymologie, tr. J. Ḵāleqī-Moṭlaq as Asās-e ešteqāq-e fārsī, Tehran, 2536 (=1356) Š./1977.

Abū Bakr Moṭahhar Jamālī Yazdī, Farroḵ-nāma, ed. Ī. Afšār, Tehran, 1346 Š./1967.

Moḥammad-Bāqer Majlesī, Ḥelyat al-mottaqīn, Tehran, 1371/1951.

ʿAbbās b. Moḥammad-Reżā Qomī, Safīnat al-beḥār wa madīnat al-ḥekam wa’l-āṯār, 2 vols., Beirut, 1985? E. Šakūrzāda, ʿAqāyed o rosūm-e mardom-e Ḵorāsān, 2nd ed., Tehran, 1362 Š./1983.

Najīb-al-Dīn Moḥammad Samarqandī, The Medical Formulary of al-Samarqandī and the Relations of Early Arabic Simples to Those Found in the Indegenous Medicine of the Near East and India, ed. N. Ḵāledī and M. Levey, Philadelphia, 1976.

Ḥobayš b. Ebrāhīm Teflīsī, Bayān al-ṣenāʿāt, ed. Ī. Afšār, in FIZ 5, 1336 Š./1957, pp. 298-447.

(Mahmoud Omidsalar)

Originally Published: December 15, 1998

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WILD THYME

See ĀVĪŠAN.

ĀVĪŠAN wild thyme. Varieties in Iran are carminative, stomachic, diuretic, digestive, and flatulent. They may be used for liver and respiratory disorders.

ĀVĪŠAN, wild thyme. The genus Thymus of the family Labiatae (mint family) comprises a number of fragrant aromatic undershrubs, with very small leaves and whorls of small purplish, nectar-bearing flowers in the axils of the leaves or at the ends of the branches. The Kotschy thyme (āvīæān-e bārīk, Thymus kotschyanus Boiss. et Hohen., locally called avīæam, avæam, ābæan, āyæūm [Alborz, Lar], odæan, ūæan, oæna-ye kūhī, ṣaʿtar, kaklik-oti [Šarafḵāna in Azerbaijan], kālvāæ [some northern districts], āzorba [Ganjnāma of Hamadān, used for both Thymus kotschyanus and Thymus serpillum), jowæan-e æīrāzī [in the bazaars of Tehran], Ar. ṣaʿtar/saʿtar) is a low perennial, strongly aromatic, wild undershrub with many varieties distributed in the higher regions of northwest Iran, in the Alborz mountains, and in Khorasan. Dried leaves and floral tops, which contain oil of thyme, are used for flavoring soups, sausages, sauces, and various vegetable and meat dishes. Aqua or ʿaraq-e āvīæan, used for flavoring sherbets, is obtained by soaking dried leaves and floral tops in water. Around Tehran dried āvīæan is used with a refreshing drink made of a mixture of yogurt, water, and salt (dūḡ).

Mother-of-thyme (Thymus serpillum, locally oæm, oæma, āzorba) is another widespread thyme of Iran. Both thymes are carminative, stomachic, diuretic, digestive, and flatulent. They may be used for liver and respiratory disorders. Maḵzan al-adwīa (p. 256) and Toḥfa-ye Ḥakīm Moʾmen (pp. 563-64) attribute the apperitive, diuretic, vermifuge, emmenagogue, and antacid properties of thyme.

Āvīæan-e æīrāzī is one of the species of the genus Zataria.

Bibliography:

M. ʿAlī-Akbar Khan Āæpaz-bāæī, Sofra-ye aṭʿema, Tehran, 1353 Š./1974, p. 83.

J. Jalas, “Thymus,” in K. H. Rechinger, Flora Iranica, Cont. 150, Graz, 1982.

Ḥakīm Moḥammad Moʾmen Tonokābonī, Toḥfa-ye Ḥakīm Moʾmen, Tehran (1402/1981).

Sayyed Moḥammad-Ḥosayn ʿAlawī Ḵorāsānī Šīrāzī, Maḵzan al-adwīa together with Qarābāḏīn-e kabīr, Tehran, 1349 Š./1970, p. 273.

Ḥ. Ṯābetī, Deraḵthā wa deraḵṭčahā-ye jangalī-e Īrān (Forest trees and shrubs of Iran), 2nd ed., Tehran, 1355 Š./1976, pp. 747ff.

(R. A. Parsa) Originally Published: December 15, 1987

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WILLIAM OF RUBRUCK a Flemish Franciscan missionary who traveled through the lands that the Mongols had conquered in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Asia Minor between 1253 and 1255.

WILLIAM OF RUBRUCK, Friar (fl. 1253-1255), a Flemish Franciscan missionary who traveled through the lands that the Mongols had conquered in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Asia Minor between 1253 and 1255. Apart from references in the Opus Maius of his fellow-Franciscan Roger Bacon (see below), his report to the French king Louis IX, entitled simply the Itinerarium by scholars for the sake of reference, is our only source for his travels. We do not know his age, although the hardships of the journey he undertook render it unlikely that he was born before 1210.

His travels. From Palestine, where he was among Louis’ entourage following the French king’s disastrous invasion of Egypt (647/1249-50) during the Seventh Crusade, Rubruck secured the king’s support to travel into Mongol territory in order to bring spiritual comfort to some German slaves who had been carried off into Asia from Hungary by the Mongol invaders in 1241-42. His aims also included spreading the Gospel and making contact with the Mongol prince Sartaq, who was based in the Pontic-Caspian steppes (the territory later known as the khanate of the Golden Horde) and of whose Christian sympathies the crusading army had heard. In 1253, accompanied by another Franciscan named Bartholomew of Cremona, one of Louis’ clerks and an interpreter, Rubruck sailed via Constantinople to Soldaia (Sudāq) in the Crimea, and thence traveled into the steppe. In the event, he was disappointed in Sartaq, on whose Christianity he casts doubt, and failed to make contact with the German slaves. From the outset, moreover, the mission was bedeviled by the Mongols’ misapprehension that the group represented an official embassy and that the friendly letter from Louis that Rubruck carried to Sartaq was an appeal for military assistance against the Muslims. For this reason Sartaq sent the group to his father Bātu Khan, who in turn dispatched the two friars and the interpreter across Asia to the Great Khan Möngke in Mongolia. Here it was finally recognized that the party was not an embassy, and after a few months the Great Khan sent Rubruck back as his own envoy, with a letter demanding the King’s submission. Returning via the Caucasus and the encampment of the Mongol general Bāyjū on the Aras river, Rubruck reached Palestine (1255), only to learn that King Louis had embarked for home a year earlier; he therefore sent his report to the king and asked Louis to secure permission for him to come to France in person. We know that he subsequently traveled to France, since Bacon met him there and cites him several times in the Opus Maius. The date of his death is unknown.

His report. Apart from chapters 2-8 and 35, the Itinerarium is not organized thematically; but since King Louis had instructed Rubruck to write of everything he saw and heard, he mentions fauna, including the yak and the horned sheep that would later take its name from Marco Polo. He also incorporates a great deal of geographical and ethnographic material hitherto unknown to Europeans. Although he did not travel as far as China, Rubruck provides the earliest Western description of the Chinese (chap. 26, paragraphs 8-9), whom he correctly identified with the Seres of Classical geography. He mentions several peoples in the Caucasus region, such as the Lesgians (“Lakz”) and the Alans (“Aas,” Ās), and ascertained that the Caspian Sea, which he calls the “sea of Siroan [Širvān],” was landlocked rather than being a gulf connected to the encircling ocean (chap. 18, paragraph 5), as Europeans believed on the venerable authority of Isidore of Seville (d. 636). Naturally interested in religious matters, he provides an invaluable survey of Mongol shamanism (chap. 35), narrates in some detail his relations with Nestorian Christians in Mongolia (CHRISTIANITY iii. In Central Asia And Chinese Turkestan), and is the earliest Western writer to furnish a description of Buddhism (chaps. 24-25), of whose existence the Catholic world had been unaware.

Bibliography:

Sources.

William of Rubruck, Itinerarium, new critical edition (with Italian translation) by Paolo Chiesa, Guglielmo di Rubruk. Viaggio in Mongolia, [Milan], 2011; older edition in A. Van den Wyngaert, ed., Sinica Franciscana, I, Itinera et relationes Fratrum Minorum saeculi XIII et XIV, Quaracchi-Firenze, 1929, pp. 164-337; Eng. tr. Peter Jackson, in Jackson, ed. (with David Morgan), The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, London, 1990; Fr. tr. Claude and René Kappler, Guillaume de Rubrouck envoyé de saint Louis: Voyage dans l’empire mongol, Paris, 1986. Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, ed. J. H. Bridges, 3 vols., Oxford and London, 1897-1900.

Studies.

J. Charpentier, “William of Rubruck and Roger Bacon,” in Hyllningsskrift tillägnad Sven Hedin på hans 70-årsdag den 19. Febr. 1935, Stockholm, 1935, pp. 255-67.

J. Dauvillier, “Guillaume de Rubrouck et les communautés chaldéennes d’Asie centrale au Moyen Age,” L’Orient Syrien 2, 1957, pp. 223-42.

Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, “Eine christliche Weltchronik von Qara Qorum: Wilhelm von Rubruck OFM und der Nestorianismus,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 53, 1971, pp. 1-19.

Maria Bonewa-Petrowa, “Rubrucks Reisebeschreibung als soziologische und kulturgeschichtliche Quelle,” Philologus 115, 1971, pp. 16-31.

P. Pelliot, “Guillaume de Rubrouck,” in idem, Recherches sur les chrétiens d’Asie centrale et d’Extrême-Orient, ed. J. Dauvillier, Paris, 1973, pp. 75-235.

Larry V. Clark, “The Turkic and Mongol Words in William of Rubruck’s Journey (1253- 1255),” JAOS 93, 1973, pp. 181-89.

J. Richard, “Sur les pas de Plancarpin et de Rubrouck: la lettre de saint Louis à Sartaq,” Journal des Savants, 1977, pp. 49-61.

P. Jackson, “William of Rubruck in the Mongol Empire: Perception and Prejudices”, in Zweder von Martels, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing, Leiden, 1994, pp. 54- 71.

R. F. Young, “Deus Unus or Dei Plures Sunt? The Function of Inclusivism in the Buddhist Defense of Mongol Folk Religion against William of Rubruck (1254),” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26/1, 1989, pp. 100-37.

B. Z. Kedar, “The Multilateral Disputation at the Court of the Grand Qan Möngke, 1254,” in H. Lazarus-Yafeh, M.R. Cohen, S. Somekh and S.H. Griffith, eds, The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, Wiesbaden, 1999, pp. 162-83.

Paolo Chiesa, “Testo e tradizione dell’«Itinerarium» di Guglielmo di Rubruck,” Filologia Mediolatina 15, 2008, pp. 133-216.

A. J. Watson, “Mongol Inhospitality, or How to Do More with Less? Gift Giving in William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium,” Journal of Medieval History 30, 2011, pp. 1-12.

(Peter Jackson)

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WILLOW

See BĪD.

BĪD common designation in modern Persian for the genus Salix L., willow. Willow trees are found in all the Iranian lands, mainly along streams and canals.

BĪD (also deraḵt-e bīd or bīd-bon), common designation in modern Persian for the genus Salix L., willow.

i. The word. ii. The tree.

i. The Word

New Persian bīd (earlier bēḏ, Middle Persian wēt, Avestan vaēti (fem.) “willow (branch),” cf. Old Indian veta (masc.) “aquatic climbing plant” or “branch,” Greek itéa, Latin vitis “vine,” Old High German wīda, are all derived from Indo-European *wei-t- “to turn, bend, wind.” In modern Iranian dialects the word takes forms such as Kurdish vī or bī, Baluchi gēt, Pashto wala (see AirWb., col. 1314; Grundriss I, 2nd ed., pp. 49, 299, and elsewhere; Mayrhofer, Dictionary III, pp. 254f.; G. Morgenstierne, An Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto, Oslo, 1927, p. 86; Horn, Etymologie and Hübschmann, Persische Studien, no. 251; Pokorny, p. 1122; W. Eilers, Westiranische Mundarten aus der Sammlung Wilhelm Eilers I (Ḵᵛānsārī), p. 5 n. 8 on p. 6, p. 388, and II [Gazi], p. 643).

The concept of “turning, bending, winding” which underlies New Pers. bīd and German Wiede reappears in English “willow” (from Anglo-Saxon welig), Dutch wilg, Greek helikē; but these are from Indo-European *weli-kā and therefore from wel “to turn, wind” (Pokorny, p. 1141). Flexible willow shoots are still used today for making baskets, creels, etc. (bīdbāfī).

The Armenian for “willow” is urī, and the Arabic is ṣafṣāf “tree which grows in rows” (Arabic ṣaff, Semitic ṢP), willows being usually planted in rows along water-courses. The Turkish for “willow” is söğüt (older sögüt), a word of uncertain etymology.

Willow trees are found in all the Iranian lands, mainly along streams and canals, and since their leaves (bīdbarg) exhale a pleasant fragrance in the summer glare it is not surprising that place names with bīd should be widespread. In the following list (taken from Razmārā’s Farhang) the bīd component of most of the names certainly means “willow”: Bīd; with common suffixes Bīdak, Bīda, Bīdakān, Bīdān, Bīdača, Bīd(e)la, Bīdešk or Bīdešg, Bīdū, Bīdūk, Bīdūʾīyā, Bīdābīd, and Bīdbīdak (“rich in willows”), Bīdestān; with attributives Bīdābād, Bīd-e Amīn, Bīd-e Boland, Bīdestaḵr, Bīdestū (in Baluchistan), Bīdgol, Bīd(e)ḵān, Bīdḵᵛān, Bīdḵᵛāb, Bīdḵarakī, Bīdḵayrī, Bīdḵᵛor, Bīd-o- ḵ(a)vīd, Bīdsarā, Bīd-e Sūḵta, Bīd-e Sorḵ, Bīd-e Zāḡ, Bīd-e Zangol, Bīd-e Zard, Bīd-e Zarrīn, also Bēdvāz (mountain in Transoxiana, cited by Steingass), and several more which are debatable; with bīd as the second component, Ābbīd, Bāḡbīd, Bāmbīd, Benābīd, Bonbīd, Čāhbīdū, Darbīd, Darabīd, Dehbīd, Gowdbīd Gowdbīdūʾīya, Kūšk(e)bīdak, Padabīd, Padabīda, Palabīd. Words compounded with bīd given in the dictionaries are bīdgīā (“willow herb”), which means “artichoke,” and bīdgīāh (the same), which is said also to mean “a bird” (= Arabic ṯīl, according to ʿA.-A. Nafīsī, Farhang-e Nafīsī I, Tehran, 1355 Š./1976, p. 682); bīdkeš “a weapon” (made of willow wood?); bīdmāl “willow twigs used for cleaning or polishing”; bīdvand, a stone with medicinal uses. See ii, below, for names of different kinds of willow.

Like bīd in Iran, söğüt is a widespread toponym in Turkey. Twenty-six villages named simply Söğüt (“Willow”) are listed in the Köylerimiz gazetteer. Also very common are Söğütlü (adjective, but perhaps a corruption of putative söğtülük “willow thicket”), Sögütçük (diminutive, cf. Pers. Bīdak), and compound names such as Söğütalanı “Willow Plain,” Söğütbel and Söğütgediği “Willow Pass,” Söğütdere(si) “Willow Valley” (cf. Darabīd and Darbīd in Iran), Söğüteli “Willow House.”

In Armenian toponymy likewise, urī and urēni meaning “willow” often appear: e.g., Urīkʿ “Willow Thicket” (cf. Bīdestdān, Söğütlü), Urēacʿ tapʿ “Willow Plain” (cf. Söğütalanı), Urēacʿ pʿor (cf. Darabid, Söğütdere; see H. Hübschmann, “Die altarmenischen Ortsnamen,” IF 17, 1904, pp. 197-490, esp. p. 462).

Finally it should be noted that bīd “larva” or “moth,” the New Pers. homonym of bīd “willow,” may in spite of the semantic difference be traced to the same Indo-European root wei-t “to turn” (Pokorny, 1120). Like willows, caterpillars bend and twist. Latin vermis, German wurm, English worm, from Indo-European *wṛmi/wṛmo, similarly evoke the concept of turning and bending.

Bibliography : Given in the text.

(Wilhelm Eilers)

ii. The Tree A great confusion or indetermination reigns in the taxonomy of Salix L. in Iran. The following inventory is based on Ṯābetī’s detailed account (1976, “Salix,” pp. 662-81), with some synonyms, local names, habitats, etc., also taken from Mobayyen, II, pp. 20-28, Djavanshir, pp. 156-57, etc.

1. Salix acmophylla Boiss.; habitat: some specified localities in the southern Alborz slopes area (where it is called bīd-e zard/zard-bīd, lit. “yellow willow”), Gīlān, Kurdistan, Kermānšāh, Lorestān, Baḵtīārī, Fārs, Yazd, Kermān, Sīstān, Baluchistan, etc.; also reported in Bādḡīs (Afghanistan), Turkmenistan, Caucasus, etc. 2. S. aegyptiaca L. (= S. caprea [auct. non L., according to Ṯābetī], S. Medmeii Boiss., etc.); habitat: Caspian lowland forests from Mīnūdašt (in Gorgān) to Ardabīl and Arasbārān, Qom, Isfahan, Fārs, Kermān, Yazd, etc.; also found in Caucasus, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan; common name: bīd-mešk/-mošk or mešk/mošk-bīd (lit. “musk willow”); local names: mešg-fīk (in Katūl, Gorgān), sūgūt (in Mīnūdašt, Gorgān), meš-bed (in Gorgān), pīš(ī)pīšī (in Arasbārān), dār-fešfeša (in Sardašt), etc. (see also its older names and medicinal uses below). 3. S. alba L. (= S. micans Anders., etc.); habitat: most areas in Iran, especially Caspian plain forests from Gorgān to Arasbārān and western Azerbaijan, Lorestān, Kurdistan, Kermānšāh, and Hamadān; also reported in Afghanistan, Turk- menistan, and Caucasus; common name: bīd (or variants thereof); local names: fīk or fek(-dār) (in many places in Māzandarān), bāmešī-fek (in Āmol; lit. “pussy willow”), etc. 4. S. babylonica L. (= S. pendula Moench); common designation: bīd-e majnūn (lit. “the mad willow,” perhaps alluding to Majnūn, the demented lover of Laylā, who is often depicted under a willow), bīd-e mowalla, or, sometimes, bīd-e moʿallaq (lit. “the hanging willow”), all alluding to its drooping, apparently disheveled, foliage and branches (cf. its English name “weeping/mourning willow;” see also its older, obsolete names below); planted as an ornamental tree (usually grafted on S. excelsa, etc.) in many places in Iran; also reported as native to Soviet Azerbaijan. 5. S. carmanica Bornm.; habitat: Urmia, Kermānšāh, Isfahan, Yazd, Kermān; also growing in Afghanistan; common (?) name: bīd-e marjān(ī) (lit. “coral willow”). 6. S. daphnoides Vill.; habitat: Čālūs valley, Walīābād and Sīāhbīša in Māzandarān, etc; local names: bīd-derra (in Čālūs valley and Walīābād), vī (?). 7. S. elbursensis Boiss. (= S. purpurea L. var. pallescens/virescens Anders.); habitat: Čālūs and Karaj valleys, Rūdbār, Kermānšāh, etc.; also found in Anatolia and Caucasus; common name: bīd(-e) sorḵ/sorḵ-bīd (lit. “red willow”); local name: morvār (?). 8. S. excelsa Gmel.; habitat: Caspian forests from Mīnūdašt to Āstārdā, Zagros region from Arasbārān down to Fārs, Kermān, Yazd, northern Khorasan, southern Alborz slopes, etc.; also reported in Afghanistan; local name (in Karaj, etc.) for this species (and the variety Rodinii Skvortsov found in Bandar-e Gaz, Khorasan, and Tall-e Ḵosravī in Fārs): bīd(-e) sīā(h) or sīā(h)-bīd (lit. “black willow”). 9. S. fragilis L.; habitat: Caspian Plain forests, some places in the southern Alborz region (e.g., Karaj, Ṭālaqān, Jovestān, Šahrīār); common name: (bīd-e) bīdḵeštī (lit. “the willow yielding the bīdḵešt manna;” see below); local names: fek(-dār) (in Māzandarān), fūkā/fokā (in Rāmsar and Šahsavār), vī(-dar) (in Gīlān), bīd-e mahnāzī (?). 10. S. pycnostachya Anders. (= S. iranica Bornm., S. ferganensis Nazarov, S. pamirica Drobov, etc.); habitat: some localities in Kermān, northern Khorasan, and Gorgān; also found in Afghanistan; no particular local name(s) recorded for it in our sources. 11. S. songarica Anders.; habitat: Harīrūd valley in Sīstān, eastern Khorasan; local name (recorded by Djavanshir): bīd-e sorḵ. 12. S. triandra L. (= S. amygdalina L., S. armena Schshk., etc.); habitat: Baluchistan, Gorgān, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan; local name: (dār-)fešfeša (in Kurdistan). 13. S. wilhelmsiana M. B. (= S. angustifolia Willd., S. rosmarinifolia L., etc.); habitat: Karaj and Čālūs valleys, Arasbārān, Urmia, some localities in Luristan, Baḵtīārī, Fārs, etc.; local name: jar-bīd (in Fārs). 14. S. zygostemon Boiss. (= the hybrid S. aegyptiaca x S. elbursensis, etc.); habitat: some southern Alborz valleys (e.g. Karaj valley), Arāk, Hamadān, Baḵtīārī, Mt. Taftān slopes, etc.; local name in most places: (bīd-e)jowdānak (lit. “barley-grain willow”).

