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(p.), the name of a mythical bird. There are two passages in the Avesta referring to the “bird Saēna-” ( mərə γ ō saēnō ; Yašt 14: 41) or the “tree of Saēna-” ( vanam yam saēnahe ; Yašt 12: 17); the latter specifies that this tree stands in the middle of Lake Vourukaša, that its name is “all-remedies” and that it bears the seeds of all plants. The word saēna is etymologically identical with Sanskrit śyēná- , “eagle, falcon”, but it is not clear from the two Avestan passages whether it designates a species of bird (though the fact that Saēna- is used…

, a long narrative poem in Persian by Fak̲h̲r al-Dīn Asʿad Gurgānī [ q.v.], written not long after 441/1050 and dedicated to Abū Naṣr b. Manṣūr, the governor of Iṣfahān on behalf of the Sald̲j̲ūḳids. The story, which is set in the distant and unspecified past, deals with the love affair between Wīs, the wife of King Mōbad of Marw, and Rāmīn, her husband’s younger brother. It tells of how the two lovers meet, how they are eventually discovered, and how Rāmīn rises in rebellion against his brother, in the end …

Muḥammad b. S̲h̲araf al-Dīn ʿAlī al-Ḥusaynī al-Kās̲h̲ānī, commonly called Taḳī Kās̲h̲ī , Persian scholar of the 10th-11th/16th-17th centuries. He was a pupil of the poet Muḥtas̲h̲am Kās̲h̲ī, whose dīwān he edited. His fame rests on his monumental compendium of Persian poetry K̲h̲ulāṣat al-as̲h̲ʿār wa-zubdat al-afkār , of which the first version was completed in 993/1585 and the enlarged second version in 1016/1607-8. It contains notices of well over 600 poets from the 5th/11th century up to the author’s own contempora…

(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 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…