Table of Contents

• LĀHIJĀN

  Christian Bromberger

  a city in the province of Gilān.  It is located at 37°12′ N, long 50°0′ E, to the east of the lower reaches of Safidrud at an altitude of 4 m.

• LĀHŪRĪ, ʿABD-AL-ḤAMĪD

  Cross-reference

  17th-century Indo-Persian historian and author of the Pādšāh-nāma, the official account of the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahān (1037-67/1628-57). See ʿABD-AL-ḤAMĪD LĀHŪRĪ.

• LAHUTI, Abu’l-Qasem

  Kāmyār ʿĀbedi

  (1887-1957), Marxist poet, political activist, and an important contributor to the modern of poetry of Tajikistan.

• LAK TRIBE

  Mohammad Reza [Faribors] Hamzeh’ee

  (or Lakk), an ethnic term used for a large number of people residing in a vast part of present-day Iran. The original meaning of the word in Persian, “hundred thousands,” apparently refers to the original number of families that constituted a nomadic tribal confederation.

• LĀḴ-MAZĀR

  V. A. Livshits

  “Rocky sacred place (?),” name applied to gorges not far from the settlement of Kuč, 29 km southeast of Birjand in Khorasan Province (ostān). 

• LAKHMIDS

  C. Edmund Bosworth

  an Arab dynasty that ruled in central Iraq with their capital at Ḥira for roughly three centuries, from about 300 to 602 CE, generally but intermittently as the allies and clients of the Sasanian kings of Persia.

• LANBASAR

  C. Edmund Bosworth

  an important fortress of the Nezāri Ismaʿilis in the mountainous district of Rudbār, within the region of medieval Islamic Daylam in northwestern Iran.

• LANGARUD

  Marcel Bazin and Christian Bromberger

  a city and sub-provincial district (šahrestān) in Gilān located at lat 37°11′ N, long 50°09′ E on the Langarud River, which cuts through the city, dividing it into two parts.

• LAODICEA

  Cross-Reference

  name of a Seleucid military colony in Media. See NEHAVAND.

• LĀRAK

  Daniel T. Potts

  a small island in the Straits of Hormuz to the south of Hormuz Island, located approximately 45 kms southeast of Bandar Abbas and 18 kms southeast of the eastern end of Qeshm Island at lat 26°51′0″ N, long 56°21′0″ E. 

• LARK

  Cross-Reference

  See ČAKĀVAK.

• LAŠANI

  Pierre Oberling

  a Turkicized Kurdish tribe in Fārs. The Lašani accompanied Karim Khan Zand to the province in the mid-18th century.

• LAURENS, Jules Joseph Augustin

  Jacqueline Calmard-Compas

  (1825-1901), French artist in drawing, painting, and lithography who depicted Oriental and other subjects.

• LĀVĀN ISLAND

  Daniel T. Potts

  in the Persian Gulf. also known as Lār(a), Lān, or Allān, located near Naḵilu, has been mentioned in historic documents famous for pearl fishing and piracy.

• LAVĀSĀN

  Giti Deyhim and EIr.

  a town and district northwest of Tehran.

• LAWḤ

  M. Momen and B. T. Lawson

  (tablet), a term used distinctively in the Bahai writings as part of the title of individual compositions of Bahāʾ-Allāh addressed to individuals or groups of individuals.

• LAYARD, Austen Henry

  John Curtis

  Layard is chiefly known for his excavations in northern Iraq between 1845 and 1851. He worked at the Assyrian sites of Nimrud and Nineveh, the North-West Palace of Assurnasirpal II and South-West Palace of Sennacherib, where he found stone bas-reliefs and figures as well as cuneiform tablets and small objects in bronze, glass, and ivory.

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• LĀYEQ ŠĒR-ʿALI

  Keith Hitchins

  (1941-2000), Tajik poet, editor, and public intellectual. Lāyeq continually expanded the boundaries of Tajik poetry through his restless urge to experiment, to cultivate new means of expression and new forms. Despite his eagerness to innovate, he remained faithful to certain traditions. A number of his poems of the 1980s and 1990s observed the norms of Persian-Tajik poetry.

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• ŁAZAR PʿARPECʿI

  Gohar Muradyan

  late 5th century Armenian historian.

• LE STRANGE, GUY

  C. Edmund Bosworth

  (1854-1933), scholar in Persian, Arabic, and Spanish, specially notable for his work in the field of the historical geography of the pre-modern Middle Eastern and Eastern Islamic lands and his editing of Persian geographical texts. Le Strange’s chef d’œuvre is, however, undoubtedly The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate(1905).  

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• LENTIL

  Cross-Reference

  See ʿADAS.

• LENTZ, OTTO HELMUT WOLFGANG

  Gerd Gropp

  Lentz wrote no voluminous book, but many essays in periodicals, including pioneer works on Turfan texts, Iranian dialects, local eastern systems of time reckoning, and loanwords in Mid. Iranian. His doctoral dissertation on North Iranian elements in the Šāh-nāma (1926) won him immediate recognition.