Historically, some information—also very confused—about salices and their names is available in Arabic and Persian sources of the Islamic era. They have dealt with the willow under the “standard” heading ḵelāf; however, some other controversial (Arabic or arabicized) names such as ṣafṣāf are also found. That confusion is reflected in the synonymy given by Ebn Maymūn, (d. a.d. 1204), Šarḥ asmāʾ, no. 393 (ḵelāf = ṣafṣāf = sendār = ḡarab = sawḥar = sālej) and no. 64, where he confuses bahrāmej (S. aegyptiaca) with clematis. As quoted by Ebn al-Bayṭār (II, p. 68), Ḡāfeqī (1st half of the 6th/12th century) says: “Ḵelāf is of numerous kinds, including ṣafṣāf (with two varieties, red and white) and bādāmak.” The physician-botanist Abū ʿAbd-Allāh Moḥammad Tamīmī (d. 380/990), in his Ketāb al-moršed (as quoted by Ebn al-Bayṭār, ibid.), expatiates on the difference between ḵelāf and ṣafṣāf, leading us to the conclusion that ḵelāf, with its fragrant catkins having medicinal properties, corresponded to S. aegyptiaca, whereas ṣafṣāf, which used to be applied to the allied genus Populus (poplar), too, might be identified with S. Safsaf Forsk. or S. alba L. (cf., Toḥfa, nos. 412 and 433, and Ebn Maymūn, p. 197). Ebn Sīnā (d. 428/1037; II, pp. 282, 344) equates ṣafṣāf with ḵelāf;

so does Bīrūnī (on the authority of Bešr b. ʿAbd-al-Wahhāb Fazārī, Ketāb al-ṣaydana, pp. 183-84 of Ar. text), adding that “it is bīd-e sepīd [lit. white willow] in Persian.” Ebn Sīnā (p. 93), however, has a very short article under bahrāmaj (= bīd-mešk). Ebn al- Bayṭār (d. 646/1248; p. 122, s.v. bahrāmaj) says it is the same as al-ḵelāf al-balḵī (lit. the willow native to Balḵ) having “two varieties . . . both of which are sweet-smelling.” Anṭākī (d. 1008/1599; I, p. 124) also equates ḵelāf with ṣafṣāf “in all its varieties,” but mentions “bahrāmaj known as al-balḵī,” and “the bitter ṣafṣāf,” for which he indicates medicinal properties. According to the 11th/17th-century author Tonokābonī (physician to the Safavid Shah Solaymān; pp. 354-55), “ḵelāf comprises bīd-mešk = ḵelāf-e balḵī, bīd-e barrī [lit. “wild/common willow”] = ṣafṣāf, and bīd-e mowallah [lit. “love-mad/disheveled willow,” i.e., S. babylonica].” The lexicographer Moḥammad Pādšāh, in his Ānand Rāj (comp. 1306/1888; I, p. 826), on the authority of a certain Majd-al-Dīn ʿAlī Qawsī, reports “seventeen kinds” of willow, of which he mentions only the following species and synonymous names: 1. bīd-mošk/mošk-bīd = gorba-bīd/bīd-e gorba (lit. cat willow) = bīd- mūš (lit. mouse willow, probably a corruption of bīd-mošk) = bīd-e balḵī; 2. sorḵ-bīd; 3. sīāh-bīd; 4. bīd-e mowallah = bīd-e majnūn = bīd-e ṭabarī (lit. the willow native to Ṭabarestān; but he explains, p. 828, s.v. bīd-e ṭabarī, that this is equated by some with bīd-mošk).

Following is a short account of the medicinal properties of the willow as indicated by some physicians-pharmacologists of the Islamic era. Concerning its pharmacodynamic “nature,” Abū Bakr Kāsānī, in his Persian adaptation and expansion (1st half of the 8th/14th century) of Bīrūnī’s Ṣaydana (I, pp. 281-83), when mentioning a view about the origin of the appellation ḵelāf (in Arabic also meaning “opposite, contrary”), says: “Anything bitter is warm by nature, save bīd, which is bitter but cold in nature; that is why it has been called ḵelāf in Arabic” (see Levey in Samarqandī, pp. 227-28, for the Sumerian and Akkadian cognates of the Ar. ḵelāf “willow”). Then (II, p. 848), on the authority of Abū Zayd Arrajānī (fl. 4th/10th cent.), he states that both the bīd and its blossoms are cold in the first degree, and dry in the second. According to Tamīmī (loc. cit.) inhaling the sweet smell of ḵelāf (= S. aegyptiaca) flowers is beneficial to hot- tempered people, because it moistens (i.e. refreshes) their brains and alleviates the violent bilious headaches to which they are susceptible (dohn al-ḵelāf, i.e., its “oil,” has the same virtues). Aḵawaynī Boḵārī (d. ca. 373/983?), author of the oldest extant medical treatise in Persian, Hedāyat al-motaʿallemīn, prescribes the use of the leaves of the willow (to which he always refers as bēd/bīd) and of the willow oil (rowḡan-e bīd) in some cases and ways which seem to derive from his personal experience (cf. Ebn Sīnā’s therapeutic description, loc. cit., which follows that of Dioscorides closely). He recommends willow leaves as follows: as part of a mixture to be applied on the head in case of cephalgia (p. 223); with vinegar and rosewater in a poultice (on the abdomen) in splenitis accompanied by fever and mouth dryness (p. 473); in a moraṭṭeb (moistening, refreshing) sitzbath (a decoction of willow leaves, violets, and nenuphars) for a kind of quotidian fever (p. 652); in summer the dwelling of a person sick of hectic fever should be cool and strewn with willow leaves and nenuphars (p. 665); a person affected by smallpox should be laid on a bed of willow leaves (p. 737); similarly a person sick of choleric fever should lie down or sleep in a cool place strewn with willow leaves, and as a prophylactic measure against pestilence the place should be fumigated with willow leaves, apple leaves, sandalwood, and camphor (p. 764). The uses of willow oil: in an ointment (also containing nenuphar oil, vinegar, etc.) to be applied on the head against a kind of cephalgia (p. 223); in another ointment (on the head) against sar-sām (phrenitis, brain fever) (p. 236); in case of tašannoj (convulsions) the body should be “moistened/refreshed” with a “cold” oil such as willow oil or nenuphar oil (p. 266). Aḵawaynī also uses “willow water” in one case: a cataplasm of pounded bāqelā (broad beans) soaked in fresh willow water as a remedy against entešār (pathological pupillary dilatation) (p. 284). Of course, the willow supposedly had medicinal uses more varied than those few mentioned by the Persian author. For example, Anṭākī (loc. cit.), who considers “the bitter willow . . . occurring mostly near streams and in cold regions” to be “cold in the second degree, moist in the second or in the first, and dry,” states that, as such, it is a hepatic deobstruent, that it curbs the heart palpitation, thirst, ardor, as well as the stomachal weakness caused by bodily heat and agues. Further, according to him, an ointment of its leaves cures itch and scabies and dissolves edemas; and its “gum” (see bīd-ḵešt below) sharpens the eyesight.

Of all those old therapeutic uses of different salices only a few have practically persisted through modern times in Iran. The following are the important ones.

Bīd-ḵešt. Also called bīd-angabīn/-angobīn (lit. willow nectar), it is a whitish, sweetish dried manna that exudes, according to Polak (p. 287, Pers. tr. p. 460), from the twigs or leaves of S. fragilis L. (bīd-e bīdḵeštī, etc.; see above). Just like their Roman and Greek predecessors who knew about it, the few authors of the Islamic era who have mentioned it do not seem to have been particularly attracted by it (cf., e.g., Ebn Sīnā, loc. cit.). Bīrūnī, (loc. cit.) says (on the authority of Rāzī and Ṭabarī): “The "milk" of ṣafṣāf causes the hair to fall. Some people nick the bark of the willow and collect a gum or milk from it; some people obtain it from its leaves when the tree is in bloom.” Classified by Schlimmer (p. 359) in the group of pectoral and demulcent mannas of Iran, it is still sometimes administered in popular medicine mainly as a ḵonakī (a cooling agent, Galenically speaking) in typhoid, in febrile labial herpes, and the like.

The ʿaraq (distillate) of bīd-mešk. Historically, “willow water” (āb-e bīd, māʾ al-ḵelāf) has been mentioned by a few Islamic authors (Aḵawaynī’s particular prescription was indicated above). Ebn Sīnā (loc. cit.) recommends “ḵelāf blossoms and water” as cephalic; Kāsānī (loc. cit.) reports that “bīd water unclogs liver occlusions and helps against jaundice.” However, not only the kind of the willow and the part(s) involved have not been specified, the nature of the “water” in question is not determined, either. But in modern times the bīd-mešk species and specifically the distillate obtained from its fragrant catkins have been emphasized. Earlier also known as šāh-bīd (lit. king willow), bahrāma (arabicized as bahrāmaj/bahrāmej), etc., bīd-mešk is usually identified with S. aegyptiaca L. (lit. Egyptian willow), which, despite its misleading Linnean designation, had its origin in southwest Asia and especially in Iran (see Meyerhof in Ebn Maymūm, p. 197, and Ṯābetī, 1326, pp. 23-24, both on the authority of Björn Floderus). Some authors, however, have dealt with it as S. caprea L. (e.g., Dymock et al., III, p. 364) and even as S. zygostemon Boiss., (e.g., Schlimmer, p. 497; for an explanation of the confusion of these closely allied species, see Ṯābetī, loc. cit.). Anyhow, bīd-mešk distillate, added to sugared water, is nowadays widely consumed in Iran just as a refreshing drink or as a ḵonakī in fevers and febrile diseases. The commercialized ʿaraq- e bīd-mešk is vaunted as a cordial (mofarreḥ) and nervine. Outside Iran, Dymock et al. (p. 366) remark that “the Persian settlers in India have introduced the flowers . . . and the distilled wateṛ . . . of S. Caprea, both of which are used by the upper classes of Mahometans and Parsees, who consider them to be cephalic and cardiacal, and use them as domestic remedies in almost every kind of slight ailment.”

Bīd as an antipyretic. Some willow species are rich in salicin, an antipyretic discovered only in 1825. As mentioned above, some older authors have noticed the efficacy of various uses of the willow in some fevers or febrile ailments. Until the introduction of the acetyl-salicylic acid (aspirin, etc.) and quinine into Iran in modern times and still nowadays in areas where local popular medicine prevails, an infusion of the bark of the young branches of some willow species (e.g., S. alba and S. triandra) was/is used as a remedy for malarial and choleric fever, rheumatic pains, and as a general febrifuge. As prescribed long ago by Aḵawaynī (see above), where willows are available, the practice still persists to lay the patients having a fit of typhoid or malarial fever on a bed of willow twigs and leaves.

Apart from the curative benefits of Salix, some willows are planted all over Iran as ornamental or shade trees, most especially bīd-e majnūn, the weeping willow, which can develop a majestic stature. As such the bīd is often mentioned in Persian poetry in descriptions of the spring. In addition, the pliant, purple or brown, twigs of some species, especially S. alba, S. elbursensis, S. pycnostachya, S. triandra, and S. wilhelmsiana, are used in basketry as a limited, local industry. Further, willow wood is—generally speaking —used in the humid Caspian provinces for fence stakes (because it withstands rot) and in most places in the steppelands as fire-wood.

Despite all those benefits, because willows are dioecious plants without showy flowers or edible fruit, many Persian poets have referred to bīd as a symbol of unfruitfulness, uselessness, and, by extension, unproductive ignorance—as typified in this distich of Saʿdī: “Every tree has a fruit, everybody a honar (talent, craft); but, poor me, I am hopeless and indigent like the willow.” Similarly, some oneirocritics have interpreted the willow as a decaying old man unable to have any offspring, or, in the case of women, as a pretty lady without any possession (see Ḵᵛābgozārī, p. 171). Another “foible” of the bīd, most probably the weeping willow with long flexible drooping twigs that flutter in the slightest breeze, has been used in Persian language and literature to form similes such as “to shiver like the willow” and “trembling like the willow,” indicating the intensity of somebody’s frailty and fright (for literary quotations, see Dehḵodā, Loḡat-nāma, s.v, bīd, cf. also the current Persian proverbial expression bīd-ī nīst ke az īn bādhā belarzad “(such and such a person) is not a willow to tremble at these winds,” i.e., he/she is too hardy to be frightened/upset by these trifles).

Bibliography:

Abū Bakr Rabīʿ b. Aḥmad Aḵawaynī Boḵārī, Hedāyat al-motaʿallemīn fi’l-ṭebb, ed. J. Matīnī, Mašhad, 1344 Š./1965.

Dāʾūd b. ʿOmar Anṭākī, Taḏkerat ūli’l-albāb wa’l-jāmeʿ le’l-ʿajab al-ʿojāb, 2 vols., Cairo, 1308-09/1890-91.

Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī, Ketāb al-ṣaydana fi’l-ṭebb (Al-Biruni’s Book on Pharmacy and Materia Medica), ed. M. Saʿīd and R. E. Elāhī, Karachi, 1973.

K. Javānšīr, Aṭlas-e gīāhān-e čūbī-e Īrān (Atlas of woody plants of Iran), Tehran, 1976.

W. Dymock, C. J. H. Warden, and D. Hooper, Pharmacographia Indica, 3 vols., London, etc., 1890-93.

Ebn al-Bayṭār, al-Jāmeʿ le-mofradāt al-adwīa wa’l-aḡḏīa, 4 pts. in 2 vols., Būlāq, 1291/1874.

Ebn Sīnā, Qānūn dar ṭebb II, Pers. tr. ʿA. Šarafkandī, Tehran, 1362 Š./1983.

Abū Bakr b. ʿAlī Kāsānī, tr. and adapt. of Bīrūnī’s Ketāb al-ṣaydana; ed. M. Sotūda and Ī. Afšār, 2 vols., Tehran, 1358 Š./1979.

Ḵᵛābgozārī, ed. Ī. Afšār, Tehran, 1346 Š./1967-68. Ebn Maymūn (Moses Maimonides), Šarḥ asmāʾ al-ʿoqqār, ed. M. Meyerhof, Cairo, 1940.

Ṣ. Mobayyen, Rostanīhā-ye Īrān: Felūr-e gīāhān-e āvandī (Flore des plantes vasculaires de l’Iran) II, Tehran, 1358 Š./1979.

Moḥammad Pādšāh, Farhang-e Ānand Rāj, ed. M. Dabīrsīāqī, 7 vols., 2nd ed., Tehran, 1363 Š./1984-85.

Jakob Eduard Polak, Persien. Das Land und seine Bewohner, Leipzig, 1865; Pers. tr. K. Jahādārī, Safar-nāma-ye Pūlāk (Īrān o īrānīān), Tehran, 1361 Š./1982.

Najīb-al-Dīn Moḥammad Samarqandī, The Medical Formulary of Al-Samarqandī, tr. and annot. by M. Levey and N. Khaledy, Philadelphia, 1967.

Ḥ. Ṯābetī, Deraḵtān-e jangalī-e Īrān, Tehran, 1326 Š./1948.

Idem, Jangalhā, deraḵtān o deraḵṭčahā-ye Īrān, Tehran, 1976.

Toḥfat al-aḥbāb, ed. and tr. H. P. J. Renaud and G. S. Colin, Paris, 1934.

Moḥammad Moʾmen Ḥosaynī Tonokābonī, Toḥfat al-moʾmenīn, Tehran, n.d. [1360 Š./1981?].

(Hūšang Aʿlam)

(Wilhelm Eilers, Hūšang Aʿlam)

Originally Published: December 15, 1989 ______

WISDOM LITERATURE

See ANDARZ, APHORISM, IRAN viii. PERSIAN LITERATURE (1) Pre-Islamic.

APHORISM

“short sentences drawn from long experience” to Cervantes, “the wisdom of many, the wit of one” to Lord Russell, the terms proverb, aphorism, maxim have evaded strict definition and demarcation.

APHORISM, “short sentences drawn from long experience” to Cervantes, “the wisdom of many, the wit of one” to Lord Russell, the terms proverb, aphorism, maxim have evaded strict definition and demarcation one from another. Aphorism in its literal sense, as a “sententious statement of the principles of physical science” ultimately derives from Hippocrates’ medical Aphorisms. In this sense, a very early specimen of Persian poetry, part of the Dāneš-nāma attributed to the poet Maysarī (Lazard, Premiers poètes II, pp. 186-88), is composed of aphorisms. However for the purposes of this article, which concerns the use of aphorisms in Persian folklore and literature, the prescriptive definition offered by John Gross has been adopted. Gross follows a path through “a wilderness of definitions” (The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, Oxford, 1983, pp. vii-viii), and arrives at a set of definitive characteristics based on his own experience and on general consensus. To Gross, aphorisms are statements about life that are “permanently and universally applicable;” they are “unlike proverbs” in that they have authors; and they are bits “of literature . . . that bear the stamp and style of the mind which created [them].” Finally, notes Gross, the aphorism “has to stand by itself,” in order to remain in the popular consciousness or to be anthologized, aphorisms have to be terse and witty, avoiding the trite and commonplace and occasionally becoming the vehicles of “a disenchanted view of human nature.” This notion of aphorism corresponds to Amīr-qolī Amīnī’s definition of the term maṯal (plural amṯāl) in the introduction to his dictionary of colloquial Persian expressions Farhang-e ʿaw(w)ām (Isfahan, 1339 Š./1960, p. 1). Amīnī speaks of aphoristic “wit” (baḏla-gūʾī); “aphorisms are composed of pithy expressions and pregnant allusions while at the same time are imbued with wit and humor.” Moḥammad-Taqī Moqtaderī concurs in this definition when he uses the term matalak (jibe) to characterize some of the proverbial expressions found in Afghan Persian (FIZ 7/1, 1338 Š./1959, p. 5). Terms traditionally used to mean “advice” (pand/naṣīḥat) and “wisdom” (ḥekmat) can be distinguished formally from maṯal. The difference between the terms naṣīḥat/pand and maṯal is implicit in Saʿdī’s fifth essay “Dar naṣīḥat al-molūk” (Advice for kings): “Never feel safe from anyone who lives in fear of you, . . . ; and proverbs tell us (dar maṯal ast): " To undermine the base of a wall and to remain stationary’ and " to kill a snake’s young and sit carefree’ are against the counsel of wisemen” (Kollīyāt-e Saʿdī, ed. M. ʿA. Forūḡī, p. 82 no. 83). While naṣīḥat is straightforward and, at times, prolix leaving nothing to allusion, maṯal wisdom is implicit, depending on the efficiency of the mot juste and on the stimulus of contradiction for its pleasure and its sting.

In many cases the maṯal is a highly compressed form of anecdote; it is the visible edge of a folkloric narrative once current, but long forgotten. Aware of the representational nature of the maṯal, modern anthologists of Persian aphorisms, such as Amīr-qolī Amīnī (Dāstānhā-ye amṯāl, Isfahan, 1324 Š./1945), Abu’l-Qāsem Enǰavī Šīrāzī (Tamṯīl wa maṯal, Tehran, 1352 Š./1973), and Aḥmad Šāmlū (Ketāb-e Kuča, Tehran, l357- Š./1978-) have supplied the anecdotes that support and explain the wisdom they have collected. The fact that the Persian maṯal implicates so much local legend and lore has caused researchers to postulate a direct correspondence between proverbial wisdom literature and national character (e.g., see Aḥmad Bahmanyār, “Maṯal,” Yaḡma 1/10, 1327 Š./1948, pp. 433-37). Expansion and explication of the laconic reference in Persian literature, however, predates the systematic work of modern scholars. The Mirror for Princes Qābūs-nāma (ed. G-Ḥ. Yūsofī, Tehran, 1346 Š./1967, pp. 208-09) reports that when the Ghaznavid Sultan Maḥmūd threatened to unleash his elephant battalions on Baghdad, the Caliph al-Qāder replied with three Arabic letters: ʾa , lām, mīm. With all of Maḥmūd’s advisers stumped by the riddle of the three letters, a young man who had not even reached the age of courtierhood realized that they were the first three letters of Koran 105:1: “Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with the owners of the Elephant?” This concise counter stopped Maḥmūd from attacking and earned its exegete a robe of honor.

