Ādhar was the pen name of Ḥājjī Luṭf ʿAlī Beg b. Āqā Khān (1134–95/1722–81), a Persian anthologist and poet. He was descended from a family belonging to the Turkmen Begdili (Ar. Bīgdilī) tribe, in Syria; the family had migrated to Iran in the ninth/fifteenth century and settled in Isfahan. Many of his relatives served the later Ṣafavids and Nādir Shāh (r. 1148–60/1736–47) as administrators and diplomats. Ādhar was born on 20 Rabīʿ II 1134/7 February 1722. The invasion by Afghans in the same year forced h…

Sayyid Ḥasan Ghaznavī Abū Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ḥusaynī al-Ashraf (d. probably c. 556/1161) was a Persian poet who spent the greater part of his life in Ghazna, as a panegyrist of the Ghaznavid sultan Bahrām Shāh (511–52/1117–57), to whose campaigns in India he dedicated several qaṣāʾid (Ar. sing. qaṣīda, a poem, rhyming AA, BA, CA etc., a. o. of panegyrical, ethical, religious or elegiac content). During that time, he made the ḥajj, probably in a search for a new mamdūḥ (lit. praised one, hence “patron”), as he was having difficulties under the patronage of Bahrām Shāh.…

Karīm Khān Zand (c.1117–93/1705–1779), who ruled the western part of Iran from 1164/1751 to 1193/1779, was the first of the Zand dynasty, which lasted until 1209/1794. His choice of Shiraz as his capital reflects his leadership of the Zands. The Zands were a branch of the Laks, a subgroup of the northern Lurs, who spoke Luri, a Western Iranian language. Their annual migration extended from the Zagros foothills in summer to the plains of Hamadan in winter. An upheaval amongst the neighbouring Bakht…

Awḥad al-Dīn ʿAlī (or Muḥammad) Anvarī was a sixth/twelfth-century Persian poet, best known for his panegyrical qaṣīdas (poems rhyming AA, BA, CA and usually panegyrical, ethical, or religious). He was born (date unknown) presumably in the Abīvard region (in present-day southern Turkmenistan, halfway between Merv and Nasā). The date of his death ranges, in various sources, from 540/1145–6 to 592/1195–6, but the earlier of those dates can be discounted, as one of his poems, a qiṭʿa (short poem), no. 118, is a marthiya (elegy) that can be dated with certainty by the date of the…