Table of Contents

  • DĒN-DIBĪRĪH

    Cross-Reference

    See DABĪRE, DABĪRĪ.

  • DĒNAG

    Philippe Gignoux

    name of several Sasanian queens; it was not feminine by derivation but was clearly reserved for feminine prosopography.

  • DENIKE

    Anatol Ivanov

    (b. Kazan, 15 January 1885, d. Moscow, 13 October 1941), the first Russian historian of the medieval art of the Near and Far East.

  • DENḴA TEPE

    Oscar White Muscarella

    a Bronze and Iron Age site situated in the Ošnū valley of Azerbaijan, southwest of Lake Urmia, and 15 miles west of the major Iron Age site of Hasanlu (Ḥasanlū) in the Soldūz valley.

  • DĒNKARD

    Philippe Gignoux

    lit., “Acts of the religion”; written in Pahlavi, a summary of 10th-century knowledge of the Mazdean religion; the editor, Ādurbād Ēmēdān, entitled the final version “The Dēnkard of one thousand chapters.”

  • DENMARK

    Fereydun Vahman, Jes P. Asmussen

    : relations with Persia. Danish-Persian relations have been concentrated in three main areas: politics and diplomacy; trade and other economic relations; and Iranian studies in Denmark, including collections of Persian art in Danish museums.

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  • DENŠAPUH

    James Russell

    short form of Vehdenšapuh; Sasanian hambārakapet (quartermaster) involved in the campaign of Yazdagerd II (438-57) to force Christian Armenians to abjure their faith and return to Zoroastrianism; a gem bearing his name is preserved in the British Museum in London.

  • DENTISTRY

    Ṣādeq Sajjādī

    (dandān-pezeškī) in Persia.

  • DEOBAND

    Barbara Daly Metcalf

    country town northeast of Delhi in what is now the Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, India, where an influential Dār al-ʿolūm was founded by a group of religious scholars in 1867 as an expression of a major religious reform movement partly inspired by British educational models.

  • DEPORTATIONS

    A. Shapur Shahbazi, Erich Kettenhofen, John R. Perry

    forced transfers of population from one region to another.

  • DERAFŠ

    A. Shapur Shahbazi

    lit. “banner, standard, flag, emblem,” in ancient Iran. In the Avesta Bactria “with tall banners,”  a fluttering “bull banner,” and enemy banners are mentioned. In the Achaemenid period each Persian army division had its own standard (Herodotus, 9.59), and “all officers had banners over their tents"  (Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.5.13). 

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  • DERAFŠ-E KĀVĪĀN

    Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

    the legendary royal standard of the Sasanian kings.

  • DERAḴT

    Hūšang Aʿlam

    tree, shrub.

  • DERAḴT-E ANJIR-E MAʿĀBED

    LOQMĀN TADAYON-NEŽĀD

    the last and highly acclaimed work of fiction by Ahmad Mahmud.

  • DERĀZ-DAST

    Aḥmad Tafażżolī

    having long hands.

  • DERBEND

    Cross-Reference

    See DARBAND.

  • DERHAM

    Cross-Reference

    See DIRHAM.

  • DERHAM B. NAŻ

    C. Edmund Bosworth

    or Naṣr or Ḥosayn; commander of ʿayyārs or moṭawweʿa, orthodox Sunni vigilantes against the Kharijites in Sīstān during the period immediately preceding the rise of the Saffarid brothers to supreme power there.

  • DEŚANĀ

    Hiroshi Kumamoto

    Khotanese term with two meanings: “showing," that is, “preaching” the law, and “profession” of faith or “confession” of sins.

  • DESERT

    Brian Spooner

    bīābān. As throughout most of the arid zone agriculture and settlement depend upon sustained investment, Persians generally expect to find bīābān where ābādī (settled, irrigated agriculture) ends. The term bīābān covers a broad range of different types of desert, from completely barren expanses to plains with significant percentages of vegetation cover.

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