To many cases, the originality of classical poets and prose stylists can be seen in the way they use traditional wisdom literature to suit their own artistic needs. The Qābūs- nāma anecdote illustrates one way in which Koranic citation, in particular, and Arabic sayings, in general, contribute to the aphoristic style of classical Persian literature. Both Koranic verse and the Hadith, according to Badīʿ-al-zamān Forūzānfar (Aḥādīṯ-e Maṯnawī, Tehran, 1347 Š./1968, pp. v-vi), served as amṯāl to the madrasa-educated audiences of mystical and homiletic Persian poetry. In his discourse on rhetoric, Neẓāmī ʿArūżī Samarqandī (Čahār maqāla, ed. M. Qazvīnī, Leiden, 1910, p. 23) recommends Koranic diction as the ultimate in concise expression and inimitability of sense, the very requirements of a good maṯal. The Koran itself, in fact, defines such a maṯal: “Seest thou not how Allah coineth a similitude (maṯal): A goodly saying, as a goodly tree, its root set firm, its branches reaching into heaven” (14:24). In classical Persian prose and poetic texts, Koranic verse and Hadith are either adopted wholesale to support an ad verecundiam argument, as appeals to indisputable authority, or find their way into Persian through translation. To avoid ambiguity and perhaps to increase the aphoristic density of their works, some writers adopt the tedious practice of yoking the Persian translation of a Koranic verse or a Hadith to its original; e.g. (in this case a Hadith), “The tree of the sword, under whose shade is heaven [Persian], for " Heaven is under the shade of swords’ [Arabic]” (Šehāb-al-dīn Zaydarī Nasavī, Nafṯat al-maṣdūr, pp. 1, 129). Abundant examples of the use of the Koranic maṯal in classical poetry are found in Taḥlīl-e ašʿār-e Nāṣer-e Ḵosrow, by M. Moḥaqqeq (Tehran, 1349 Š./1970, pp. 1-119).

Another rich source of aphoristic inspiration in classical Persian literature was the so- called “Andarz Literature” (q.v.; see The Letter of Tansar, tr. M. Boyce, Rome, 1968, pp. 19-20 and the article by J. P. De Menasce in Camb. Hist. Iran III/2, pp. 1166-95). This body of wisdom literature flourished under the Sasanians, and several andarz-nāmas bearing the names of Sasanian kings and priests have survived. The poet who relied most heavily on this type of literature and was perhaps most responsible for turning the verities of Zoroastrian wisdom into aphoristic poetry was Ferdowsī. The Šāh-nāma mentions the Andarz-nama of Anōšīravān (see Dehḵodā, s.v. andarz-nāma) and serves generous helpings of Bozorgmehr advice to the Sasanian king (Šāh-nāma, ed. Mohl, bk. VI, 1101-1605). According to Dehḵodā’s Amṯāl o ḥekam (Tehran, II, pp. 623-25, III, p. 1338, IV, pp. 2058-59) the Šāh-nāma has contributed more than fifty ways of expressing the notion “life has its ups and downs, so accept both with equanimity” to the corpus of Persian aphoristic literature. Likewise, a traditional adage of andarz literature, the idea that death is inevitable, is expressed in some fifty-three Šāh-nāma aphorisms (Amṯāl o ḥekam I, pp. 150-56). Another notion to which Ferdowsī the aphorist and other classical authors were attracted and that is common to both the Sasanian and Koranic aphoristic traditions, is the misogynist’s view that women are men manqué, flawed ab initio and therefore neither to be trusted nor obeyed; e.g., “Women, their name is deemed to be so low, for never do they food or sleep forgo,” ibid., II, p. 919). On the other hand, a man’s good nature, his only legacy, in the aphorist’s Šāh-nāma rests on his actions, ibid., I, pp. 199-200).

Like Ferdowsī, Saʿdī also made ample use of the simple wisdom of andarz in his contributions to Persian aphorisms. The eighth chapter of the Golestān (Dar ādāb-e ṣoḥbat) is devoted to rhymed prose sayings that reflect on generosity, money, life, death, kingship, asceticism, etc. As Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār suggests (Sabk-šenāsī, Tehran, l349 Š./1970, III, p. 111) because Saʿdī was not a court poet, rather an itinerant sage who depended on conducting learned discussions of religion and morality to earn a living, he habitually resorted to the well-turned aphorism in his didactic writings. “Musk is what our nose tells us not what the perfumer sells us” and “So long as gold will well do the trick, to risk one’s life would not be politic” (Kollīyāt, pp. 280 and 290) are remembered not only because they harbor some universal truth but because they appeal to the ear and acquaint one with Saʿdī’s particular view of life. As with most proverbial wisdom, Persian aphorisms are not free of ambiguity. Commenting on Western proverbial literature, John Crossan writes: “For every " Two heads are better than one’ there is always another " Too many cooks spoil the broth’” (Raid on the Articulate, New York, 1976, pp. 58-59). The 10th century poet Daqīqī qualified “patience shall have its reward” by adding that one needed two lifetimes to realize the truth of the saying (Lazard, Premiers poètes II, p. 148). The 14th-century Persian satirist ʿObayd Zākānī exploited this intrinsic ambiguity of simple wit and wisdom to produce his collection of antiaphorisms, the Resāla-ye ṣad pand. In effect, Zākānī turned the goodly tree of maṯal upside down so that its roots were in the air and its leaves trailed in the dirt. He turns the commonplace “Honesty is the best policy” into “As long as you can, never tell the truth, so that you do not weigh on people’s heart and so that they will not take offense needlessly” (Kollīyāt, ed. ʿA. Eqbāl, Tehran, 1341 Š./1964, p. 205). Ferdowsī’s saws about the inevitability of death in Zakanian dress become “In any event, avoid death, for death has been considered unseemly” (makrūh, i.e., doctrinally frowned upon) (Kollīyāt, p. 210). With his devil’s dictionary of obscene advice, Zākānī made the process of the aphorization of both andarz and Koranic wisdom come full circle and put subsequent adagists on their guard against platitudes.

In Persian literature, then, the successful aphorist would typically convert the raw and plainly-stated wise saying into something both memorable and quotable. Not merely content to sprinkle their works with received bits of advice, the great poets and prose writers were distinguished by their tailoring of traditional wisdom into something original, something that suited their own particular literary needs. This process, known as tamaṯṯol, has preserved many of the most important lessons taught by the culture of Persian speaking and reading peoples. Anthologies capture instances of tamaṯṯol and gather them alphabetically or arrange them under traditional subject headings.

Bibliography: An early example of collected advice in Persian literature, Pand-nāma-ye Mātorīdī, was edited and published by Ī. Afšār in FIZ 9/1-4, 1340 Š./1961, pp. 46-67. For a detailed look at the syllabus of ʿelm al-amṯāl, see Šams-al-dīn Moḥammad Āmolī, Nafāʾes al-fonūn fī ʿarāyes al-ʿoyūn I, Tehran, 1377 Š./1957-58, pp. 182-234. The influence and proliferation of Biblical aphorisms in classical Persian texts is documented in Nafṯat al-maṣdūr by Šehāb-al-dīn Zaydarī Nasavī (ed. Yazdegerdī, Tehran, 1965, pp. 29, 173-75) and in Tārīḵ-e Bayhaqī (2nd ed., p. 448). A classical text that demonstrates a high degree of Persian and Arabic aphoristic density is Abu’l-Maʿālī Naṣrallāh Monšī’s Persian translation of Kalīla wa Demna, (ed. M. Mīnovī, Tehran, 1351 Š./1972, e.g., see p. 17). The movement of Greek maxims into Arabic is studied and amply documented in Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic Translation by Dimitri Gutas (New Haven, CT, 1975). On Saʿdī’s use of advice literature, see Ḥekmat-e Saʿdī by Kayḵosrow Haḵāmanešī (Tehran, 2535 = 1353 Š./1974, pp. 107-17). A discussion of Sanāʾī’s homiletic poetry is found in Of Piety and Poetry by J. T. P. De Bruijn, (Leiden, 1983, pp. 164-71). More recent anthologies include: Dehḵodā’s Amṯāl o ḥekam (4 vols., Tehran, 1352 Š./1973), a compendium of amṯāl and aphoristic poems generally accompanied by short explanations, ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān Ṭāleb Tabrīzī’s late 19th-century translation of the Counsels of Marcus Aurelius (published by the Dār al-Fonūn), and Reżā Amīr Ḥosaynī’s review and partial translation of The Cynic’s Dictionary of Amoral Advice by Jonathon Green (London, 1984) in Našr-e dāneš 5/2, February-March, 1985, pp. 54-56. The works of M. ʿA. Jamālzāda are also very rich in amṯāl. See also Mošār, Fehrest I, cols. 232-33.

Recently an annotated bibliography of anthologies of Persian aphorisms, “Ketābšenāsī-e dāstānhā wa zabānzadhā-ye Īrānī,” was published in Dāstānhā wa zabānzadhā-ye Lorī by Ḥamīd Īzadpanāh (Tehran, 1362 Š./1983, pp. 145-81). Īzadpanāh’s bibliography which was compiled with the help of, among others, Moḥammad-Taqī Dānešpažūh, Moḥammad-Reżā Šafīʿī Kadkanī, Ṣādeq Kīā, and Fatḥallāh Moǰtabāʾī, describes sixty published and manuscript anthologies of advice literature and works on aphorisms, ranging from traditional compilations like Nawāder al-amṯāl of Moḥammad Tāškandī Naqšbandī (Paris, Bib. Nat. ms. Suppl. Pers. 1547 [Cat. Bib. Nat. IV, pp. 89-90]) to works on folklore such as Farhang-e ʿawām-e Āmol by Mahdī Partovī Āmolī (Tehran, 1358 Š./1979). A recent publication that appeared after Īzadpanāh’s bibliography is Maṯalhā-ye Šūštarī by Jalāl-al-dīn Emām Jomʿa (Tehran, Bonyād-e Nīšābūr, n.d.).

(P. Sprachman)

Originally Published: December 15, 1986

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WOLSKI, JÓZEF distinguished Polish historian, whose research has had an enduring effect on the study of ancient Iranian history.

WOLSKI, JÓZEF (b. Tarnów, Poland, 19 March 1910; d. Kraków, 2 October 2008), distinguished Polish historian, whose research has had an enduring effect on the study of ancient Iranian history. He completed the famed King Jan III Sobieski gymnasium in Kraków. After graduating from Jagiellonian University (1928-32), he became an assistant of Prof. Ludwik Piotrowicz who had studied classical philology at Jagiellonian University with K. Morawski and then in Berlin with Eduard Meyer and Otto Hirschfeld (1912-14). E. Meyer, a historian of the Graeco-Roman world and of the Orient, largely influenced L. Piotrowicz. In turn, Piotrowicz’s methodology and his broad perspective of historical processes (his research embraced Greek and Roman, as well as Near Eastern, history) made a strong impression on young Wolski’s scholarly formation and his later attitude toward research.

Wolski’s master’s thesis titled “Arsaces I, the founder of the Parthian state,” was accepted as a doctoral dissertation (1936). He published it in Polish in the journal Eos (part I: Eos 38, 1937, pp. 492-511; part II: Eos 39, 1938, pp. 244-266). Later, in 1974, it appeared in French: “Arsace Iᵉʳ, fondateur de l’État parthe,” in Commémoration Cyrus, 1974). The topic, lying at the intersection of Iranian and Hellenistic history, was promising, and its detailed scrutiny yielded new findings. Due to difficulties in reconciling the source evidence, the figure of Arsaces has given rise to contradictory views; some scholars (such as W. W. Tarn) have even doubted his existence. Contrary to the scholarly communis opinio, Wolski demonstrated that the accounts of Strabo, Pompeius Trogus (in the epitome of Justin), and Appian give a sound base for a reconstruction of the establishment of the Arsacid kingdom. These ancient authors show that the subjugation of Parthia proper by Arsaces I and the establishment of Arsacid rule in Khorasan took place during the so-called War of the Brothers fought between Seleucus II and Antiochus Hierax (ca. 240/239-237 BCE). At the same time Wolski rejected the then-preferred evidence given by Arrian, establishing a new chronology of events. Wolski’s dissertation not only marks the real beginnings of Parthian studies in Poland, but it also represents a significant turning point in the study of Parthian and Seleucid history altogether, because his work set modern research in a wholly new direction. A topic often considered peripheral to ancient history would become a matter of paramount importance.

The young, energetic scholar, supported by Piotrowicz, worked on his habilitation concerning the collapse of Seleucid rule in Iran in the third century BCE. The 60-page dissertation was readied in 1938 and the first of two parts was published in 1939 (“The collapse of Seleucid rule in Iran in the 3rd century BCE,” Eos 40, 1939, pp. 23-47). Before World War II, in 1939, Wolski sent German translations of his doctoral dissertation and a portion of his habilitation to three distinguished scholars: W. W. Tarn (Cambridge), E. Bickerman (Sorbonne), and M. Rostovtzeff (Yale University). While Tarn and Bickerman remained rather reluctant to accept new proposals, M. Rostovtzeff wrote Wolski in August 1939 acknowledging his achievements, and agreed with his new interpretation of Iran’s history in the third century BCE. He invoked Wolski’s findings in his opus magnum The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (Oxford, 1941, p. 1425).

In the fall of 1939, Wolski was scheduled to leave on a scholarship in France. Tragically, Poland was treacherously assaulted in September 1939 by Nazi Germany and its allied Soviet Union. On 6 November 1939, the Germans arrested almost 200 professors of Jagiellonian University, including Wolski. He was first incarcerated in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then in Dachau. In 1941 he was released from the camps and returned to Kraków. From 1942/3 he taught at underground Jagiellonian University, an activity which was punishable by severe repressions, including death.

In June 1946, Wolski published his postdoctoral dissertation in French (“L’effondrement de la domination des Séleucides en Iran au III-e siècle av. J.C.,” Kraków, 1947) and won habilitation at Jagiellonian University. At the height of Sovietization and communist terror (1945–1956), Wolski and his family shared the same fate of all Poles as their country fell under the despotism of the Soviet Union and its backers. Despite such obstacles, Wolski devoted himself to scholarly pursuits. In 1945 he became a member of the Historical Commission of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU). In 1952, communist authorities dissolved the PAU. In 1946, Wolski started work at Łódź University, where he was appointed Professor Extraordinary in 1948. He was removed from his post, however, and replaced by a member of the communist party in 1952. He next found himself at Wrocław University (1952-58). After L. Piotrowicz suddenly died, Wolski took the Chair of Ancient History at Jagiellonian University (1958), which he headed until his retirement in 1980. In 1962, he became Professor Ordinary. He had an impressive record in research and teaching, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and History at Jagiellonian University (1965-68) and as Chairman of the Committee for the Study of Antique Culture at the Polish Academy of Sciences (1977-79).

Beginning in 1960, Wolski became deeply involved in direct international contacts, especially with scholars in Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, and Hungary. His first foreign visit was made possible by a scholarship from the Ford Foundation (1960). He traveled for three months in Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and France. It enabled him to make the personal acquaintance with such scholars as A. Simonetta, G. Le Rider, and A. Aymard. The tour ended with a visit in Germany, where Wolski was cordially welcomed by H. Bengtson at Würzburg. In the decades that followed, Wolski attended many international conferences and was invited to lecture all over Europe. Wolski and Franz Altheim, a German polymath active in Halle before World War II and then in Berlin, established a long and fruitful working relationship. F. Altheim specialized (together with his adopted daughter, Ruth Stiehl) in the history of the ancient Mediterranean world, Iran, and Central Asia. Altheim saw to it that Wolski’s major works were published in German (in Der Hellenismus in Mittelasien, Darmstadt, 1969). A true friendship likewise developed between Wolski and J. Harmatta, a Hungarian orientalist. Wolski particularly valued his friendship with the Belgian archeologist, L. Vanden Berghe. In Europe Wolski’s name became a hallmark of advanced Polish research into the ancient world. He always published in renowned scholarly journals, including Eos, Iranica Antiqua, Klio, Historia, Syria, Berytus, Tyche, among others. His output comprises more than 200 articles, dozens of reviews, and several books. After the fall of Poland’s communist dictatorship, Wolski enthusiastically joined in the work of a restored Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU) in 1989. This in part led him to publish his research in the form of books, which until now had appeared as articles. The first was L’Empire des Arsacides (Acta Iranica 32, Leuven, 1993), followed by The Seleucids: The Decline and Fall of Their Empire (Kraków, 1999, also published in Polish with supplements). The last volume was Seleucid and Arsacid Studies. A Progress Report on Developments in Source Research (Kraków, 2003).

Already in his doctoral dissertation, Wolski disproved beliefs then prevailing in scholarship, by employing a sound methodology based on a rigorous philological analysis of determining the best source tradition of a given subject. By drawing on his creativity and skill as a scholar, Wolski was able to reconstruct historical processes which enabled him to establish their broad political implications. Because of his use of both exacting methodology and refined historical approach, many of his studies remain of fundamental importance to the field. Wolski’s basic approach is best articulated in the works concerning the beginnings of the Parthian state, but he also attempted to analyze a number of other political issues and social as well as cultural aspects in Parthian history (see, e.g., “L’aristocratie parthe et les commencemets du féodalisme en Iran,” 1967; “Die Parther und ihre Beziehungen zur griechisch-römischen Kultur,” 1983). He devoted much attention to the eastern frontiers of Parthia, consistently maintaining that Parthian history should be seen as closely linked to peoples of Central Asia (cf., e.g., “Les débuts de l’Etat parthe et ses contacts avec l’Asie Centrale,” 1996). Wolski kept working on Parthian history throughout his life, adding new arguments and often engaging in discussions with specialists representing different stands. Wolski stressed the significance of the Parthian epoch in the whole history of Western and Central Asia and highly estimated achievements of the Arsacids, demonstrating that they were the true heirs of the Achaemenids and supporters of Iranian traditions. His achievement was most firmly to reinforce the growing conviction of the high importance of Iranian states in ancient history.

Many of Wolski’s works concerned the Hellenistic period, especially the roles played by Alexander the Great and the Seleucids in Iran (e.g., “Alexandre le Grand et l’Iran,” 1985– 1988; “L’hellénisme et l’Iran,” 1989), while others dealt with the Achaemenids and the Sasanians (“Darius III's peace offer to Alexander of Macedon after the battle of Issus, 333 BC: an historical evaluation,” 2004; “Arsakiden und Sasaniden,” 1969). Wolski devoted much study to the history of the Greeks in Bactria (Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan), a subject closely linked with his interests in the Parthians and the Seleucids (“La problème de la fondation de l’État gréco-bactrien,” 1982). While Wolski’s research tended to focus on Hellenistic and Parthian Iran, he also published studies on other subjects in ancient history, especially on Greece and Rome. In his polyhistoric approach, he consciously followed the heritage of L. Piotrowicz and E. Meyer. He had a particular liking for the history of the relations between Greece and Persia in the sixth and fifth century BCE (“L'influence des guerres médiques sur la lutte politique en Grèce,” 1971; “Medismos et son importance en Grèce à l'époque des guerres médiques,” 1973). Another area of interest to him was Roman political relations with Iran (“Sur l’authenticité des traités romano-perses,” 1992) and the causes of the fall of Rome seen by analogy with the history of Iran (the concept of war on two fronts) (“Le rôle et l'importance des guerres de deux fronts dans la décadence de l'Empire romain,” 1980). Wolski strongly accentuated a need to use various sources in historical research, including archeological, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence. It is little wonder then, that his former students include no small number of scholars who integrate into their craft such diverse fields as history, numismatics, epigraphy, and archeology. Wolski also stressed that the Western approach to the history of Iran must be free from exaggerated Eurocentrism (cf. “Antike Geschichtsschreibung und der Alte Orient im Lichte der Enteuropäisierungtendenz,” 1984). Wolski’s publications found readership in Iran: the book L’Empire des Arsacides (Leuven, 1993) was translated into Persian (Šāhanšāhi-ye Aškāni, Tehran 1386 Š./2007).

Wolski reviewed more than 50 doctoral dissertations, 40 habilitations, and 30 professorial qualifications. His students are engaged in numerous learned bodies and institutions throughout Poland. Despite his concentration camp experiences, he succeeded in keeping very fit, and almost to the end of his days he remained an active scholar. In 2004, Wolski published his memoirs, Kraków comes first (Kraków), an impressive work to conclude the life of an equally impressive man.

