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, a Persian prosodist and minor poet at the Tīmūrid court in Harāt during the second half of the 9th/15th century. He is remembered for his text-book of Persian prosody ʿArūḍ-i Sayfī , which he completed in 896/1491; this has been published several times in India, notably with an English translation and extensive commentary in H. Blochmann’s The prosody of the Persians according to Saifi , Jami , and other writers, Calcutta 1872, a work which played an important role in making Persian poetical theory accessible to European students. But now that older and more det…

(p.) “town”. The word goes back to Old Persian xšaça- (cf. Avestan xšaθra- , Sanskrit kṣatrá- ; all from the same root as New Persian s̲h̲āh [ q.v.]), “kingship, royal power”, thence “kingdom”. The latter meaning is still the usual one for Middle Persian s̲h̲ahr and it survives in the S̲h̲āh-nāma , especially in set phrases such as s̲h̲ahr-i Ērān (used metri causa instead of Ērān-s̲h̲ahr “kingdom of the Aryans”, the official name of the Sāsānid empire), s̲h̲ahr-i Tūrān , s̲h̲ahr-i Yaman , etc. But already in the earliest New Persian texts, the usual mean…

, in Islamic science an astronomical handbook with tables, after the models of the Sāsānid Persian Zīk -i S̲h̲ahriyār , the Indian Sindhind [ q.v.], and Ptolemy’s Almagest and Handy Tables [see baṭlamiyūs ]. A typical zīd̲j̲ might contain a hundred folios of text and tables, though some are substantially larger than this. Most of the relevant astronomical and astrological concepts are clearly explained in the Tafhīm of al-Bīrūnī [ q.v.]. The history of Islamic zīd̲j̲s constitutes a major part of the history of Islamic astronomy [see ʿilm al-hayʾa ]. i. Etymology Arabic zīd̲j̲ (pl. zīd̲j̲ā…

(a.). 1. Ḳurʾānic and early Arabic usage. Sid̲j̲ill is an Arabic word for various types of documents, especially of an official or juridical nature. It has long been recognised (first, it seems, by Fraenkel) that it goes back ultimately to Latin sigillum , which in the classical language means “seal” (i.e. both “sealmatrix” and “seal-impression”), but which in Mediaeval Latin is used also for the document to which a seal has been affixed; it was borrowed into Byzantine Greek as σιγίλλ(ι)ον, “seal, treaty, imperial edict”, and then, via Aramaic (e.g. Syriac sygylywn …

, a Turkish dynasty of mediaeval Islam which, at the peak of its power during the 5th-6th/11th-12th centuries, ruled over, either directly or through vassal princes, a wide area of Western Asia from Transoxania, Farg̲h̲āna, the Semirečye and K̲h̲wārazm in the east to Anatolia, Syria and the Ḥid̲j̲āz in the west. From the core of what became the Great Sald̲j̲ūḳ empire, subordinate lines of the Sald̲j̲ūḳ family maintained themselves in regions like Kirmān (till towards the end of the 6th/12th century), Syria (till the opening years of…

(a., pl. tarād̲j̲im ), verbal noun of the verb tard̲j̲ama “to interpret, translate, write the biography of someone ( lahu )”. For the function of interpreter, see tard̲j̲umān . ¶ 1. In literature. Here, it may form part of the title of a biography, or, especially in contemporary North Africa, the biography (or autobiography) itself. Hence ʿilm al-tarād̲j̲im is a branch of historical research, sometimes equated by the Twelver S̲h̲īʿa with ʿilm al-rid̲j̲āl [ q.v.]. The term dates to at least the early 5th/11th century, where it appears in the titles of three works by al…