Search

According to Bartol’d, there is no mention of Chaghāniyān in historical records prior to the migration of the Hephthalites to Transoxania from Altai Krai during the early 5th century ce (see Bartol’d, Turkestan, 73, footnote 1; see below; for more information on the Hephthalites and their migration to Transoxania see Grousset, 110–115; Litvinsky, 135–136).Archaeological findings in the Surkhān Daryā region indicate that the pre-Islamic history of this area has to be sought in the histories of the northern territories of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom …

Bābāʾī Movement, a socio-religious insurrectionist movement that arose in Anatolia during the reign of the Saljūqs of Rūm in the first half of the 7th/13th century, at the ¶ time of the Mongol invasion. The founder of this movement seems to have been one Bābā Ilyās Khurāsānī (q.v.), a prominent Turkoman Sufi shaykh, who came to Anatolia from Khurāsān at the beginning of the 7th/13th century. Ibn Bībī, the contemporary court chronicler of the Saljūqs of Rūm, refers instead to a certain Bābā Isḥāq of Kafarsūd in northern Syri…

The name Bīsutūn is derived from the word Bagastāna in Old Persian, that is to say, the vernacular of the Achaemenid dynasty (Kent, 6, 108; Qurashī, 179). This word is made up of two parts: the morpheme baga meaning God and the suffix – stān meaning place, thus referring to ‘the place of God’, which is also the meaning of the Persian word yazdān-sarāy, an expression which Firdawsī uses in his Shāhnāmah to mean a place of worship (see 5/2346; Qurashī, 179; Kent, 108). In Greek sources, Diodorus Siculus, quoting the 5th-century bce Ctesias, gives the name as Bagístanon (Βαγίστανον) (Diodorus, 2…

Bābāʾī Movement, a socio-religious insurrectionist movement that arose in Anatolia during the reign of the Saljūqs of Rūm in the first half of the 7th/13th century, at the time of the Mongol invasion. The founder of this movement seems to have been one Bābā Ilyās Khurāsānī (q.v.), a prominent Turkoman Sufi shaykh, who came to Anatolia from Khurāsān at the beginning of the 7th/13th century. Ibn Bībī, the contemporary court chronicler of the Saljūqs of Rūm, refers instead to a certain Bābā Isḥāq of…

Bayhaq, the name of an ancient town and district in Khurāsān, in the region of Nīsābūr. The name Bayhaq appears to be an Arabised form of a Persian word whose form and roots cannot be precisely determined, and the ones that have been proposed are all questionable (see Bayhaqī, ʿAlī, 33–34; Yāqūt, 1/804; Tabrīzī, 1/343).Early HistoryNo reference to Bayhaq can be found in extant pre-Islamic sources. Since the territorial divisions of the Sāsānid empire persisted during the early centuries of Islam, it can be said that, just as 3rd/9th century geograph…