Bibliography:

Bibliographies of Wolski’s studies.

E. Dabrowa and M. Salamon, in Hortus Historiae, Kraków, 2010, pp. 5-17.

Obituaries.

M. Salamon, “Józef Wolski. Expert in Parthian History, Historian of Antiquity,” Palamedes 3, 2008, pp. 9-16.

M. J. Olbrycht, “Józef Wolski 1910-2008; an Epitaph,” in M. J. Olbrycht, ed., Orientis Splendor. Studies in Memory of Józef Wolski (=Anabasis. Studia Classica et Orientalia 1), Rzeszów, 2010, pp. 7-17.

Select list of Wolski’s publications on Iran.

“Arsaces I, założyciel państwa partyjskiego,” 38, 1937, pp. 492-513; Eos 39, 1938, pp. 244-266 (review by H. Markowski, Philologische Wochenschrift, 60, 1940, pp. 99-104).

“Załamanie się panowania Seleucydów w Iranie w III w. przed Chr. (part 1),” Eos 40, 1939, pp. 23-47.

“Arsace II,” Eos 41, 1940-1946, pp. 156-65.

“L’effondrement de la domination des Séleucides en Iran au III-e siècle av. J.C.,” in Bulletin International de l’Academic Polonaise des sciences et des lettres. Classe de philologie-Classe d’histoire et de philosophie, Supplément 5, Cracovie, 1947, pp. 13-70.

“Studia nad organizacją monarchii Arsacydów,” in Polska Akademia Umiejętności. Sprawozdania z czynności i posiedzeń 48, Kraków 1947, pp. 24-26

“Le problème d’Andragoras,” Ephemeridis Instituti Archaeologici Bulgarici [Bulletin de l'Institut Archéologique Bulgare] 16 (=Serta Kazaroviana), Sofia, 1950, pp. 111-14.

“Chronologia ruchów separatystycznych w Iranie w III w. przed Chr.,” Polska Akademia Umiejętności. Sprawozdania z czynności i posiedzeń 51, Kraków 1950, pp. 285-288.

“Les études sur le texte de Strabon,” in Charisteria Thaddaeo Sinko oblata, Varsaviae, Wratislaviae 1951, pp. 385-394. “Remarques critiques sur les institutions des Arsacides,” Eos 46, 1952/1953, pp. 59-82.

“Parthian and Iranian Titles in the Parchment No. 10 from Dura,” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 7-8, 1954, pp. 285-294.

“Pausanias et le problème de la politique spartiate (480-470 av. J.-C),” Eos 47, 1954, pp. 75-94.

“The Decay of the Iranian Empire of the Seleucids and the Chronology of the Parthian Beginnings,” Berytus 12, 1956-1957, pp. 35-52.

“Pausanias et le problème de la politique spartiate” = “Pausanias und das Problem der spartanischen Politik,” Bibliotheca classica orientalis, 1958, no. 6, pp. 353-55.

“L’historicité d’Arsace Ier,” Historia 8, 1959, pp. 222-38.

“L’état parthe des Arsacides. Essai de reconstitution de son évolution intérieure,” Palaeologia 7, 1959, pp. 325-32.

“Z problematyki badań nad historią hellenistyczną,” Meander 14, 1959, pp. 527-38.

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“L’Arménie dans la politique du Haut-Empire Parthe (env. 175-87 av. n. è.),” Iranica Antiqua 15, 1980, pp. 251-67.

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“Les rapports romano-parthes et la question de l’Arménie,” Ktèma 8, 1983, pp. 269-77.

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“Sur le «philhellénisme» des Arsacides,” Gerión 1, 1983, pp. 145-56. “Les monarchies hellénistiques et les Parthes,” in Actes du VIIe Congrès de la Fédération Internationale des Associations d’Études Classiques I, Budapest 1983, pp. 367-79.

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“Thémistocle, la construction de la flotte athénienne et la situation internationale en Méditerranée,” Rivista Storicha dell’Antichità 13-14, 1983-84, pp. 179-92.

“Le titre de “roi des rois” dans l'idéologie monarchique des Arsacides,” AAASH 30, 1982- 84, pp. 159-66.

“Les Séleucides et l’héritage d’Alexandre le Grand en Iran,” in Studi Ellenistici 1, Pisa 1984, pp. 9-20.

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“Die abhängige Bevölkerung im Partherreich,” in Antike Abhängigkeitsformen, Berlin 1985, 80-87.

“L’Asie Mineure et la Méditerranée dans la politique des Parthes,” in XVe Conference internationale d’Études Classiques «Eirene» (=Thracia 7), Sofia 1985, 31-36.

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“Hérodote et la construction de la flotte athénienne par Thémistocle,” Storia della storiografia 7, 1985, pp. 113-22.

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“L’archéologie et l’histoire ancienne: l’Iran à la lumière des nouvelles sources archéologiques,” in Centenary of Mediterranean Archaeology, 1897—1997, Kraków, 1999, pp. 129-34.

Dzieje i upadek imperium Seleucydów, Kraków, 1999 (with two supplements: M .J. Olbrycht, “Seleucids and the culture of their epoch,” pp. 135-208; J. Bodzek, “The Catalogue of Seleukid coins in the National Museum of Kraków,” pp. 209-35).

“Znaczenie pewnych elementów epigrafìcznych i ikonograficznych na monetach partyjskich dla rekonstrukcji procesu historycznego,” Notae Numismaticae 3/4, Kraków, 1999, pp. 95-101.

“Servitia, ich funkcja i znaczenie w społeczeństwie irańskim okresu Arsacydów,” in Electrum 4, 2000, pp. 95-100.

“Arsace Ier, était-il le premier roi couronné des Parthes?” in Les civilisations du bassin méditerranéen. Hommages à Joachim Śliwa, Kraków, 2000, pp. 455-58.

“Notes from the History of Hellenistic Propaganda: Seleucids vs Arsacids,” in Studia Archaeologica. Prace dedykowane Profesorowi Januszowi A. Ostrowskiemu, Kraków, 2001, pp. 411-15.

“Remarques critiques concernant le progrés de la méthodologie antique,” in Le monde romain et ses periphéries sous la République et sous l’Empire (Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis - MMCCLII, Antiquitas – 25), Wrocław, 2001, pp. 173-77.

The Seleucids: The Decline and Fall of Their Empire, Kraków, 1999 (Polska Akademia Umiejętności, Rozprawy Wydziału Historyczno-Filozoficznego, T. 91).

“Remarques critiques concernant le progrés de la méthodologie antique,” in Le monde romain et ses périphéries sous la République et sous l’Empire (Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis 2252, Antiquitas 25) Wrocław 2001, pp. 173-77.

“Le classi inferiori della popolazione nel regno dei Parti,” in Erkos: studi in onore di Franco Sartori, Padova, 2003, pp. 285-91.

“Schöpften Strabon und Justinus aus der gleichen Quelle bei der Darstellung der frühen Geschichte Parthiens,” Latomus 62, 2003, pp. 373-80.

Seleucid and Arsacid Studies. A Progress Report on Developments in Source Research, Kraków 2003 (Polska Akademia Umiejętności, Rozprawy Wydziału Historyczno- Filozoficznego, T. 100).

“Morze Egejskie terenem konfliktów państw greckich,” in Portolana. Studia Mediterranea 1, Kraków 2004, pp. 41-46.

Šāhanšahi-ye Aškāni, Tehran, 1386 Š/2007 (Persian translation of: L’Empire des Arsacides, 1993).

Reviews.

Ph. Łoziński, The Original Homeland of the Parthians, s'Gravenhage 1959, in Gnomon 32, 1960, pp. 374-75.

J. Reinhardt, Weltgeschichte der Standortentwicklung der Wirtschaft in der Klassengesellschaft I, Berlin 1961, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung 84, 1963, pp. 164-66.

K.-H. Ziegler, Die Beziehungen zwischen Rom und dem Partherreich, Wiesbaden, 1964, in Orientalische Literaturzeitung 61, 1966, 18-20.

H. Kreißig, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Seleukidenreich, Berlin, 1978, in Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 11, 1981, pp. 137-40.

K. Schippmann, Grundzüge der parthischen geschichte, Darmstadt, 1980, in Gnomon 54, 1982, pp. 43-46.

G.L. Hammond, Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in Antiquity, Princeton, 1981, in Gnomon 55, 1983, pp. 262-63.

D. M. Lewis, Sparta and Persia, Leiden, 1977, in Folia Orientalia 22, 1981-84, pp. 305-6.

M. Schottky, Media Atropatene und Grossarmenien in hellenistischer Zeit, Bonn 1989, Latomus 53, 1993, pp. 439-440.

(Marek Jan Olbrycht)

______

WOMEN i. In Pre-Islamic Persia

WOMEN i. IN PRE-ISLAMIC PERSIA

Few primary literary texts document the activities of royal and non-royal women in pre- Islamic Persia. To learn about these, we are largely dependent on the often hostile secondary sources of the Greek and Roman periods which, however, are of limited historical value, as they tend to focus on particular aspects of the lives of royal Persian women or use specific descriptions for historiographical purposes. Likewise, historical texts of the early Islamic period have to be used with caution. In contrast, the archeological material available to us underscores the fact that depictions of women were available on a variety of media throughout the pre-Islamic empires, highlighted in the importance of the representation of royal women at the Sasanian court.

i. Achaemenid period.

(1) Titles for royal women.

(2) Activities at court.

(3) Marriage alliances.

(4) Female workers.

(5) Representation of women.

ii. Parthian period.

(1) Introduction.

(2) Titles for Parthian royal women.

(3) Activities at court.

(4) Representations of Parthian women.

iii. Sasanian period.

(1) Introduction.

(2) Titles for royal women.

(3) Marriage alliances. (4) Activities at court.

(5) Representations of Sasanian women.

i. ACHAEMENID PERIOD

(1) Titles for royal women. The most invaluable source for the discussion of women in the Achaemenid period are the Persepolis Fortification Tablets (PFT). They shed light on the titles for royal women, as well as on their economic position. The PFT also offer unique insight into the position of female laborers who were recipients of food rations at Persepolis. While other Near Eastern sources can complement some of the information provided in the PFT, it is predominantly the Greek historical sources and, occasionally, biblical references, which allow a discussion of the position of women at the Achaemenid court.

The PFT attest to the fact that the Elamite title dukšiš (princess) was used collectively for Achaemenid royal women. Their individual status was determined by their relation to the king, and accordingly the women were referred to as “the king’s mother” (Elam. *sunki ammari), “the king’s wife” (Elam.*sunki irtiri), and “the king’s daughter” (Elam. sunki pakri). These terms of reference follow Assyrian and Babylonian usages, attested in the terms ummi šarri, aššat šarri, and mārat šarri. Babylonian sources dated to the Achaemenid period also referred to a woman belonging to the royal household as “woman of the palace” (Bab. ša ekalli; BE 9 28.50).

Greek sources frequently mention the existence of royal concubines (Gr. pallakai) at the Persian court, especially emphasizing their considerable number: 300 according to Heracleides of Kyme (FGrH 689 F1), and 360 according to Dinon (FGrH 690 F27). Yet the status of these women was in no way compatible to that of Greek concubines. The royal concubines, or women of the king, often were of high rank, but due to their non- Persian descent they were excluded from marrying the king, and their offspring—in principle—could not succeed to the throne. Other women entered the king’s palace as captives:

“The 14th [year] (345 BCE) of Umasu who is called Artaxerxes (Artaxerxes III): In the month Tishri the prisoners which the king took [from] Sidon [were brought] to Babylon and Susa. … On the 16th day the […] women, prisoners from Sidon, which the king sent to Babylon, on that day they entered the palace of the king.” (ABC, Chronicle 9). (2) Activities at court. While the accommodation of the women of the court in a designated area within the palace complex is likely, no written or archeological evidence allows the suggestion that they lived in the seclusion of a harem. On the contrary, royal women were among the few people at the court who had direct access to the king and joined him at breakfast and dinner (Heracleides of Kyme FGrH 689 F2 apud Athenaios, 4.145c; cf. Xen., Cyr. 1.3.4; Plut., Art. 5.5;). They enjoyed economic independence and were able to travel in their own right, as well as in the king’s entourage, accompanying the king on campaigns and possibly on hunts (Heracleides of Kyme FGrH 689 F1). Together with the royal concubines, the wives of the Persian nobles, and their female attendants, they took a designated position within the royal train and were provided with their own personnel and royal guards. Presumably the women’s tents were also set up in an appropriate space during encampment. Information about women’s participation in royal banquets is contradictory. While Herodotus (5th century BCE) relates the story of Persian envoys at the Macedonian court, demanding the presence of women during a banquet, claiming it to be a custom in their own country (5.18.2), the Book of Esther (1:9- 12; cf. Dan. 5:2,10) implies that the king’s wife and the women of the court celebrated a feast separate from the king’s banquet.

One of the most intriguing issues revealed in the archeological sources is the fact that royal women are depicted holding audiences which are reminiscent of the king’s audience scene from the apadāna reliefs. As is known from the Book of Nehemiah (2.6), the king’s wife could be present at royal audiences, but the archeological evidence reveals that they also held their own council. This may be a custom adopted from the Elamite court, as is suggested in a seal impression on some PFT. The seal PFS 77* (Garrison and Root, in press) is carved in Neo-Elamite style and shows a woman enthroned, accompanied by a female servant standing behind her and receiving a female visitor, who is separated from the enthroned woman by an incense burner. A similar scene is depicted on a cylinder seal carved in Achaemenid court style (FIGURE 1; cf. Spycket, fig. 7; Brosius, 2005), and on an unpublished seal in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (acc. no. C16496). Further examples can be found on funerary stelae from Asia Minor dated to the Achaemenid period (Bakir; Brosius, 2005). The representation of women in audience scenes could only have found artistic expression if high-ranking women indeed held audiences themselves.

Royal women owned land and estates in Persis (Fārs) as well as outside the Persian heartland, e.g., in Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, and Media. They employed their own workforce and it also appears that certain administrative officials were assigned to them (e.g., BE 9 28, 9 50; Hdt., 2.98.1; Xen., An. 1.4.9; 2.4.27; Plato, Alc. I 121C-123CD; Plut., Art. 19.10). Most notable is Irdabama, a royal woman of the court of Darius I (r. 522-486) and unknown to Greek sources. She possessed her own workforces, mainly centered on Tirrazziš (Shiraz), which could include up to 480 laborers (PF 1028; PF-NN 1068, 1146). A small workforce known as matištukkašp also was assigned to her. With her own seal (PFS 51) Irdabama authorized the transactions of foodstuffs, while officials, such as Uštana and Rašda, using seal PFS 36 and 78 respectively, carried out her orders (Brosius, 1996, pp. 135-44). Estates are attested as belonging to Irtašduna, identified as Artystone, wife of Darius I. She also used her own seal (PFS 38) to authorize transactions and ration payments for her workforce.

Greek historiography predominantly depicts Persian royal women as intriguing and interfering individuals at the Persian court, and they thus appear as instigators of rebellion and upheaval. However, few incidences attest to the fact that the women’s rank and close proximity to the king allowed them to intervene between the king and members of the royal family and the nobility. They were thus able to lessen a punishment or ask for the reinstatement of a disgraced family member, as in the case of Amestris and Amytis saving the life of Megabyzus (Ctesias FGrH 688 F 13). Overall their actions seem to be determined by their ambition to protect the royal family and consequently avenge the death of a family member or endeavor to save his life.

Apparently following Babylonian practices, an official mourning period was declared at the announcement of the death of a female member of the royal family, and the burial rites were carried out in accordance with her royal status. Like the body of the king, that of the king’s wife had to be returned to Persis (Ctesias FGrH 688 F 14.15; cf. Hdt., 2.1.1; ABC, 7, col. III: 23-24).

(3) Marriage Alliances. Following Near Eastern practices, female relatives of the king were used in political marriage alliances, such as Nebuchadnezzar’s marriage to the daughter of the Median king (ABC, 3, l.29) and the marriage between the Median king Astyages (r. 584?-550?) and Aryenis, daughter of the Lydian king Alyattes (Hdt., 1.74.4; cf. Röllig, p. 22). Royal daughters were given in marriage to foreign kings in order to affirm political alliances or to confirm a peace treaty. Astyages is said to have married his daughter Mandane to Cambyses I (6th century BCE) in an apparent attempt to prevent the downfall of his realm (Hdt., 1.107.1), while according to Ctesias (d. after 397 BCE), the first link between the two royal houses was established only after Cyrus I (6th century BCE) conquered Media and subsequently married Astyages’ daughter Amytis (FGrH 688 F9). Persian kings also established their connections with the Persian nobility through a deliberate marriage policy. Cyrus II (r. ca. 559-530) married Cassandane (d. 538? BCE), daughter of the Achaemenid Pharnaspes (Hdt., 2.1.1). Phaidyme, daughter of the noble Otanes was said to have been the wife, first of Cambyses II (r. 530-522), and then of Bardiya. In order to legitimize his accession, but, more importantly, to prevent rival claims to the throne, Darius I entered a series of marriage alliances which remain unparalleled within Achaemenid rule. His alliances included the daughters of the previous kings, Atossa, Artystone, and Parmys (Hdt., 3.88.2-3). In addition, he created close familial links with his two closest allies who helped him to secure the throne, Gobryas and Otanes. He married daughters of both nobles (Hdt., 7.2.2, 3.88.4), while they themselves were married to sisters of Darius (Hdt., 7.5.1, 7.82). Their respective offspring also intermarried, with Darius’ daughter Artazostre marrying Mardonius son of Gobryas (Hdt., 6.43.1; PFa 5), and his son Xerxes I (r. 486-465) marrying Otanes’ daughter Amestris (Hdt., 7.61.2). Such interfamilial marriages were again concluded by the offspring of Darius II (r. 423-404), albeit on a much smaller scale, when Amestris was married to Teritouchmes son of Hydarnes and Artaxerxes II (r. 404-359) to Hydarnes’ daughter Stateira (Ctesias FGrH 688 F15). Artaxerxes’ own daughter was to be married to Tissaphernes, satrap of Sardis, who might himself have been a son of the same Hydarnes (Diod. Sic., 14.26.4; cf. Lewis, pp. 83-84).

Marriages between family members, including half-siblings, nieces, and cousins also occurred, and as is important to emphasize, these were not regarded as incestuous. Darius, whom Xerxes I had designated as heir to the throne, was married to Artaynte, the daughter of his uncle Masistes (Hdt., 9.108.1), while Ochus, who succeeded to the throne as Darius II, had married his half-sister Parysatis (Ctesias FGrH 688 F15) when he was still satrap of Hyrcania (Gorgān). Artaxerxes III (r. 359-338) is said to have married his niece (Val. Max., 9.2. ext. 7). Greek sources claim that incestuous brother- sister and father-daughter marriages were concluded within the royal family, but it is difficult to determine their veracity. Cambyses II allegedly married two of his sisters (Hdt., 3.31.1), which even at the time was regarded as an unlawful act, and Artaxerxes II is said to have married two daughters (Plut., Art. 23.5-6). Against the accusation of Cambyses’ incestuous marriages stands Herodotus’ own statement that Cambyses was married to Otanes’ daughter Phaidyme, as well as Ctesias’ reference to a wife named Roxane (FGrH 688 F13), whom he does not identify as a sister. Furthermore, the fact that the accusation of incest is listed in a series of sacrilegious acts committed by Cambyses, all of which are to emphasize his insanity and hubris, should caution against their acceptance. They derived from a common Egyptian source hostile to Cambyses, and some of these atrocities, such as the killing of the Apis bull, have been proved to be untrue (cf. Kuhrt, Sherwin-White 1987). The accusation made by Plutarch (46-after 119 CE) that Artaxerxes II married two of his daughters cannot be validated either way, but considering Plutarch’s penchant for court gossip, these marriages seem to emphasize the decadence of the Persian court manifested in the stereotypical portrayal of Persian women as power-hungry and scheming. If these marriages were concluded, we know of no offspring resulting from them. The reference that Darius III (r. 336-330) married his sister Stateira (Plut., Alex. 30.3) is contradicted by the passage in Curtius Rufus (fl. 1st century CE?), according to which only two children of Sisygambis’ family had survived, namely Darius III and his brother Oxathres (Curt., 10.5.23, 3.11.8). We also have the statement by Diodorus Siculus (fl. mid-1st century BCE) that Darius’ wife was a sister of Pharnaces (Diod. Sic., 17.21.3). Royal daughters were frequently used as pawns in the perpetual re-affirmation of the nobility’s loyalty to the king, and were given in marriage to Persian nobles as the highest royal reward for loyal service (Hdt., 5.116, 121-2; Ctesias FGrH 688 F13; Xen., An. 2.4.8; Plut., Art. 27.7; Diod. Sic., 14.26.4; cf. Brosius, 1996, pp. 72-77).

