312 REVIEWS The traces of Azari in the vocabulary of the modern Turkic lan- guage of Āturpātakān are the subject of another section of the work under review. This dialect, according to the author, is a mixture of Iranian Azari, Persian, Arabic, and Turkic elements. The Turkic con- stituent of the Azari Turkish, by his calculations, constitutes not more than 20-30 % of the whole vocabulary and includes mainly ver- bal forms. The considerable part of the lexicon is predominantly Per- sian. In the author’s opinion, the phonetic system of Azari Turkish bears the explicit traces of the Iranian linguistic substrate. He con- cludes that the language of the modern inhabitants of Āturpātakān is in fact a mixed Iranian-Turkic phenomenon, but by no means a pure Turkic dialect; therefore, according to him, it must be called New Az- ari, Azari Turkish, or the Modern Language of Āturpātakān. The book has an Appendix, which is a description of the gram- matical peculiarities of Harzani, a dialect still spoken in Dey Harzan, Galin-qaye, Babra, and in several surrounding villages. A separate paragraph is devoted to the analysis of the verbal system of this dia- lect.

Hasmik Kirakosian Arya International University, Yerevan

Sheerin , Les kurdes Ardalân entre la Perse et l’Empire ottoman, Paris: “Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner”, 2004, 225 pp.

The monograph by Sheerin Ardalan (1955-2002), herself a direct off- spring of the last valis of Ardalan, is based for the most part on the materials of the family archives, rare documents and sources. The first chapter presents the history of the Ardalan dynasties and the succession chronology of the local khans till the 18th cen- tury. The 10th-12th centuries are characterised as the period of the rise of Kurdish influence in the Islamic Near East. The author describes the history of the so-called famous Kurdish dynasties: the Rawwadids in Aturpatakan and the South Caucasus, with the capital in Tabriz (920?-1071); the Shaddadids in , and (951-1074); the in Diarbakr and Jazira (983-1085); and, finally, the Hassanveyids in Shahrizur and Dinavar (959-1015).

REVIEWS 313 The last two dynasties are examined more narrowly. From the Marwanids two new Kurdish families emerged: the Rozakis (in the Kurdish rendering Rōžakī, later Rōžkī), who reigned in the lands from Bitlis to Diarbakr (one of their emirs was Sharafaddin Bidlisi, the author of the famous “Sharaf-nameh”), and the Ardalanis. The last mentioned dynasty was founded in 1168-69 by Bābā-Ardalān, possi- bly a descendant of Aḥmad Naṣr ad-Dawla ibn Marwān, who later emigrated to Diarbakr. Almost a century after the breakdown of the Hassanveyids, Bābā-Ardalān, whose original name was Khusraw, es- tablished his fiefdom in the same areas. Khusraw chose a place for the settlement among the Gurans of Palangan in the town of Shahri- zur and soon became both the spiritual and political leader of that tribe. According to Bidlisi, the Ardalanis were the most influential sedentary tribe in the region. After Bābā-Ardalān’s death, his progeny continued inheriting leadership up to the 15th century; the dynasty itself existed for seven centuries. The author suggests two etymons―both far from being accept- able―for the name Ardalān: (h)ardalān “mountainous place” (Gurani ard “mountain”, with the locative suffixal element –lān); and *ardalān (a hypothetic compound from Gurani ard “great” and ālān “the Alans”) meaning, in her opinion, “the great Alans” and indicating, as she thinks, the role the Alans played in the ethnic history of Kurdis- tan (p. 23). A separate chapter is dedicated to the relations between the Ar- dalanis and the , the reigns of Nadir and Sobhan Verdi Khan, the origin of the Zand family, and the wars waged for Shahrizur and Kermanshah, etc. Until 1616, the princes of Ardalan―Sorkhab (Sohrab) Beig, Tey- mur Khan, and Halo Khan―from time to time intensified their rela- tions with the Safavid and the Ottoman Empire, but more often they recognised the supremacy of neither, and their troops did not participate in the military campaigns of the empires. The chronology of the book reaches up to the year of 1867. After the death of Amanollah Khan II, the last vali of Ardalan, Nasreddin Shah appointed his uncle, Farhad Mirza Qajar, the first governor of Ardalan. The innovative aspect of Sheerin Ardalan’s work is in the detailed description of the history of Ardalan and its ruling families, particu- larly in the reconstruction of the life and activities of Khusraw II.