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• LEOPARD

  Eskandar Firouz

  (Panthera pardus, Pers. Palang), the largest and most powerful member of the cat family still occurring in Iran. The Persian leopard is very variable in both size and coloration, depending on the conditions of the natural environment of its range.

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• LESĀN-AL-DAWLA

  Nader Nasiri-Moghaddam

  (1862-ca. 1920), MIRZĀ ʿALI KHAN, royal librarian. His career at the royal court began in Tabriz in 1891.

• LEWIS, David Malcolm

  Amılie Kuhrt

  Lewis was educated at the City of London School and Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he studied the traditional Classics curriculum in Greek and Latin, philosophy and ancient history (1945-1949). After National Service in the Royal Army Education Corps (1949-1951), he pursued graduate studies at Princeton, NJ with two leading historians of classical Greece before returning to Oxford.

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• LEXICOGRAPHY

  John R. Perry

  the compiling of dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies of a language or a particular lexical corpus.

• LEYLI O MAJNUN

  A. A. Seyed-Gohrab

  narrative poem of approximately 4,600 lines composed in 584/1188 by the famous poet Neẓāmi of Ganja.

• LIGHTING EQUIPMENT AND HEATING FUEL

  Willem Floor

  Before the widespread use of electricity in Iran, the main illuminants were vegetable oils and animal fat.

• LILAC

  Ahmad Aryavand and Bahram Grami

  a fragrant shrub of the olive family. Different varieties exist with blue and purple flowers, used for aroma, decorative, and medicinal purposes. The Persian lilac is a small shrub and has been a garden favorite in Iran for centuries and today occurs in various parts of the country.

• LILY

  Ahmad Aryavand and Bahram Grami

  (susan in Persian and Arabic), the name of herbaceous and bulbous flowering plants of the lily family, lilies are among the oldest cultivated plants. Persian poets have likened the lily’s petal to the human tongue.

• LIME

  Cross-Reference

  a solid, white substance consisting essentially of calcium oxide. See ĀHAK.

• LION RUGS

  Parviz Tanavoli

  (gabba-ye širi), a group of Persian rugs with the image of the lion as the main motif. The majority of the existing lion rugs are the work of Baḵtiāri and Qašqāʾi tribes in southwest Iran and were woven during the 19th and 20th centuries.

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• LION TOMBSTONES

  Pedram Khosronejad

  a type of tombstone in the form of a lion, found mostly on the graves of Lor and Qašqāʾi nomads in the west, southwest, and parts of southern Persia. These stylized, sculptured lions stare out from isolated Baḵtiāri graveyards in many valleys and along the migration routes of the tribes across the Zagros Mountains.

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• LITERACY CORPS

  Farian Sabahi

  (Sepāh-e dāneš), educational program implemented in Iran in the framework of the White Revolution (1963-79) during the reign of Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi (1941-79). With the Literacy Corps, education to some extent escaped the control of the ʿolamāʾ, who used to shape the younger generation along traditional lines.

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• LITHOGRAPHY i. IN PERSIA

  Olimpiada P. Shcheglova

  The first lithographic printing press was brought to Persia in 1821 from Tiflis (Tbilisi), on the orders of the Crown Prince, ʿAbbās Mirzā. The Persian painter Allāhverdi who had studied lithography there, returned to Tabriz in March 1821 with a complete set of lithographic equipment.

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• LITHOGRAPHY ii. IN INDIA

  Olimpiada P. Shcheglova

  From the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th, India was at the hub of a great expansion in lithographic printing. Hundreds of lithographic printing houses flourished in India, and although books in Persian were only a part of their production, it was there that the largest number of Persian lithographed books was published.

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• LITHOGRAPHY iii. IN CENTRAL ASIA

  Olimpiada P. Shcheglova

  Lithographic book printing began in Central Asia in the late 19th century: in the khanate of Khiva, 1874 (in Turkic languages only), in Turkistan in Tashkent, 1881, and in the khanate of Bukhara, 1901. The bulk of lithographed books in Oriental languages were published in Tashkent.

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• LITHOGRAPHY iv. LITHOGRAPHED ILLUSTRATIONS

  Ulrich Marzolph

  The first illustrated Persian lithographed book is the 1259/1843 edition of Maktabi’s Leili o Majnun.

• LIZARDS

  Steven C. Anderson

  reptiles belonging to the order Squamata; second to birds, they are the most often seen vertebrates in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, especially during daylight hours. “Lizard” is a colloquial term for these reptiles that are members of a larger evolutionary group that includes snakes.

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• LOCKHART, LAURENCE

  Ernest Tucker

  Lockhart returned to the company’s London headquarters in 1930 and served there until 1939.  He continued to engage in academic pursuits in parallel with his business career, publishing numerous short scholarly pieces on a wide range of topics.  In his spare time, he conducted extensive research on Iran and Iranian history.

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• LOCKS AND LOCKSMITHS IN IRAN

  Parviz Tanavoli

  Locks have been made in Iran since at least the second millennium BCE. The most ancient lock, dating to the 13th century BCE, was excavated at the ziggurat of Choga Zanbil in Khuzestan. Throughout the Islamic period in Iran, locks were made in all shapes and sizes.