(4) Female workers. The PFT provide unique insight into the position of female laborers. Although women do not appear to have held office within the royal administration or were involved in conducting religious ceremonies, they are amply attested as workers laboring alongside men and children. Frequently workforces were headed by a woman called arraššara pašabena who – with one or two exceptions – received the highest monthly ration among the labor force, including 50 quarts of grain, 30 quarts of wine, and the third of a sheep. These women were evidently known to the administration by their personal name (PF 1790). The f pašap were a special workforce which is well attested in the villages of Persis and Fahliān. Identified by Hinz (1973a, p.172) as an occupational designation meaning “Teppichknüpferinnen, Schneiderinnen,” closer investigation suggests that f pašap is a collective term which refers to a particular kind of a predominantly female workforce and which includes a number of different professions (Brosius, 1996, pp. 155-66, esp. 165-66).

For labor requiring less skilled workers, reflected in the limited range of ration scales, women received one third less food than men. In contrast, for skilled labor women and men were given equal rations according to their level of qualification. As mothers of newborn babies, women were given extra rations, with mothers of boys receiving twice the amount of food than mothers of baby girls (Brosius, 1996, pp. 171-78). The almost even balance between male and female births, as well as between male and female working children, attests to the fact that infanticide was not practiced.

(5) Representations of women. There are few depictions of women but they nevertheless demonstrate that women could be shown in a variety of media, and thus were an accepted subject in Achaemenid art. According to Herodotus, Darius I had a statue of his wife Artystone made of gold (Hdt., 7.69.2). Although no statues of women have come down to us, the surviving evidence suggests that royal and non-royal women were depicted. The high relief figure of a high-ranking Persian woman found in Egypt (FIGURE 2) shows her in a many-folded Persian dress belted in the front (see CLOTHING ii. In the Median and Achaemenid periods) and wearing an elaborate necklace. She is wearing a turreted crown, and her bobbed hairstyle follows Achaemenid fashion (cf. the lapislazuli head from Persepolis and the limestone head from Masjed-e Solaymān in Spycket, figs. 6, 9). Similarly the ivory statuette from Susa (Musée du Louvre, SB 3728/9188; see Spycket, fig.1) depicts a crowned woman in Persian dress. The Persian women on a tapestry from Pazyryk are also wearing crowns, with a long veil falling down the back (Rudenko, pp. 296-97 and pl. 177). Their depiction is evidently based on an known and accepted artistic form that can be repeatedly found on Achaemenid or Achaemenizing art of the satrapies, including gems and rings from Asia Minor, funerary stelae from Dascylium, stands of incense burners and kohl tubes from Syria-Palestine (Spycket, pp. 43-45 and pls. 21-26; Starr, pp. 49-115; Boardman), as well as gold plaques (Dalton) from the Oxus Treasure. ZX ii. PARTHIAN PERIOD

(1) Introduction. The problematic situation of the written and archeological sources for the Parthian empire extends itself to the discussion of women in the Parthian period. Few documents have come down to us which enable us to gain an understanding of Parthian women, and these reveal little more than the names and titles of royal women. Classical sources provide some information on the marriage policy of Parthian kings and on the women’s presence in the king’s entourage. It can safely be assumed that the position of Parthian noble women mirrored that of royal women, albeit on a more modest scale. It certainly appears to have been the case that Parthian nobles were accompanied on campaigns by their female household, exemplified in the 200 wagons which transported the women of Surena (Plut., Crass. 21). The sources do not permit a detailed discussion of the ranking order among the women of the court, nor of their possible political influence and economic independence. On the basis of Achaemenid and Seleucid practices one can only hypothesize that Parthian royal women, too, owned land and estates, as well as manufactures. The influence of the Seleucids on the early Parthian kings, perceptible in the expression of kingship (e.g., the diadem, Greek epithets in the royal title, the influence in art and architecture), may have extended to the public presentation of Parthian royal women. No information has as yet come to light which would allow us to discuss the legal and economic situation of non-royal women in the Parthian period.

Evidence from Nisāya alludes to the Greek influence in the depiction of women in statues, sculptures, stucco work, and in art objects made of precious metal and ivory (Invernizzi, pp. 45-60). To gain insight into the way women were depicted in Parthian court art we need to turn to the artistic legacy of the regional kingdoms of the Parthian empire, especially to Elymais, as well as to cities such as Dura-Europus and Hatra which modeled their art and architecture on those of the Parthian royal court. Their art provides us with a rich impression as to how royal and noble women dressed according to Parthian fashion and could be publicly presented in their stance, expression, their coiffure, dress, jewelry and other adornment. (2) Titles for Parthian royal women. Parthian kings were polygamous. In addition to the king’s wives, royal concubines also resided at the court and formed part of his entourage. The royal wives were chosen from among the female members of the royal family itself as well as from Parthian noble families. Among the non-Parthian women at the king’s court we find the daughter of Demetrius Nikanor (Justinus, 38.10.10), who was captured after the death of Antiochus VI (r. 145-142) and taken to the court of Mithridates I (r. 171-139/38). One of the foreign women who secured a high position at the court was Musa (Josephus, Ant. Jud. 18.2.4). Augustus (63 BCE-14 CE) sent the Italian woman as a ‘gift’ to Phraates IV (r. 38-3/2). She was the mother of the heir to the throne, Phraates V (r. 2 BCE-2 CE), and by marrying her own son, became queen. A Greek woman (Dio Cass., 62, 63.5; Josephus, Ant. Jud. 20.74; Tac., Ann. 12.44) is known as the mother of Vologeses I (r. 51-76/80 CE).

The wives of Parthian kings are mentioned in official documents, a practice which may have been adapted from the Seleucids (OGIS 219). Their personal names and titles appear in Babylonian documents of the Parthian period, as well as in the Greek documents from Avroman in Kurdistan. The king’s wife bore the title “queen” (Bab. šarratu, Gr. basilisse,), while the term “lady” (Bab. beltu) was used as a form of address. Greek references to royal wives as “sisters (of the king) from the same father” (Gr. homopatriai adelphai) are known from the Avroman documents which mention Siace (Minns, no. I: 2-3), the wife and sister of Mithridates II (r. 124/123-88/87), who is named alongside two other wives, “Aryazate surnamed Automa, daughter of the Great King Tigranes, and his wife” and “Azate his compaternal sister and wife” (Minns, no. II: 3-5). A sister-wife is also attested for Orodes I. Her name is given in Babylonian documents as Isbubarza (Strassmeier, p. 112; Potts, p. 392). While these references point to an emphasis on the siblings’ common paternal descent they allow no conclusions as to whether they descended from the same mother, and thus to their identification as full siblings. Not only do we lack conclusive evidence that Parthians entered incestuous marriages between full siblings, these reference do also not allow us to draw any conclusions about such practice within the Parthian dynasty.

In most known cases women are only mentioned as the king’s wives. A Babylonian text mentions Ri-[x]-nu, the mother of Phraates I (r. 176-171), and probably the wife of Mithridates I. As the mother of the heir to the throne she took an eminent position at the court when she acted as regent for the young Phraates after the king’s death (Debevoise, p. 29; Oelsner, pp. 147-8). Both wives of Gotarzes I (r. 91/90-81/80), one of whom was named Aši’abatum, were referred to as his “wives and ladies” (Bab. aššati(?)- šu beltu; cf. Strassmeier, p. 112; Minns, p. 34), while Pi-ir(?)-ri-ta-na-a, the wife of Phraates III (r. 71/70-58/57), was called his “wife and queen” (Bab. aššatišu šarratu; cf. Strassmeier, p. 112; Minns, p. 36). Phraates IV had four wives: Olennieire, Cleopatra, Baseirta and Bistheibanaps (Minns, p. 30). (3) Activities at court. Female members of the king’s family were used as pawns in the establishment and confirmation of political alliances. This was a practice attested especially between Parthia and Armenia, though undoubtedly political marriage alliances with other principalities of the Parthian empire also occurred. A daughter of Phraates IV was married to Tigranes of Armenia, and Orodes II (r. 58/7-38) affirmed his alliance with the Armenian king Artavasdes with a marriage between his son Pacorus and a sister of the Armenian king (Plut., Crass. 33).

The royal wives and the women of the palace accompanied the king on military campaigns and thus were frequently in danger of capture by the enemy and even of death. Among the Parthian princesses captured by Romans, the daughter of Osroes (r. 108/9-127/28) was taken hostage by Trajan (r. 98-117) after the occupation of Ctesiphon. She was returned to the Parthian king by Hadrian (r. 117-38) in 128/29 CE (SHA, Hadrian 13.8). To prevent the women’s falling into enemy hands, Parthian kings did resume to extreme measures. In 26 BCE, threatened with an advance of Tiridates, Phraates IV killed the women in his entourage (Isidore of Charax, Parth. Stat. 1), and in 52 CE the wife and children of the Armenian king Mithridates were killed by Rhadamistus, son of Pharasmanes of Iberia (Tac., Ann. 12.44-47). When Rhadamistus himself was pursued, he stabbed his pregnant wife and threw her into a river. She was found alive and rescued (Tac., Ann. 12.51; 13.6). After the Alans captured the female entourage of Vologeses I’s brother Pacorus, he was forced to pay ransom for his wife and his concubines (Josephus, Ant. Jud. 7.7.4). (4) Representations of Parthian women. Public presentation of royal women seems to have been limited. They do not appear on the few extant Parthian reliefs, while statues and sculptures of royal Parthian women which – like statues of the kings – will have existed, did not survive. Recent scholarship has moved away from the identification of the two seated figures next to the reclining king in the Elymaean investiture relief from Tang-e Sarvak II as Mithra and Anāhitā/Athena or Artemis and Athena (Vanden Berghe and Schippmann, pp. 70-73). Both figures are male, wearing long tunics and trousers, rather than dresses, and at least one of the seated figures is sporting a moustache in Parthian fashion (Vanden Berghe and Schippmann, p. 72).

Only in exceptional cases were women depicted on coins. Thus Musa is depicted as the queen of Phraates V, wearing a crown and a diadem (Alram, p. 385 pl. 3 no. 27). Not merely this marriage, but also her appearance on coins was a unique occurrence. At a regional level we find Anzaze depicted on coins together with her husband Kamnaskires II (ca. 145-139 BCE), king of Elymais (Alram, p. 386, pl. 4 no. 37). As the king’s power and exalted position were reflected in the splendid display of the court, the public presentation of his entourage formed an important element in the expression of kingship. As part of that expression royal women were undoubtedly dressed in fine and richly embroidered garments, long-sleeved, many-folded dresses tied by a belt. Their jewelry included multiple necklaces, bracelets and earrings, made of large-sized pearls or worked in gold with precious and semi-precious stones. Royal women probably wore a crown, but they could also wear the upright tiara or simply a veil which hung down the back. This is the impression given by the depictions of high- ranking women in sculpture, relief, and painting in the art of cities such as Palmyra, Dura-Europus and Hatra, which was influenced by, or modelled on, Parthian court art (Gall, pp. 75-84). The depiction of these women, as well of local female deities, testifies that it was not a restricted artistic subject, but rather, that female statues and other representations of women were an expression of their high social status (FIGURE 3).

iii. SASANIAN PERIOD

(1) Introduction. The evidence for the Sasanian period reveals a more discernible public role played by royal women. In continuity with Parthian practices, female members of the royal family were mentioned in official documents, most notably in trilingual inscription (ŠKZ) of Shapur I (r. 239-270) from the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt at Naqš-e Rostam. But moreover they received public honor in royal fires lit for members of the king’s family, as well as in the sacrifices ordered by the king. Numerous seals and finger rings depict royal and high-ranking women. The king’s consort appears on royal reliefs and on silver plates and bowls. Their depiction on coins (FIGURE 4) remains exceptional and is only attested for the wife of Bahrām II (r. 276-93) and the reigning queen Bōrān (r. 630-31).

The discussion of Sasanian women has been impeded by two major assumptions: Firstly, that ’ordinary’ women were not depicted in Sasanian art but that any representation of females must be that of the goddess Anāhitā (Shahbazi, 1983, p. 261), and secondly, that the title “Queen of Queens,” used in ŠKZ as a reference to a king’s daughter or sister, signaled the woman’s status as a wife of the king, and thus gave proof of incestuous marriage alliances within the Sasanian royal family. These alliances were understood as a reflection of the Zoroastrian practice of close-kin-marriages (MPers. xwēdōdah). Yet scrutiny of the sources should caution against the equation of a royal title with a particular marriage, even more so since the evidence for such alleged marriages is extremely scant. The fact that Šāpurduxtak, the wife of Bahram II, bore the title, although she was not his sister, gives further weight to the argument that the title was not restricted to a king’s sister. In her case we need to consider whether her status as the king’s wife coincided with that of queen of queens. Equally, Kardēr’s statement that he promoted close-kin-marriages (ŠKZ para. 14) neither allows a conclusion as to the kind of familial marriages he fostered, nor whether he referred specifically to the royal family or to Zorostrian Persians in general. In consequence of recent criticism and rejection of the existence of a state religion in the Sasanian empire it also can no longer be argued that such marital unions were sanctioned at highest political level (Wiesehöfer, 2001, pp. 210-12; cf. Macuch, p. 152). Analysis of the written evidence for the Sasanian period does not permit the conclusion that the Sasanian kings favored incestuous marriages. (2) Titles for royal women. The main source for the titles of royal women is ŠKZ. Referring to royal women of the immediate family of the king, as well as of the extended royal family, the inscription provides us not only with personal names but also with different titles which indicate an order of rank among the royal women. The king’s mother, referred to was the “Mother of the King of Kings” (MPers. šāhān šāh mād), and the king’s wife, who bore the title of the “Empire’s Queen” (MPers. šahr bāmbišn), probably held the most senior rank among the women at the court. The title “Queen” (MPers. bāmbišn) was held by royal women of the court who were the king’s daughters and sisters, as well as the wives of Sasanian regional kings. The title “Queen of Queens” (MPers. bāmbišnān bāmbišn) probably has to be understood within that context as a title for the royal woman who took the highest rank among the queens (Gignoux, “Ādur-Anāhīd”; Wiesehöfer, 2001, p. 175). According to ŠKZ it was given to a king’s daughter, and is attested for Dēnag, the daughter of Pāpak, and for Ādur-Anāhīd, the daughter of Shapur I. The title “Princess” (MPers. duxš), mentioned only once for Rōdduxt, daughter of Anōšag (ŠKZ para. 37), might indicate young age and/or her premarital status. One form of address was “Lady” (MPers. Bānūg). The wife of Ardašir I (d. 242 CE) and mother of Shapur I is referred to as “Lady Murrōd, Mother of the King of Kings’ (ŠKZ para. 37), and the same address is used for the goddess Anāhitā in the inscription of Narseh (r. 293-302) from Paikuli (NPi B).

In his inscription Shapur I ordered royal fires to be lit in honor of himself as king, as well as for his children, beginning with his daughter Ādur-Anāhīd and also mentioning three of his sons, Hormozd I (r. 270-71), Shapur, and Narseh (ŠKZ para. 36). Yet the daily sacrifices of a lamb, 1.5 measures of bread and 4 measures of wine were to be given for each member of his family, including the Mother of the King of Kings, the Empire’s Queen, the king’s daughters, as well as the king’s male and female ancestors. These sacrifices for the souls of the living and deceased members of the royal dynasty, including the royal women, attest to the recognized official status these women held at the Sasanian court.

(3) Marriage alliances. The polygamy of the Sasanian kings was on the one hand due to the king’s need to produce numerous male offspring in order to select the best heir to the throne, and on the other hand due to the need to enter marriages with the daughters of Sasanian nobles and political allies in order to cement political allegiances. Since the heir’s descent was not dependent on his mother’s descent, ethnicity, or religious belief, the claim that incestuous marriages, which were allegedly concluded in order to preserve the ‘pure bloodline,’ determined the choice of the heir to the throne, is undermined further.

The beginnings of the Sasanian dynasty are as ambiguous in regard to royal women as they are in regard to Ardašir’s descent from Sāsān. While the Muslim historian Ṭabari (839-923) claims that Pāpak was the son of a union between Sāsān and Rāmbehešt, a daughter of the noble family of the Bāzrangi clan (pp. 4-5), Shapur I calls in his inscription Dēnag mother of Pāpak, and refers to her as King’s Mother, without linking her to Sāsān (ŠKZ para. 23). Pāpak himself was married to a woman named Rōdak, who, as the mother of Ardašir I, held the title of Mother of the King of Kings (ŠKZ para. 41). Pāpak’s daughter Dēnag was given the title of Queen of Queens, a title which now appears parallel to the title of King of Kings held by Pāpak’s son and heir. A seal (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, Inv. GL. 979; cf. Gignoux and Gyselen, 1989, p. 882) depicting a woman in profile, and identifying her as “Dēnag, Queen of Queens, head of the eunuch section” (MPers. Dēnag ī bāmbišn bāmbišnān mahist pad tan šābestān) has conventionally been ascribed to her. What precisely this title meant cannot be ascertained, but it might be suggested that as head of the women’s section of the court she was in charge of its personnel, which presumably included not only eunuchs, but also female servants.

As mother of Shapur I, the heir to the throne, the title of Mother of the King of Kings was transferred to Ardašir’s wife Murrōd, while Shapur’s daughter Ādur-Anāhīd became the Queen of Queens (Gignoux 1985: 472). A seal is also attested for the Empire’s Queen Xwaranzēm, most likely the wife of Shapur I (Gignoux, 1978, 4.77). The obvious distinction between a king’s wife – identified as in the cases of Pāpak, Ardašir I, and Shapur I – and a royal daughter who was given the title of Queen of Queens, as different from the title of Queen bestowed upon other women of the court, forces us to dismiss the commonly held view that the title must automatically refer to the king’s wife. Evidently it was used to signal the highest rank among the queens of the Sasanian court, which included the wives of regional kings.

An unusual reference to a daughter’s female descent (ŠKZ para. 37) is difficult to interpret, since Xwaranzēm is mentioned as the mother of Warāzduxt, though the name itself does not signify that she was not a daughter of Shapur I. In his inscription Shapur I mentions his sons Hormozd I, Shapur, Narseh, and Bahrām I (r. 271-74) without indicating their maternal descent. However, according to Ṭabari (p. 40), the mother of Hormozd I was a daughter of king Mihrak. The mention of Hormozdag as the son of Hormozd I is preceded by a reference to a queen Staxryād, who may be identified as the wife of Hormozd I (ŠKZ para. 38). For Shapur I’s son Shapur, king of Messene, a son Pērōz and a daughter Šāpurduxtak are attested, while his wife may have been queen Dēnag, identified as “Queen of Messene, dastgerd of Shapur” (ŠKZ para. 44). Šāpurduxtak, Queen of the Sakas and Lady Narsehduxtak are named respectively as the wife and presumably the daughter of Narseh, king of the Sakas. Shahbazi (1983, p. 267) has rightly cautioned against the identification of Šāpurduxtak as the daughter of Shapur I. That the personal name itself allows no conclusion as to the woman’s paternal descent becomes clear in regard to another daughter of Narseh, Hormozdduxtak (ŠKZ para. 37). Finally, a woman referred to as Lady Čašmag and most likely a member of the Sasanian royal family (ŠKZ para. 37) may be linked to “Čašmag brave-of-Shapur” (ŠKZ para. 46).

Ṭabari (pp. 309, 316-17) mentions the brother-sister marriage between Bahrām VI Čōbīn (r. 590-91) and Kurdiyah, but it is not stated whether they were full siblings. Nothing is known of the descent of Dēnag, the wife of Yazdegerd II (r. 439-57) and mother of Pērōz (Firuz, r. 459-84) and Hormozd III (r. 457-59), though her name indicates that she was a member of the Sasanian royal family. She is said to have governed the kingdom around Ctesiphon (Ṭabari, p. 109). If this information is historical, it indicates that royal women could be given political positions in the organization of the empire.

Several cases attest to the marriage of the Sasanian king with non-Persian women due to political alliances, and, intriguingly, the sons of these unions often succeeded to the throne. The wife of Bahrām V Gōr (r. 420-38) is said to have been an Indian princess (Ṭabari, p. 868), but nothing further is known about her or her offspring. The marriage between Kawād I (r. 488-96) and Nēwanduxt, the daughter of the Khāqān of the Hephtalites, resulted in her becoming the Mother of the King of Kings Ḵosrow I Anoširvān (r. 531-79). It has been suggested that she might have been a daughter of Pērōzduxt, who had previously been taken captive by the Hephtalite king, and was returned after Suḵrā had negotiated her release (Ṭabari, pp. 119-20, 129 n. 334). The plausibility of this report however, depends on the feasibility of Pērōzduxt’s bearing a royal child whom she then had to leave behind at her release. For equally political reasons (Masʿudi, para. 632), Ḵosrow I married a daughter of the Khāqān of the Turks who became the mother of Hormozd IV (r. 579-90). Ḵosrow II (r. 590-628) is said to have married two Christian wives: the Byzantine princess Maryam and Širin. According to Christian sources, the latter was also a Byzantine princess (Theophylactus Simocatta, Hist. 5.14.2-11; cf. Whitby, pp. 305, 234), though of Aramean origin (Fowden, p. 136). According to Ṭabari (p. 379-80, cf. 312 n. 729), Maryam was the mother of Kawād II (r. 628), while Širin was the mother of Mardānšāh and the (foster) mother of Šahriyār. Ḵosrow II married Širin in 592, and, hoping for the birth of a son, dedicated gifts to the Shrine of St. Sergius at Rusafa (Sergiopolis) a year later (Evagrius, HE 6.21; Theophylactus Simocatta, Hist. 5.14.2-11; cf. Fowden, pp. 137-39). In the royal couple’s donation of a gold cross, as well as in the building of three churches, one of which was dedicated to St. Sergius, Fowden (pp. 139-40) sees a parallel to the previous offering of a cross and the building projects undertaken by Justinian (r. 527-65) and Theodora (d. 548), the Byzantine emperor and empress. The church for Širin was built together with a palace in Beṯ Lašpar, which has been identified as Qaṣr-e Širin in northwest Iran (Chronicle of Seert, 58: 146-7; cf. Fowden, p. 140).

During the political turmoil of the late Sasanian period, two daughters of Ḵosrow II, Bōrān and Āzarmīgduxt (r. 631), succeeded, if only for brief periods of time, to the Sasanian throne. According to the Muslim historian Hamza Eṣfahāni (893/4-970/1) Bōrān was a daughter of Khosrow’s Christian wife Maryam (p. 54). Her reign was marked by a benevolent rule and the hope to end the war by peaceful means. New coins were issued, and a tax relief and the rebuilding of stone bridges and bridges made of boats were ordered to improve the economic situation in the empire (Ṭabari, pp. 403- 405). Coins identify her in the legend and show her portrait, wearing a crown and crescent moon (FIGURE 4; cf. Göbl, pp. 54-55, pl.15, nos. 228-29). Bōrān’s most important political gesture was the return of the Holy Cross to Jerusalem.

Āzarmigduxt’s reign lasted for only six months before she was apparently killed by Rostam, the son of Farroḵ-Hormozd, the spāhbed of Khorasan (Ṭabari, pp. 406-407). She minted coins, which bore her name but showed the image of a king, identified either as her father or Farroḵ-Hormozd (Mochiri, pp. 241-44; Gignoux, “Āzarmīgduxt”; cf. Sellwood, pp. 21, 169-70). All known coins with her name are from the mint WYHC.

(4) Activities at court. As was the custom, royal women accompanied the king on campaigns, traveling in carriages for greater comfort (Ṭabari, p. 130 n. 335). The women’s presence was probably to instill the army with confidence in a victorious outcome of the impending battle, but in reality it exposed the women to potential danger. This was no more apparent than in the Hephtalites’ capture of the women’s train of Pērōz, including his wife and daughter. The women were only freed when the Sasanian general Suḵrā entered ransom negotiations with the Hephtalite king (Ṭabari, pp. 119-20). Previously, the women in the train of Narseh suffered a similar fate when they were captured by the Romans, and released only after Narseh agreed to a peace treaty (Peter Patricius, frgs. 13-14). Ḵosrow II ordered his women and children to be brought to safety when he came under threat from Bahrām VI Čobin his rival to the throne (Tabari, p. 304). (5) Representations of Sasanian women. The representation of royal women attests to their official recognition as being closely related to the king. Royal women like Xwaranzēm, Dēnag, and the wife of Shapur III (r. 383-88) had their own seals which identified them by their portrait and an inscription. The mere fact that royal women owned seals is a reflection of their authority which allowed them to conduct transactions and official affairs (Gignoux and Gyselen, 1989). Their representation on reliefs and on silver bowls and plates demonstrates that the depiction of females was part of the catalogue of royal Sasanian art. Their appearance in investiture reliefs signals a new variant to the genre. The subject is first introduced by Ardašir I whose investiture relief at Naqš-e Rajab includes two females (FIGURE 1). Facing away from the investiture scene they nevertheless perform the same gesture of respect as the Sasanian nobles witnessing the event.

At Naqš-e Rostam, the king’s consort now appears together with other members of the king’s family in the investiture relief of Bahrām II (Herrmann, p. 168; Shahbazi, “Bahrām II”). Other artistic subjects were introduced. On the rock reliefs at Sarab-e Qandil and Barm-e Delak the royal couple is depicted exchanging a flower. At Sarab-e Qandil the flower is held in the woman’s right hand, while her left hand is hidden in her sleeve and held up in a gesture of respect, while at Barm-e Delak the king offers a flower to his wife. It is now thought that these scenes depict royal marriages (Shahbazi, 1998; cf. Vanden Berghe, “Barm-e Delak”; for different identifications, see Hinz 1973b, pp. 201-212). This artistic theme finds further expression on seals which depict couples holding a ring or a flower (Gignoux and Gyselen, 1982, p. 50). At Sar Mashad a relief ascribed to Bahrām II shows the king protecting his wife and two other family members from a lion’s attack (Herrmann, p. 167; Shahbazi, “Bahrām II”). Bahrām’s wife is also identified on a silver cup from Zargveshi, Georgia, which depicts her portrait alongside with those of the king and the son (Harper, 1974, pp. 63-64, 70-71). Exceptionally, too, is her depiction on coins. On the obverse she is appearing either with the king as the royal couple, or with the king and the heir to the throne. The reverse shows the royal couple flanking a fire altar, and the legend identifies her as Šāpurduxtak, Queen of Queens (Lukonin, p.112; Shahbazi, 1983, pp. 265-66). The identification of this queen as the daughter of Shapur, king of Messene (Lukonin, p.112; cf. Frye, p. 304) is a mere assumption and impossible to substantiate. But as Queen of Queens she ranked above all other queens of the royal court.

A further image of the Sasanian royal family is found in Narseh’s relief at Naqš-e Rostam. It depicts the king and queen standing opposite each other in semi-profile, both holding a ring. Between them stands the small male figure, most likely to be identified as their son and heir Hormozd II (r. 302-309), and two nobles stand behind the king. While in the past scholars tended to identify the woman as the goddess Anāhitā, serious doubt has been expressed towards the association of Anahita with royal investiture (Shahbazi, 1983). Her identification on the royal reliefs was simply the logical conclusion from the erroneous assumption that mortal women were not depicted. The woman next to Narseh has her left hand covered by the sleeve of her dress. This stance is a gesture of respect given to the king by his court, as can be seen on several Sasanian reliefs depicting members of the Sasanian nobility, including Ardašir’s relief at Naqš-e Rajab. The woman, therefore, is most likely Šāpurduxtak, Narseh’s wife and queen. The identification of Šāpurduxtak as the daughter of Shapur I is supported by her crown, which is identical with her father’s (Shahbazi, 1983, pp. 266-67). Her portrait was also added to Shapur’s triumph scene at Darabgird (Shahbazi, 1983, p. 267 fig. 5). In light of this evidence, the identification of the woman in the investiture relief at Ṭāq-e Bostān, ascribed to Ḵosrow II, as the goddess Anāhitā needs to be reconsidered. As none of the women depicted in the early Sasanian reliefs can be identified as Anāhitā, there is no convincing evidence to suggest that she was associated with investiture. It is most likely that the woman in the relief at Ṭāq-e Bostān is the king’s consort, and thus ought to be identified as either Maryam or Širin.

High-ranking women were depicted on a variety of silver vessels (Harper 1971; 1975; 1981) and on seals and bullae (Gignoux, 1978; Gignoux and Gyselen, 1982; 1989). They are shown as full figures or busts, with their face in profile facing to the right. They are characterized by long, curly hair, which is either worn in ringlets or braids, and/or with part of it gathered in a round hairdo on top of the head. The considerable variety in the headdresses of royal women invites the suggestion that they, too, wore a personalized crown. The headdresses include simple high caps, caps embroidered with pearls, beaded diadems, turreted crowns similar to that of Shapur I, and crowns made in the shape of rams’ horns (FIGURE 2).

Their jewelry includes several necklaces, using large pearls, as well as pearl-shaped earrings. They are depicted in this style on seals, e.g., the seal of Dēnag and of the wife of Shapur III (Gignoux and Gyselen, 1989, p. 896, fig. 24). The latter is wearing a round beaded headdress decorated with rams’ horns and an oak-leaf. She may be compared to the queen depicted in a banquet scene on a silver dish, wearing an identical crown (Walters Art Gallery, inv. no. 57.709; Vanden Berghe and Overlaet, fig. 65). Female dancers and musicians are frequently depicted on Sasanian silverware. These objects, drinking cups, vessels, and especially jugs, probably have to be placed in the context of royal banquets. Female musicians playing flutes and harps are also depicted on the hunting reliefs at Ṭāq-e Bostān. These motifs continued into the art of the early Islamic period.

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(Maria Brosius)

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WOMEN ii. In the Avesta

WOMEN

ii. IN AVESTA

The egalitarian ideals of Zoroastrianism—in particular, the recognition of women as “men’s partners in the common struggle against evil” (Boyce, 1972, p. 308, fn. 83) have long served to protect the dignified status of women within the Mazdayasnian community. Such notions of gender parity are firmly rooted in the teachings of the Avesta and reflect the character of early Iranian society (Schwartz, p. 4) as well as bestow “a modern appearance on this ancient religion” (Hintze, 2003, p. 403).

Gender and the language of the Avesta. On a stylistic level, this message of equality is articulated through the use of explicitly inclusive formulae. Four times in the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti the words nar- “man” and nāirī- “woman” are collocated: twice as part of the fixed expression nā vā nāirī vā “a man or a woman” (Y. 35.6, 41.2), and twice as narąmcā nāirinąmcā “of men and women” (Y. 37.3, 39.2). In the Gāθās, an alternative word for “woman,” jaini-, is juxtaposed with the usual word for “man” (nar-) in the phrase iθā … narō aθā jə̄naiiō “thus … men, so also women” (Y. 53.6). Additionally, both the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti and the Gāθās attest the use of the word gənā-. In its sole Gāθic occurrence, the term gənā- “noblewoman” occurs beside nar- “man” in the expression vā … nā gənā vā (Y. 46.10). Most interpreters translate this as “a man or a noblewoman” and take the word gənā- to refer to human females (see Humbach, p. 183; Kellens and Pirart, p. 239; Narten, p. 193). By contrast, the two instances of gənā- in Y. 38.1 do not stand in combination with a word for “man” and appear to refer instead to abstract principles or entities anthropomorphized as divine females (cf. Hintze, 2007, pp. 196- 209, who, however, argues that gənā- refers to female divine entities also in the Gāθic passage).

Women and the Zoroastrian community. The Avesta testifies to the concept that women were accorded moral and religious agency equal to that of men. In the Gāθās, both males and females are addressed in Y. 53.6 (quoted above), and Mazdayasnians pray the ā.airiiə̄mā išiiō prayer (Y. 54.1), which implores Airyaman to come to the assistance “of the men and women of Zaraθuštra” (nərəbiiascā nāiribiiascā zaraθuštrahe). So too in the Younger Avestan fragment FrD.3, both sexes are explicitly cautioned: “He has not won anything who has not won (anything) for his soul. She has not won anything who has not won (anything) for her soul” (nōit̰ cahmi zazuua yō nōit̰ urune zazuua. nōit̰ cahmi zazuši yā nōit̰ urune zazuši) (see Hoffmann, p. 288).

The belief in the essential parity between the religious status of women and that of men in Zoroastrianism is further reflected in the Avestan texts’ frequent praise and veneration of its righteous adherents, irrespective of their gender. In Y. 39.2 it is said: “And we worship now the souls (urunō) of truthful men and women, wherever they may have been born” (aṣ̌āunąm āat̰ urunō yazamaidē kudō.zātanąmcīt̰ narąmcā nāirinąmcā). In Y. 37.3 it is males’ and females’ frauuaṣ̌is “(moral) choices” which are lauded: “Him (= Ahura Mazdā) we worship in the choices of the truthful ones—of men and of women” (tə̄m aṣ̌āunąm frauuaṣ̌īš narąmcā nāirinąmcā). In the Younger Avesta, this sentiment is most clearly echoed in Yt. 13, which devotes verses 139-42 to the worship of the frauuaṣ̌is of various venerable women, and verses 143-44 to the worship of the frauuaṣ̌is “of truthful women” (aṣ̌aoninąm) and “of truthful men” (aṣ̌aonąm) in the various lands. Beside these two gender-specific, genitive plural forms of the adjective aṣ̌auuan- “truthful [one]’, the Avesta also attests a third genitive plural form, OAv. and YAv. aṣ̌āunąm (usually in coordination with frauuaṣ̌i-, e.g., Y. 4.2, 4.6, 24.11, 65.12, etc.), which E. Tichy has argued should be interpreted as a genus commune meaning “of [the male and female] righteous ones” (see Tichy, p. 102).

As a practical corollary to this outlook, both girls and boys were initiated into the Zoroastrian religion through the investiture of the sacred shirt and girdle. Vīdēvdād 18.54 thus declares it a sin “when a man (nā) or evil woman (jahika) beyond fifteen years of age goes about without wearing the sacred thread or shirt” (yat̰ nā jahika pasca paṇcadasīm sarəδəm frapataiti anaiβiiāsta vā anabdātō vā) (however, cf. H.-P. Schmidt, p. 26, fn. 17, who believes that the word jahika is an interpolation and therefore initiation was originally only for Zoroastrian males).

Women and education. The Avesta also makes clear that women, like men, were recipients of religious education. This fact is evidenced in Y. 26.7, wherein are worshipped the “choices” (frauuaṣ̌is) “of teachers, of students—male [and] female” (aēθrapaitinąm aēθriianąm narąm nāirinąm). Further, in Vr. 3.4 (and Gāh 4.9) the express desire to appoint a “woman” (nāirikā-) who is huš.hąm.sāsta- “well educated” (see Hintze, 2007, p. 199, with fn. 10, against Bartholomae, col. 1842, s.v. huš.hąm.sāsta- “gut zurechtzuweisen, lenksam”) is paralleled in the same verse by the wish to appoint a “man” (nar-) who is vistō.fraorəiti- “knowing of the Confession.”

Elsewhere, in the Hērbedestān, the topic of who is eligible to receive education for the activity of aθauruna- “priestly service” is taken up. The text assures that either the lady (nāirikā-) or the lord of the house (nmānō.paiti-) may go forth for this—the chosen party being the one who has the “highest esteem for truth” (aṣ̌āi bərəjiiąstəmō, H. 1.2) and is less needed for managing the household (H. 5.1-5; see Hintze, 2009, p. 188). This implies women’s education in the period of the Avesta extended beyond mere preparations for the “housewifely role” as assumed by some commentators (see Gould, p. 150, after Sanjana, pp. 17-19). Besides being educated, women (as well as men) were also expected to take part in disseminating the teachings of Zoroastrianism: Y. 35.6 encourages “a man or a woman” (nā vā nāirī vā) who “knows what is real” (vaēdā haiθīm) and “what is really good” (hat̰ vohū) to “make this known to those who will thus practice it” (fracā vātōiiōtū īt̰ aēbiiō yōi īt̰ aθā vərəziiąn). This imperative for proselytizing fits also with M. Boyce’s view that those women and men engaged in aθauruna- were acting as Zoroastrian missionaries (Boyce, 1989, pp. 16-17; Hintze, 2009, p. 179).

Women and ritual. Although the Zoroastrian priestly class is today comprised exclusively of males, evidence from the Avesta suggests women too once played an active role in conducting rituals. The assertion on the part of the Hērbedestān (H. 5, see above) that women could qualify as an aθauruuan-, being the general office of ‘priest’ is complemented by a passage in the Nērangestān (N. 22.2 [= N. 40]) which permits “any male … or female or minor” (kahiiācit̰ nā … nāirikaiiā̊ scit̰ apərənāiiūkahecit̰) who knows the sacred texts to act as a zaotar-, that is, a specialized priest in charge of pouring the libations.

In their legendary narrations, the Yašts also provide ample evidence of women commissioning sacrifices. For example, Hutaosa is recorded sacrificing to Vāiiu (Yt. 15.35), as are a group of virginal girls (kainīnō, Yt. 15.39). Huuōuuī is said to have sacrificed to the goddess Cistā (Yt. 16.15), and Ahura Mazdā commands Arəduuī Sūrā Anāhitā to descend from the stars in order that virginal girls may “beg [of her] a strong husband” (jaiδiiā̊ ṇte taxməmca nmānō.paitīm, Yt. 5.87).

Moreover, the ritual injunctions specific to the worship of each deity make clear that women, as a class, were not excluded from participating in sacrificial rites. Thus does Aṣ̌i (Yt. 17.54) prohibit from making sacrifices to her only “menopausal [women]” (para.daxšta) and “virginal girls who have not had intercourse with men” (kainina anupaēta mamaṣ̌iiānąm). As a mark of equality however, the verse also bars “andropausal men” (narō pairišta.xšuδrō) and “juvenile boys” (apərənāiiu tauruna). Similarly, Tištriia (Yt. 8,59) bans both the “evil man” (mairiiō) and the “evil woman” (jahika) from partaking of his sacrifice. Arǝduuī Sūrā Anāhitā (Yt. 5.93) meanwhile, forbids such disabled women as are “blind, deaf, dwarfed, stupid” (aṇdā̊ sca karənā̊ sca druuā̊ sca mūrā̊ sca), etc. from drinking of her libation.

Additional roles of women. It has been suggested that the early Zoroastrian texts accorded women limited positive roles beyond procreation and domesticity (see, e.g., Gould, p. 149). However, in addition to the range of opportunities already discussed, the Avesta also envisages females filling a number of important social positions. In Y. 41.2, for example, it is prayed ”May a good ruler, a man or a woman (nā vā nāirī vā), rule us, in both existences” (huxšaθrastū nə̄ nā vā nāirī vā xšaētā ubōiiō aŋhuuō). Evidently, women, as much as men, were considered capable of being leaders in both the corporeal and spiritual planes of being. Several scholars have also identified Y. 46.10 (referred to above) as promoting gender equality: in this stanza, Zaraθuštra states he will cross the “Account-keeper’s bridge” (cinnuatō pərətūm) with “the man or noblewoman” (vā ... nā gənā vā) who would give to him “the reward for truth and rule by good thought” (aṣ̌īm aṣ̌āi vohū xšaθrəm manaŋhā). M. Schwartz (p. 2) interprets this as a plea for patronage and has concluded that in Zaraθuštra’s society, women were eligible to be patrons, thus implying that they possessed considerable wealth and status. A number of modern interpreters (e.g., Gould, p. 145) have pointed to the verse as evidence that Zaraθuštra preached the reward of heaven for his female as well as male adherents (cf. Hintze, 2007, pp. 197-209).

Women and purity. As well as following the purity laws common to both sexes (e.g., the correct disposal of hair- and nail-clippings, see Vd. 17), Zoroastrian females were subject to supplementary regulations concerned mainly with their procreative functions. Thus, during her period of menstruation, a lady was to be sequestered in a special building which, according to Vd. 16.4, had to be located “fifteen paces from the fire, fifteen paces from the water, fifteen paces from the barəsman which is to be strewn, three paces from the truthful men” (paṇca.dasa.gāim haca āθrat̰, paṇca.dasa.gāim haca apat̰, paṇca.dasa.gāim haca barəsmən frastairiiāt, θrigāim haca nərəbiiō aṣ̌auuabiiō). Further, she was permitted to drink only from a vessel “made of iron or lead—the two lowest-value metals” (aiiaŋhaēnəm vā srum vā nitəma xšaθra.vairiia, Vd. 16.6), and had to eat a restricted diet (see Vd. 16.7).