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• LOCUST

  Cyrus Abivardi

  (in modern taxonomy, Pers. malaḵ-e mohājer), the term used for any gregarious, short-horned grasshopper. The generic Persian term malaḵ (vs. Mid. Pers. mayg in the Pahlavi Vendidad; Av. maδaxa-) is regarded as a borrowing from an Eastern Iranian language (cf. Pashto malax[ay]).

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• LOMMEL, HERMAN

  Rüdiger Schmitt

  German scholar of Indo-European, chiefly Indo-Iranian studies, and also of religious studies.

• LORI LANGUAGE

  Multiple Authors

  the language of one of Iran’s major ethnic groups, spoken by five million people over the length of the Zagros range. This entry consist of two parts i. Lori dialects  ii. Sociolinguistic status of Lori

• LORI LANGUAGE i. LORI DIALECTS

  Colin MacKinnon

  These are spoken by both settled and migratory folk over a large area of western Iran, including parts of Hamadan Province (at least from Nehāvand southward) through Lorestān to Khuzestan, Čahār Maḥāl and Baḵtiāri, Kohgiluya and Boir Aḥmadi, and Fārs.

• LORI LANGUAGE ii. Sociolinguistic Status of Lori

  Erik J. Anonby

  The array of related dialects collectively known as Lori (autonym: lurī) is spoken among the Lori and Baḵtiāri peoples of the Zagros mountains of western and southwestern Iran and surrounding areas.

• LORIMER, David i. In Persia

  Fereydun Vahman and Garnik Asatrian

  (1876-1962), British Iranist and military and intelligence officer. He had a keen interest in the dialect and folklore of the region. He used to collect his material on dialects from elderly informants and would spend the evenings working with them. 

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• LOTERĀʾI

  Martin Schwartz

  term used by Iranian Jews for speech using local Judeo-Iranian grammar with a special exotic substitutive vocabulary.

• LOUVRE MUSEUM i. IRANIAN ANTIQUITIES IN THE COLLECTIONS

  Pierre Amiet

  In 1793, when the Louvre Museum (Musıe du Louvre) was created under the name of Central Museum of Arts (Musıe Centrale des Arts), antiquities were exclusively represented by Greek and Roman sculptures.

• LOUVRE MUSEUM ii. PERSIAN ART IN THE ISLAMIC COLLECTION

  Sophie Makariou

  In 1893 a section devoted to “Muslim Art” was created within the Département des objets d’art, and from the outset objects from Persia have been a most important part of this collection.

• LUKONIN, Vladimir Grigor’evich

  Muhammad Dandamayev and Inna Medvedskaya

  (1932-1984), outstanding Russian scholar in the field of history and history of culture and arts of ancient Iran, from the earliest times until the end of the Sasanian period. He published and introduced to scholarship many artifacts of Iranian culture preserved at the Hermitage Museum.

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• LULUBI

  Ran Zadok

  country of a people who probably originated in southern Kurdistan; the form of the name is identical in both Sumerian and Akkadian, namely Lulubi and Lulubum respectively.

• LURISTAN

  Multiple Authors

  major province in Iran

• LURISTAN iv. The Origin of Nomadism

  Inge Demant Mortensen and Peder Mortensen

  The large valleys and plains of Luristan are exceedingly fertile.  They have often been described as suited for agriculture as well as for pastoral nomadism, which seems to have been the prevailing lifestyle for hundreds of years.

• LURISTAN v. Religion, Rituals, and Popular Beliefs

  Inge Demant Mortensen

  Lur society has been living within the framework of Islam, but under conditions and circumstances that encouraged rather than restricted a free display of popular traditions.

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• LURISTAN BRONZES i. THE FIELD RESEARCH

  Bruno Overlaet

  The label “Luristan bronzes”  designates a series of decorated bronze objects in a specific local style dating from the Iron Age (ca. 1300/1250 to 700/650 BCE). These bronzes became known through large-scale illegal excavations starting in the late 1920s.

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• LURISTAN BRONZES ii. CHRONOLOGY

  Bruno Overlaet

  The first documented Luristan bronze acquired by a European museum, “a master of animals idol,” was purchased in 1854 by the British Museum. The first publication about a Luristan bronze in a scholarly journal (1918) attributed a Luristan horse bit with decorated cheek pieces to Armenia.

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• LUSCHEY, Heinz

  Wolfram Kleiss

  After his military service during the Second World War, Luschey worked as an assistant at the Archaeological Seminar of the University of Tübingen. In 1956 he became assistant director of the Istanbul branch of the German Archaeological Institute.

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• LUT

  Cross-Reference

  Persian word meaning “desert.” See DESERT.

• LUṬI

  Willem Floor

  A Persian term with a variety of meanings, with both positive and negative connotations.

• LYSANDER

  Ernst Badian

  (ca. 454-395 BCE), Spartan commander and politician.

• L~ CAPTIONS OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Cross-Reference

  list of all the figure and plate images in the letter L entries.