Since all externalized bodily fluids, and especially dead matter, were considered polluting, a women who had experienced a stillbirth was viewed as being in a state of especial impurity. In such instances, Vīdēvdād 5.48-56 prescribes that the Mazdayasnian community “must build an enclosure” (xpairi.daēzą pairi.daēzaiiąn) for her at a remove of “thirty paces” (θrisata.gāim). Here the woman was to remain for three nights, after which “she should wash her body and clothes with cow urine and water by the nine holes” (us tanūm snaiiaēta us vastrāt̰ gə̄uš maēsmana apāca nauua upa maγəm). Following this, a further nine nights’ seclusion was required before her re-entry into society was permitted. Boyce considered such restrictions as “humiliating” (Boyce, 1972, p. 308), whilst J. Choksy cites these “arduous rites” and the attendant “psychological distress” as reasons why some Mazdayasnian women converted in later times to Islam (Choksy, pp. 97-98). It is worth noting, though, that men too were bound by gender-specific purity laws, and in the case, for example, of nocturnal emission, were also required to undergo ritual purification (see Vd. 18.46).

Excepting of such codes, the only Avestan passage that potentially advocates the differential treatment of men and women is found in Vīdēvdād 7.41-22, which stipulates a physician’s fees. Accordingly, a doctor was to heal: a “lord of the house” (nmānahe nmāno.paitīm) for the cost of a “lowest value ox” (nitəməm staorəm), but his “wife” (nmānahe nmāno.paitīm nāirikąm) for the cost of a “female ass” (kaθβa daēnu); a “lord of the town” (vīsō vīspaitīm) for the cost of a “middling value ox” (maδəməm staorem), but his wife for the cost of a “female cow” (gauua daēnu); a “lord of the tribe” (zaṇtə̄uš zaṇtupaitīm) for the cost of a “highest value ox” (aγrīm staorəm) but his wife for the cost of a “female horse” (aspa daēnu); a “lord of the province” (daŋ́ hə̄uš daŋ́ hupaitīm) for the cost of a “cart with four draught animals’” (vāṣ̌əm caθru.yuxtəm), but his wife for the cost of a “female camel” (uštra daēnu). Whilst these listings are clearly hierarchical— ascending from the lowest value to the highest value—it is, however, not possible to say whether a given item in Vd. 7.42 was considered to be of greater, lesser, or equal worth than its correspondent in Vd. 7.41.

Bibliography:

C. Bartholomae, Altiranisches Wörterbuch, Straßburg, 1904.

M. Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism I, Leiden, 1972.

M. Boyce, “Āθravan,” in Encyclopedia Iranica III, 1989, pp. 16-17.

J. Choksy, Evil Good and Gender. Facets of the Feminine in Zoroastrian Religious History, New York, 2002.

K. Gould, “Outside the Discipline, Inside the Experience: Women in Zoroastrianism,” in Religion and Women, ed. Arvind Sharma, New York, 1994, pp. 139-82.

A. Hintze, Review of Evil Good and Gender. Facets of the Feminine in Zoroastrian Religious History by J. Choksy, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2003, pp. 403-10.

Idem, A Zoroastrian Liturgy: The Worship in Seven Chapters (Yasna 35-41), Wiesbaden, 2007.

A. Hintze, “Disseminating the Mazdayasnian Religion: An Edition of the Avestan Hērbedestān Chapter 5,” in Exegisti monumenta: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas Sims- Williams, ed. Werner Sundermann, Almut Hintze, and François de Blois, Iranica 17, Wiesbaden, 2009, pp. 171-90.

K. Hoffmann, “The Avesta Fragment FrD.3,” Indo-Iranian Journal 11, 1968, pp. 1-10.

H. Humbach, in collaboration with J. Elfenbein and P. O. Skjærvø, The Gāthās of Zarathushtra and the Other Old Avestan Texts II, Heidelberg, 1991.

J. Kellens and E. Pirart, Les textes vieil-avestiques II, Wiesbaden, 1990.

J. Narten, Der Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, Wiesbaden, 1986.

D. Sanjana, The Position of Zoroastrian Women in Remote Antiquity, Bombay, 1892.

H.-P. Schmidt, Some Women’s Rites and Rights in the Veda, Professor P.D. Gune Memorial Lectures (second series), Poona, 1987.

M. Schwartz, “Women in the Old Avesta: Social Position and Textual Composition,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 17, 2007, pp. 1-8.

E. Tichy, “Vedisch ṛtā́́ van- und avestisch aṣ̌auuan-,” Die Sprache 32, 1986, pp. 91-105.

(Leon Goldman)

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WOMEN iii. In Shiʿism

WOMEN

iii. IN SHIʿISM

In theory, Shiʿism has a more favorable attitude towards women than Sunni Islam. These favorable differences are largely annulled, however, by some specific Shiʿite practices as well as the social realities of women’s lives in Shiʿite communities. Overall, the social position of Shiʿite women throughout the centuries has been more affected by local and cultural factors, rather than religious ones. In modern times, the social role of women has been one of the main points of dispute between Islamic conservatives and modernists.

(1) Women in Shiʿite thought. The Koran can be interpreted as saying that men and women are spiritually equal, and this aspect has been emphasized by modernist Shiʿite scholars. Women have a more favorable position in Shiʿite than in Sunni theology and law, mainly owing to the circumstances of Shiʿite history. In addition to the figures of the Prophet Moḥammad and the twelve Shiʿite Imams, there is also the figure of Fāṭema, the daughter of the Prophet, wife of the first Imam, and progenitor of the other Imams, completing the pleroma of the Fourteen Immaculates (čahārdah maʿṣum) in Shiʿite mystical philosophy. As a member of this pleroma, Fāṭema has a redemptive role on the Day of Judgment (Ayoub, p. 19), and women in particular call on her in this capacity.

The presence of a female figure among the Fourteen Immaculates added an element of the "sacred feminine" to Shiʿite cosmology that is not present in its Sunni counterpart and has been compared to the place of Mary in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity (Thurkill). Indeed, Fāṭema has even acquired some of Mary’s titles, such as "virgin" (baṭul) and perhaps even "mother of her father" (omm abihā). Almost as important for women is the figure of Zaynab, the sister of Imam Ḥosayn, who, after the events at Karbalāʾ, stood defiantly before the Omayyad authorities and managed to save the life of her nephew ʿAli Zayn-al-ʿĀbedin and thus preserve the line of Imams. Their actions have provided role models and important precedents for Shiʿite law. For example, Fāṭema’s insistence on her right of inheriting the spoils of Ḵaybar and the land of Fadak from her father in the face of opposition from the caliph Abū Bakr led to improved inheritance rights for women in Shiʿite Islamic law.

(2) Women in Shiʿite Law. Whatever advantages may have been given to women in Shiʿite thought were largely removed in practice in the patriarchal societies of the Middle East. The men who carried out the process of deriving the law (šariʿa) created norms that put Shiʿite women in much the same subordinate social position as Sunni women. The most conservative interpretations of Shiʿite law regards women’s role as being essentially within the house as a domestic supervisor, to provide their husbands with sexual pleasure, to bring up children, and to keep away from men other than close relatives; women are regarded as weak, of poor judgment, not worth any substantial education, too emotional to be trusted with important decisions, and liable, if unveiled, to lead men astray by arousing sexual desires (Majlisi, p. 78; see also ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb, Nahj al-balāḡa I, p. 129).

Women are of course subject to all of the general obligations of Muslims, although some laws and rituals can only be performed with the husband’s permission (see for example Mofid, pp. 30-31 on fasting and payment of ḏakāt and ṣadaqa). To detail all differences between the laws for men and those for women or among the various Shiʿite authorities of the past, would extend beyond the scope of this article. The following is just a sample of those laws that are specific to women as described by Shaikh Mofid (q.v.) in Aḥkām al-nesāʾ.

Women are exhorted to dress and behave modestly, to lower their gaze in the presence of unrelated males, and not to speak to anyone other than their husbands or close relatives, except in a few circumstances (Mofid, pp. 55-58). Sunni and Shiʿite law regarding marriage and divorce are generally similar and depend mainly on Koranic injunctions. Shiʿite legal text-books always contain a large section on menstruation since menstrual blood is ritually polluting. The most important regulations are that menstruating women cannot perform the ṣalāt prayer, fast or perform the pilgrimage rites, should not enter a mosque or touch a Koran and should not have sexual intercourse with their husbands (Mofid, pp. 18-20). A woman may not go out of the house without her husband’s permission (idem, p. 38) or travel without her husband or a close male relative (idem, p. 29). Even a woman learning to read and write was considered reprehensible in classical texts (idem, p. 56).

With regard to inheritance, in general women receive half of what men receive. However, Shiʿite law is considerably more favorable to women than Sunni law since sisters, daughters, and maternal relatives and their descendants (cognates) are equally entitled to inherit as brothers, sons, and paternal relatives (agnates). The testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man (and not accepted at all on certain matters), and this 1:2 ratio also applies to such things as blood money (dia) (Mofid, pp. 51-53). (For more on women in Shiʿite law, see Ferdows; Madelung.) There has been considerable discussion among Shiʿites concerning whether women can become mojtaheds or not. Most authorities say that they cannot but, in recent times, one woman in Isfahan, Bānu Noṣrat Begom Amin (d. 1982), claimed the rank of mojtahed and held ejāzas. However, her rank was never fully accepted by many of the ʿolamāʾ. It is suggested that women may achieve the status of mojtahed, in the sense of being able to follow their own independent judgment and not practice taqlid, but they cannot act as marjaʿ al-taqlid (Fischer, pp. 162-63, 279 n. 18). Zohra Ṣefati is a current teacher in Qom and is widely considered a mojtaheda (Internet 1). Another area where there is considerable controversy, this time between Sunnis and Shiʿa, is over the question of the permissibility of the Shiʿite institution of temporary marriage, which Sunnis (and many Shiʿite Iranians) regard as little more than legalized prostitution (see MOTʿA).

(3) Lives of Shiʿite women. Despite the above theoretical considerations, the actual lives of Shiʿite women are governed by the extent that these Shiʿite legal stipulations are balanced by national laws, as well as many local and cultural factors. Many Shiʿite women still live in traditional communities where their theoretical rights in Islamic law are negated by their inability to exercise these rights effectively in a male-dominated religion and society; these women’s lives are largely confined to the home. In more modern societies, national laws may negate some aspects of religious law. In Persia, for example, the Family Protection Law of 1967 led to substantial improvements in the rights of women in such matters as marriage, divorce, and custody of children. These reforms were, however, abolished in the 1979 Revolution, although some elements were later brought back (Paidar, pp. 271-77). Nevertheless, middle-class urban women in Persia today are able to obtain an education and go out to work, leading to a considerably larger social role. Even in traditional communities, however, one can find examples, especially in tribal and village societies, of women working alongside men, unveiled and with great social freedoms.

In terms of religious activities, women largely live in their own sphere, with their own rawża-ḵᵛānis and sofras; women may even be rawża-ḵᵛāns and perform clerical functions (Kamalkhani, pp. 12-33, 47-70). Each national community has its own distinctive women’s religious activities (on Persia, see Kamalkhani; on Iraq, see Fernea and Bezirgan; on Lebanon, see Deeb, 2006). In Persia, an attempt has been made to force a social segregation on women, by having women-only areas in all public places, especially mosques, and by segregating transport. There has been a considerable resistance among Persian women to this trend.

(4) Women as ideological battleground. Probably no area of the Islamic world is more of a battleground between the modernists and traditionalists than the social role of women and issues such as veiling. In the 1970s and 1980s, intellectuals such as ʿAli Šariʿati were formulating new ways for women to be both Islamic and modern. Fāṭema and Zaynab in particular served important functions as role models for women during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (see Šariʿati) and in present-day Lebanon (see Deeb, 2009). In the last few decades among Islamicists there are, on the one hand, the traditionalists (such as Khomeini and Ḵāmeneʾi), who maintain a conservative position on all aspects of women’s lives, along with the neo-traditionalists (such as Moṭahhari), who maintain the same position but use modern and scientific rhetoric; and on the other hand, the modernists (such as Soruš), who are actively trying to adapt the traditional position to modern realities (Mir-Hosseini).

Today there is a lively debate about the social position of women, engaging with the discourses of Shi’ism, modernism and feminism (see Azari; Mir-Hosseini; Nashat; Najmabadi). While older women in Persia use the čādor, younger women are now using smarter and more practical alternatives, such as headscarves, wimples, coats, and tunics, and many are flouting the spirit, if not the letter, of Islamic law. Just as in the 1970s, it was debatable whether women were wearing the čādor as a symbol of their Islamicization or as a symbol of their dissatisfaction with the Shah’s regime, so to can it be debated today whether young women are pushing the boundaries of the dress code as a symbol of their secularization or as a symbol of their dissatisfaction with the political regime. In both cases the answer is probably a mixture of the two motives.

Bibliography:

ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb, Nahj al-balāḡa, ed. Sharif-al-Rażi, Beirut, n.d.

Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of ʿAshura in Twelver Shiʿism in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass., 1975.

Farah Azari, Women of Iran: the Conflict with Fundamentalist Islam, London, 1983.

Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shiʿi Lebanon, Princeton, 2006.

Idem, “Emulating and/or embodying the ideal: The gendering of temporal frameworks and Islamic role models in Shiʿi Lebanon,” American Ethnologist 36/2, 2009, pp. 242-57.

Adele Ferdows, “The Status and Rights of Women in Ithna ʿAshari Shiʿi Islam,” in Asghar Fathi, Women and the Family in Iran, Leiden, 1985, pp. 13-36.

Elizabeth Fernea and Basima Q. Bezirgan, “Women’s rituals in Iraq”, in K. S. Aghaie, ed., The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shiʿi Islam, Austin, 2005.

Michael M. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1980.

Internet 1 = www.women.gov.ir/pages/?cid=404.

Zahra Kamalkhani, Women's Islam: Religious Practice Among Women in Today's Iran, London, 1998.

Wilferd Madelung, “Shi’i Attitudes Toward Women as Reflected in ‘fiqh’,” in Afaf Lutfi al- Sayyid-Marsot, ed., Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, Malibu, 1979, pp. 69-79.

Mollā Moḥammad-Bāqer Majlisi, Helyat al-mottaqin, Tehran, n.d.

Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran, Princeton, N.J., 1999.

Shaikh Mofid, Aḥkām al-nesaʾ, ed. Shaikh Mahdi Najaf, Qom, 1413/1992. Morteża Moṭahhari, Neẓām-e ḥoquq-e zan dar Eslām, Qom , 1978; tr. The Rights of Women in Islam, Tehran, 1981.

Afsaneh Najmabadi, ed., Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran, Cambridge, Mass., 1990.

Guity Nashat, Women and Revolution in Iran, Boulder, Colo., 1983

Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran, Cambridge, 1995.

ʿAli Šariʿati, Fāṭema Fāṭema ast, Tehran, n.d.; Fatima is Fatima, tr. Laleh Bakhtiar, Tehran, 1980.

Mary F. Thurkill, Chosen Among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shiʿite Islam, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2008

(Moojan Momen)

Originally Published: February 11, 2011

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WOMEN iv. in the works of the Bab and in the Babi Movement

The Bab elevated the status of women in his writings and confirmed this in his actions. The Babi community reflected this change in the actions of the Babi women.

WOMEN iv. IN THE WORKS OF THE BAB AND IN THE BABI MOVEMENT

The Bab elevated the status of women in his writings and confirmed this in his actions. The Babi community reflected this change in the actions of the Babi women.

(1) Women in the works of the Bab.

(2) Women in the Babi movement.

(1) Women in the works of the Bab. Theologically, the Bab regarded God as utterly beyond the reach and knowledge of humanity and he characterised the Primal Will as the locus of the primal manifestation of the Godhead and the fashioner of the creation. This Primal Will is represented by the Maid of Heaven who descends to earth. And in describing this figure, the Bab writes: "I am the Maid of Heaven begotten by the Spirit of Bahāʾ" (Qayyum al-asmāʾ, p. 52; Saeidi, pp. 152-53). Thus the Bab created a female symbol for the highest spiritual aspect of himself (see also Lawson).

In general, the Bab treats women and men equally in the laws that he gives. In a number of places, the Bab specifically ameliorates some of the burdens that Islamic law had laid upon women; and so for example, divorce is made more difficult by the imposition of a twelve-month delay (Persian Bayān 6:12), the severe restrictions on their social intercourse is relaxed (Persian Bayān 8:10), and men are ordered not to harm women (Ṣaḥifa Bayn al-Ḥaramayn, p. 82). He orders men to treat women with the utmost love (Ṣaḥifa-ye ʿAdliya, pp. 32, 38; Saeidi, p. 236). On occasions, the Bab even gives women preference over men; for example, he sets a penalty for anyone who causes grief to another person, which he equates to causing grief to God, but he says that the penalty for causing grief to women is doubled (Persian Bayān 7:18); also, having laid down the duty of pilgrimage for whoever can afford it, he exempts women from this obligation unless they live nearby, so that no hardship should come upon them on the way (Persian Bayān 4:18).

In many places in his writings, the Bab refers to women as the "possessors of circles" (ulā al-dawāʾer; see for example Persian Bayān 4:5, 7:18, 8:6). This refers to the Bab's injunction that women carry on them a piece of paper on which is drawn six concentric circles, between which are five lines of Babi scripture. The two numbers, five and six, signifying Howa (He, i.e. God). Other instructions are also given regarding these circles, but the overall intention is that the circle symbolizes the Sun of Truth (or the Manifestation of God, the term used by the Bab for the figures such as Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and himself) and so the woman carrying it is constantly reminded to look for the next Manifestation of God "He whom God shall make manifest" (Persian Bayān 5:10; Saeidi, pp. 329-31).

(2) Women in the Babi movement. Most contemporary accounts agree that one of the main social impacts of the Babi movement was the amelioration of the position of women (see, e.g., Momen, pp. 27, 75). Quite apart from what is in his writings, the Bab signalled that his religion would lead to an improvement in the position of women by the support that he gave to his leading female disciple, Qorrat-al-ʿAyn. Her radicalism in pushing forward the implications of the claims of the Bab to the point of infracting the precepts of Shiʿism while she was in Karbalāʾ led another senior Babi, Shaikh Aḥmad Moʿallem-e Ḥeṣāri to complain about her to the Bab in 1846. The Bab wrote back praising Qorrat-al-ʿAyn and absolving her of any guilt by giving her the title of Ṭāhera (q.v.; “the pure one”; quoted in Fāżel Māzandarāni, p. 332). She was also regarded by the Babis as the return of Fātema, the Prophet's daughter, on the basis of what the Bab had written (Persian Bayān 1:4). She was later to push forward her radicalism and even to appear unveiled at the conference of Badašt (1848), all with the evident approval of the Bab (Nabil, pp. 292-98).

During the Babi upheaval at Zanjān, the British consul, Abbott, visited the scene of the operations and reported to Shiel, the British minister: "They [the Babis] fight in the most obstinate and spirited manner, the women even, of whom several have been killed, engaging in the strife" (quoted in Momen, p. 11; cf. Nabil, p. 563). During this episode, a latter-day Joan of Arc arose in the person of Zaynab, a young Babi girl, who dressed as a man and participated in the fighting with such courage and success that she became the terror of the royal troops and was put in command of one section of the Babi defences (Nabil, pp. 549-52; Walbridge, pp. 355-56).

During the Babi upheaval in Nayriz (1850), the women also played an important part; Nabil (p. 487) records: "The uproar caused by their [the Babis'] womenfolk, their amazing audacity and self-confidence, utterly demoralized their opponents and paralysed their efforts." It may even be that in the second Neyriz upheaval (1853), the Babi women outnumbered the men, many of whom had been killed in the first episode.

Bibliography: Mehri Afnān, "Maqām-e zan dar āṯār-e Hażrat-e Noqṭa-ye Ulā wa mašāhir-e zanān dar ʿahd-e aʿlā," Ḵušahā-ʾi az ḵerman-e adab o honar 6, 1995, pp. 207-27.

The Bab, Qayyum al-asmāʾ, ms. dated 1261, in Afnan Library, Tonbridge, UK.

Idem, Persian Bayān, published as Ketāb-e mostaṭāb-e Bayān, n.p., n.d.; E.G. Browne's summary translation is in Moojan Momen, ed., Selections from the Writings of E.G. Browne on the Bābi and Bahā'i Religions, Oxford, 1987, pp. 316-406

Idem, Ṣaḥifa-ye ʿAdliya, n.p., n.d.

Idem, Ṣaḥifa Bayn al-Ḥaramayn, Cambridge University Library mss. Or Ms 943.

Fāżel Māzandarāni, Tārik-e Ẓohur al-Ḥaqq, vol. 3, n.p., n.d.

Todd Lawson, "The Authority of the Feminine and Fatima's Place in an Early Work of the Bab," in The Most Learned of the Shiʿa: The Institution of Marjaʿ Taqlid, ed. Linda Walbridge, Oxford, 2001

Moojan Momen, The Bābi and Bahā'i Religions, 1844-1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts, Oxford, 1981

Nabil [Zarandi], The Dawn-Breakers: Nabīl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahāʾī Revelation, ed. and tr. Shoghi Effendi, Wilmette, IL, 1970

Nader Saiedi, Gate of the Heart: Understanding the Writings of the Bāb, [Waterloo, Ont.], 2008.

John Walbridge, "The Babi Uprising in Zanjan: Causes and Issues," Iranian Studies, 29/3-4, pp. 339-62. (Moojan Momen)

Originally Published: February 11, 2011

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WOOL

WOOL (Pers. pašm), the fiber that was the earliest to be used for the making of textiles in Persia. Archeological finds have shown that sheep wool and goat hair were already woven around 6500 BCE, although some doubt this data. Spinning whorls and warp weights dating from 5000 BCE have also been found. From the end of the 4th or early in the 3rd millennium BCE, signs of tablet weaving were recovered by the French Mission at Susa. Furthermore, a seal tablet belonging to the second half of the 4th millennium BCE shows a weaving loom, which, together with artifacts from subsequent centuries, show that weaving was a normal activity (Survey of Persian Art V, pp. 2175, 3511; Ghirshman, p. 29; Amiet, p. 48; Zeder and Hesse, pp. 2254-57; Wapnish, p. 105; Zeuner, p. 344; Rubinson, pp. 49-61; Böhmer and Thompson, pp. 30-36).

Wool is a general term for the animal fibers produced by a number of hairy mammals, which in the case of Iran are sheep, goats, and camels. Sheep (gusfand) had already been domesticated in the Neolithic age. Available chromosomal and archeological evidence indicates that the domestic sheep is descended from a mouflon-like animal and that domestication occurred about 10,000-11,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean region (Nadler, pp. 109-25). Hammurabi’s (r. ca. 1792–50 BCE) Babylonia was known as the ‘land of wool’ and had two types of sheep, one for wool production and the other for meat (Wulff, p. 177). But in addition to sheep’s wool there also was and still is goat hair (kork, taftik), and third, camel wool (pašm-e šotor). Goat (boz) domestication has been documented in the highlands of the Ganj Dareh Tepe (Kermanshah) archaeological site (see ECBATANA), from around 8500 BCE, and then expanded some 500 to 1,000 years later to arid lowland regions well outside the natural homeland of wild goats (Zeder and Hesse, pp. 2254-57). The camel was domesticated between 2900 and 1900 BCE. The earliest evidence that Bactrian camels were domesticated has been found in šahr-e Suḵta (eastern Iran), namely a jar filled with camel’s dung and fragments of camel’s hair, dating back to about 2500 BCE (Bulliet, p. 56; Zeuner, p. 344; Wapnish, p. 105).

Wool was produced everywhere in Persia by the considerable flocks of sheep, goats, and camels owned by nomadic tribes and villagers. According to Olivier, at the end of the 1790s, wool was the most important fiber in Persia after silk. There was no country in the world where wool was so abundant, he opined (Olivier V, pp. 327-28). Each type of wool was used to make different kinds of final consumer products, although there also was overlap. Wool played an important role in the economy of Iran throughout its history. Its use was universal in the making of carpets, rugs, felts, headgear, clothes, bedding, animal and floor coverings, wrapping materials, saddlebags, nosebags, ropes, and tenting. Throughout history various woolen items are mentioned in medieval texts such as clothing, felts, and carpets (for example, Spuler, Iran, p. 395; Mongolen4, p. 362, and above all Qari 1980). In the 17th century, inhabitants of Lār wore felt hats produced at Kerman and Yazd, while these two towns also produced felt and woolen garments (Tavernier, pp. 319- 20). Nothing is known about the wool trade prior to the 17th century, and then only of trade in goat hair.

Sheep wool (pašm). Sheep wool was the most important wool commodity, because of its range (nationwide), volume (huge) and economic importance (everybody needed it). Persian wool, however, is coarse, which makes it well-suited for carpet weaving, but less so for export demands. Traders distinguished between various differences in quality of sheep wool, depending on the region, season, and purity of the wool. In the mid-19th century, wool supplied by sheep from Shiraz and Qom was considered to be the best, according to Polak, while wool of sheep from Khorasan was also considered to be of good quality. The difference in quality and color as well as the destined end-use resulted in different prices for wool offered in the market. It was also clear that the grades used by the collectors of wool were often different than those used by the exporters, although some of them may have overlapped (Government of Great Britain, 1875, p. 206). In fact, when buying wool the agents hardly took quality considerations into account. Often, they had a preference for the place of origin, because at some places wool was better and less dishonestly processed than at others(Government of Great Britain, DCR 3499, pp. 6-7).

The main clip took place in spring, at the time when the animals were about to start their grazing. The second and less important clip occurred in autumn, just before the animals moved to their winter-quarters. The yield of this second clip was lower and also of inferior quality. The shearing (pašm boridan, šidan) of the sheep was a family and/or communal activity (Fraser 1838, II, p. 198). One sheep yielded about 750g of wool. In many parts of Persia, the sheep were first combed and washed with soap before shearing to get rid of dirt and burs. In other parts, the shorn fleece were collected and washed in a haphazard fashion. Then, it was cleaned by hand to remove foreign substances. Thereafter the wool was washed once again in cold water, followed by drying in the open air. Women did the washing and cleaning. Olmer commented that he never saw wool being combed as was the practice in Europe. The carding of wool was similar to that of cotton (Wulff, p. 179; Olmer, p. 34).

Export of Wool. Despite significant domestic demand, there was still export of surplus wool to the Ottoman Empire (Baghdad, Aleppo, Izmir, Istanbul) in the 18th century (Olivier V, pp. 327-28). Jaubert, referring to the situation around 1805, mentioned wool among the products exported by Persia to India and Turkey. However, [first name] Milburn in his list of possible export commodities from the Gulf did not mention wool at all (Jaubert, p. 253; Dupré I, p. 443, II, pp. 374-75; Milburn I, pp. 132-42). Around 1820, the production of wool was only of importance for three provinces, namely Kerman, ʿErāq-e ʿAjam, and Azerbaijan (Fraser 1826, pp. 354-57, 359, 363; Kinneir, pp. 36-40). In the 1840s, Abbott observed that at Isfahan there had not been a regular demand for the export of wool. He was therefore unable to determine to what extent sheep or goat wool might be purchased at Isfahan. At that time, Isfahan imported wool from Qušān in Khorasan and from Nāʾin and Yazd. The Baḵtiāris, Qašqāʾis, Garrus, and other tribes also had wool, and if there would have been a regular demand, Abbott believed they probably could have supplied it as well. The wool of the sheep and goats was all required for the use of the tribes (Amanat, pp. 100, 115, 193). By 1850, wool was little and irregularly exploited, partly because of the low market price, partly because of its quality which permitted it to be used only for coarse fabrics (Binning II, p. 298; Polak II, p. 101). The main production areas for sheep wool in the 1850s were ʿErāq-e ʿAjam, Golpāyegān, Khorasan, Kermanshah, Nehāvand, Lorestān and in particular Kurdistan and Kerman. In addition to the wool from the normal two clips, there was also the wool from killed and dead sheep, though it concerned smaller quantities (Blau, p. 71).

The export of sheep wool was of no importance until the 1860s when it acquired some importance, mostly being exported via the Persian Gulf. Export to the Ottoman empire continued, but we are not informed about its volume. Exports to Russia only began in the 1880s in substantial quantities, and as of 1890 wool became an important export commodity (Schneider, pp. 190-95). There was a shift, however, from export via the Persian Gulf to Russia, while exports to Baghdad also increased significantly. The wool trade was organized by urban merchant capital, as in previous centuries, through pre- clip sales, cash advances, and barter, and/or a combination of these methods. Whereas in the Gulf area the wool trade was entirely carried out by Persian merchants, in northern Persia it was almost entirely in the hands of Russian Armenians. Sabzevār was its center of trade. Some of these merchants tried to improve the quality of the product by washing and the use of presses, but, in general, nomads and traders ignored market signals to improve the quality of the product. The two main production zones (Kermanshah and Khorasan) continued to mainly supply the export market; Khorasan proving to be the most important export zone. The other provinces mostly supplied the national market for the expanding demand of wool for the manufacturing of carpets and cloaks, and other local traditional needs. In 1895, the total wool output of Khorasan was estimated at 20 million lbs. Of this, some 6-7 million lbs. were exported to Russia, which only took 200,000 to 300,000 lbs., the remainder being forwarded to Marseilles (Government of Great Britain, DCR 1800, p. 19). Khorasan’s wool production was in fact much smaller. The available annual quantity wool for export was about 60-70,000 puds (pud, a Russian unit of weight: 1 pud = 16.38 kg), only about one-third was really from Khorasan, the rest was from Afghanistan (Government of Great Britain, DCR 3724, p. 12). By the 1890s, wool had become one of the most important products of Kermanshah, because of the vast flocks of the Lurs and Kurds. After deduction of the wool used for the domestic market, some one million lbs. were left for export via Baghdad (Government of Great Britain, DCR 2260, p. 16). Due to internal political and security problems, the volume of the wool trade decreased, but more so in Kermanshah than in Khorasan, where Russian troops after 1912 controlled much of the province. Nevertheless, it would seem that the market was stabilizing itself at the one million mann level rather than growing. The trade in wool and woolen fabrics amounted to almost 34 million qerāns in 1913 or 6.25% of the total trade (In 1912, about qerāns equaled 100 French Francs). Exported were 14.8 million qerāns or 2,25% of the total exports (Government of France, pp. 78, 80).

Table 1. Quantity of wool exported and main destinations (selected years, 1908-56).

The export of wool dropped after World War I, because of the Russian revolution. Exports in 1920-21 amounted to only 2.5 million qerāns, but, as the table shows, exports were back at the pre-war level in 1926. Russia remained the main market, and Soviet import policy therefore had considerable impact on wool exports that fluctuated. In 1926, the Soviets even forbade all imports, except for cotton, but after the October 1927 Russo- Persian Agreement wool was exported again (Wilson, p. 85). The trend, however, was an upward one, although wool exports in relative terms declined in importance declining from 2% of total imports in 1924 to 1.2% in 1928. Thereafter, the figure fluctuated between 1.5-2% in the 1930s (Temple, p. 13; Hadow, p. 15; Lingeman, p. 44; Simmonds, p. 45; Gray, p. 55). In November 1935, the Iranian government granted a trade monopoly to a state-owned company, but it was discontinued in September 1938. A negative result was the loss of the transit trade that could not wait for the cumbersome rules of the wool monopoly. Much of Iranian wool was not cleaned; the grease and waste represented about 50% of weight. Cleaning would lower transport cost and higher prices (Agah, p. 96-97). In 1947, it was estimated that domestic consumption of wool was about 8,800 metric tons, of which 3,500 tons were used by the carpet industry, 2,700 tons by industrial factories for blankets and suitings, and 2,600 tons in home weaving. An unknown amount was produced by the tribes and used for their own requirements. Raw wool production was sufficient to meet domestic demand and to leave 25% for export. Woolen fabrics, therefore, were imported (some 1,100 tons in 1326 š./1947-48). There was little or no grading of wool, making it less suitable for suitings etc. Much wool yarn was used in cotton spinning and weaving establishments for the manufacturing of combination fabrics such as heavy blankets, using a cotton warp and a wool weft. “All of the 3,500 tons for carpets is spun by hand. Thus the fine fibers needed for suitings are thus wasted and the carpet yarns thus are not uniform or of good quality” (Overseas Consultants IV, pp. 145).

Wool production remained stable at about 35,000 tons per year between 1950 and 1971 (Aresvik, p. 252, table A.8). Thereafter, there seems to have been a fall in output, for only 18,000 tons per year were produced. However, the latter figure refers to clean wool, while the earlier figures refer to dirty wool (Echo of Iran 1977, p. 193). Iran still is a producer of wool, although a minor one. Between 1987 and 1993, its annual output was 14,000 tons of clean wool, or less than 1% of the total world output. Iranian wool is of a coarse nature, however, and is entirely used in carpet weaving. There are presently 102 commercial wool-spinning mills in Iran that produce 24,000 tons of wool yarn each year, whereas Iran’s cottage industry produces an equal amount (Petrie).

Goat hair (kork, taftik, moḵayyar). Goat hair was produced in the same areas as sheep wool. There were two kinds: (i) fine down (kork) produced by Kerman goats, which in the West is known as mohair (moḵayyar), and (ii) taftik or the straighter and coarser outer coat or so-called guard hair (Stolze and Andreas, p. 22; Dupré II, p. 86). Its use to make woven materials dates to around 6500 BCE (Survey of Persian Art V, p. 2175). Kork was the most sought after Persian wool. Fine, soft goat’s wool, referred to in Persian as kurk, kork, kulk or ḵulk, is the down undercoat underneath the rough outer hair of the goats. This fleece of the finest hairs on the under-belly serves to protect the goats against the cold winters and is shed during spring. It is produced by the Rāʾin goat, a variety of the capraibex, a Central Asian species. The Persians distinguished four different types of kork, according to an 18th-century Dutch report, to wit: kork-e šang-e duzi, kork-e kermāni, kork-e safid and kork-e nabāti (Floor 1999, p. 356). The bulk of de-haired down hair from Iranian and Afghan goats is 17.0/20.0 microns. The length is generally quite short but varies from lot to lot and can be anything from 20mm to 50mm making it suitable for spinning on either woolen or worsted systems. The term kork is also used to denote the very finest quality wool obtained from the shoulder and flanks of shearling lambs. Kork was produced not only in Kerman, but also in Yazd province, but there were quality differences between the various production locations. The production area of kork seems to have been concentrated in the area stretching from Rāvar, 70 miles northwest of Kerman, to Sirjān, a town at equal distance towards the southwest of the city; to Rāʾin in the northeast and Orzuya in the southeast. The English East India Company (EIC) reported that kork also was imported from as far as Herat in the 17th century (Matthee, n. 34-36, 39). Kerman goats produced an average fleece weight of 0.5-0.75 kg in the 1960s, yielding between 25-400g of kork annually. The herders combed the down from the goats during evening camp. During the period between 1658 and 1769, there was considerable European interest and trade in kork. Of the various colors, the Dutch East India Company, VOC, only wanted the red variety. The EIC, likewise, preferred the red type, but also bought the other types of kork. For example, in June 1736, the EIC wanted all four colors, namely, red, yellow, pearly and purple (Floor 1999, p. 357). Kork was one of the major products of Armenian trade with the Netherlands (Du Mans, pp. 187, 349, 367). In Iran itself, kork was used to weave shawl, while taftik was used for making tents, ropes, gelim, patu, felt and were used as edges, warps, and foundations for carpets.

Table 2. Quantites of kork exported by the Dutch and English (1658-1753).

The European Companies bought kork through the system of piš-foruš (or advance sale), which obliged the owners of the goats to sell their wool to the merchant who had advanced them the money (Floor 1988, p. 39). In the 19th century, some kork was exported to France and Austria, as well as to India in varying quantities. Most kork, however, was consumed locally for shawl production (Blau, p. 71).

Taftik or ordinary outer goat hair also was exported. However, there is no information available on the value, volume, or other particulars of this trade. According to Du Mans, there was a lively trade in raw goat wool and goat hair from Kurdistan, Yazd, but especially from Kerman (referring to kork), for the hatting and fulling industry in Europe. According to a French report from the 1680s, the first quality of (goat) wool originated from Kerman, the second quality from Mashad, and the third from Tabriz (Du Mans, pp. 187, 349, 367). In the late 18th and early 19th century, the trade distinguished three qualities of taftik: black, red and white. The black came from Khorasan, Bukhara and Samarqand and was superior to the other two colors. The red came from northern Persia, Khorasan, Sistān, Qandahar, and Kerman. The white was from Central Persia. These three types of wool were mixed and packed in bales of 50 or 100 ʿoqqas, depending on whether they were carried by a mule or camel. Jews were mostly involved in sorting the three kinds of goat hair. The British and French only bought the black hair and demanded that it be pure. Other Europeans took the mixed bag (Olivier V, pp. 328- 29; Dupré II, p. 375). Goat hair was rather glossy probably because the goats ate the leaves of the konār tree, which was also used to wash human hair (Government of Great Britain, DCR 3951, p. 19). In the 20th century, Iran was one of the largest producers of goat hair, because of its large number of goats. In the 1970s, some 3,300 tons per year were produced (Echo of Iran 1976, p. 193). Most of the kork is still produced in the Kerman area, both by nomads and villagers (Dillon; Stöber, p. 84; Bradbury, pp. 60, 207). In the 1990s, Iran exported some 1,500 tons out of a total world production of about 8,000 tons. However, until recently, Iran did not have proper facilities for the processing of goat hair and so it mainly exports all the soft wool in raw form, although it now also has de-hairing facilities (separation of coarse hairs and down hairs. Kork is also produced in Afghanistan and much of it found its way either to Iran or India, and beyond. Plans are underway to resume export in the form of cleaned and spun kork (Floor 1999, pp. 378-79).

Camel wool (pašm-e šotor).Camel wool is known for its length, softness, and purity, and was produced in particular in the southern and eastern provinces of Iran. The fine, soft undercoat of hair was the most sought after although the straighter and coarser outer coat or guard hair is also used. From late spring to early summer, camels naturally shed their hair. Fallen or plucked (kandan) clumps of hair are collected by hand. Camels may shed up to 8-10 kg of wool per year, which require de-hairing. The main staples were Tabriz, Kermanshah and Kerman. In the 19th century, there was export both to Europe (via Turkey), Russia and India. The latter trade was so important that the governor of Kerman obtained the export monopoly (Stolze and Andreas, pp. 22-23; Dupré I, p. 443). The wool of the Bactrian camel was finer than of the Arab camel (dromedary), and around 1800 was only used in Europe to make hats (Olivier V, pp. 329-30). The wool trade distinguished three qualities: black, red, and gray. Black wool was usually sold separately and its value was higher than that of the other two qualities. Gray camel wool usually was half in value of red wool (Dupré I, p. 443). Camel hair was woven by, amongst others, the women of Daštestān district into material to makeʿabāʾs or cloaks. Their price in Bušehr was 50 to 250 qerāns according to color and softness around the turn of the 20th century. In eastern Persia and Afghanistan, a flannel-like fabric called barak was woven from camel wool or goat hair and was made into winter clothing. The guard hair was used for tenting, ropes, and felt-like coats (Government of Great Britain, DCR 3951, p. 19; Floor 1999, pp. 129-30, 138, 261-62). In 1947, camel hair was used entirely by the tribes for the manufacture of coarse rugs (Overseas Consultants IV, pp. 146). There is no information available on the value, volume, or other particulars of this trade. At the moment camel wool is traded under the trade name of cashmere, a trade term that covers both goat hair and camel wool.

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Karen S. Rubinson, “The Textiles from Pazyryk: A Study in the Transfer and Transformation of Artistic Motifs,” Expedition 32/1, 1990, pp. 49-61.

Manfred Schneider, Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsstruktur und Wirtschaftsentwicklung Persiens 1850-1900, Stuttgart, 1990. S. Simmonds, Economic Conditions in Iran, London, 1935.

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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Voyages en Perse et description de ce royaume, Paris, 1930.

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Hans E. Wulff, Traditional Crafts of Persia, Cambridge, 1966.

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Internet Sources. 1. Afghanistan: Rebuilding a Nation: “Cashmere Wool Washing and Spinning Project,” formerly at www.export.gov/afghanistan/ (see http://trade.gov/afghanistan/ for ongoing news)

and “ Marketing Sector Assessment. SME Development,” at: www.undp.org/af/Publications/KeyDocuments/ (viewed 24 September 2008), pp. 95-115.

2. Iran Industrial, search at: www.iranindustrial.com/iranindustrial/index.php .

(Willem Floor)

Originally Published: July 20, 2005

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W~ CAPTIONS OF ILLUSTRATIONS list of all the figure and plate images in the W entries

W~ ENTRIES: CAPTIONS OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Entry Image Caption

WACKERNAGEL, JACOB Figure 1. Photograph of Jacob Wackernagel, 1912-13. (Voit Collection, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voit_199_Jakob_Wackernagel.jpg).

WAR KABUD Figure 1. General view of the excavated area amidst the robber pits.

WAR KABUD Figure 2. Selection of burial goods: pottery and bronze mace-heads, axe- adze, quiver plate, and vessels.

WELLHAUSEN, JULIUS Figure 1. Photograph of Julius Wellhausen.

WESTERGAARD, NIELS LUDVIG Figure 1. Portrait photograph of N. L. Westergaard, taken by Bertel Christian Budtz Müller, 1867. (The Royal Library, Denmark, under Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND)

WIKANDER, OSCAR STIG Figure 1. Stig Wikander in the 1960s; cf. Timuş, 2004, p. 260. Courtesy of Uppsala University.

(Cross-Reference)

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