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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
The Persian province of Māzandarān has characteristics unique in the land of Iran, even among its Caspian neighbours. The landscape of mountain, forest, ricefield and sea has its special freshness and charm, worlds away from the rocky plateau and searing desert further to the south. Its beauty was appreciated among others by the Safavid Shāh 'Abbās, who built an engineered highroad hidden to-day by the forest above Gālūgāh, and maintained favoured residences at Behshahr and Faraḥābād. For the visiting stranger, the most obvious impression is that created by the perennial Māzandarān cloud, a sea of cotton tufts, as it is often described, rising steadily up the hillsides with the growing heat of the day, to sink back into the valleys with the chill of evening, or fall as soft drizzle through the hours of darkness. When the traveller ascending the mountainside reaches the level of condensation, suddenly he is in a world of total humidity, with streaming perspiration, and water running from the trees and undergrowth. Twenty minutes later he has passed through the cloudbase, and entered the bone-dry world of “Iraq”. Dry sand replaces the treacherous “yellow clay” (zarde gil) beneath his feet, and the cool breeze in an instant evaporates the moisture from his shirt.
1 Cf. Schmidt, Erich E., Flights over ancient cities of Iran (Chicago, 1940), p. 53 and pl. 57Google Scholar, “Shore of the cotton sea”.
2 Rabino, H. L., Mázandarán and Astarábád (London, 1928), p. 59Google Scholar; Napier, G. C., “Extracts from a diary of a tour in Khorasan, and notes on the eastern Alburz tracts”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, XLVI (1876), p. 70Google Scholar: “From Chardeh [sic] the road rises over easy slopes to a pass, known as Sar-i Halala, thence over wide green plateaux, and through a short defile to the Tung-i Shamsherbur, a curious natural passage between two perpendicular sheets of limestone, as smooth as a wall, and of 20 to 30 ft in height. The softer strata between and on each side of the limestone have apparently been worn away by the action of the weather. The passage is 150 yds long, with an average width of 18 ft. A little stream and the path finds an exit through a natural gap, 14 ft wide and nearly meeting overhead”.
3 Manūchihrī mentions the surkhāb in his Ode no. XIII: surkhāb ghawwasī kunad. Kazimirsky (see n. 7, below), p. 180 translates “le canard se fait plongeur”; Dabīrsiyāqī (see n. 8 below), in his glossary of birds, p. 422, prefers to translate pélican. The Persian dictionaries also offer uninformed identifications of the bird.
4 Some of the results are incorporated in our Eastern Māzandarān, Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, Pt. VI, Vol. VI, Portf. 1 (London, 1978)Google Scholar.
5 Cf. Boyce, Mary, “The Parthian gōsān and the Parthian minstrel tradition”, JRAS, 1957, pp. 20–1 and 25Google Scholar.
6 Bivar, and Yarshater, , Eastern Māzandarān I, p. 7, n. 3 and Pl. 38–9Google Scholar.
7 A. de, Riberstein Kazimirsky, Menoutchehri: poéte person du 11ème siècle de nôtre ère (du 5ième de l'hégire) (Paris; 1886), pp. 225Google Scholar and 97, where the poem is no. XXXVI.
8 Divān-i Manūchihrī Dāmghānī, ed. Dabīrsiyaqī, Muḥammad (Tehran, 1356/1977), p. 66Google Scholar, no. 31.
9 Here I have retained Kazirmirsky's reading, as against Dabīrsīyāqī's possibly superior nārbūn “pomegranate-tree”, since it provides a more convenient translation.
10 The correct reading of the text is uncertain here. Kazimirsky reads: gar āyī piyāda manam bā-kharān “Si tu vas a pied qui que tu sois, moi je serai avec les ânes”; but this does not seem an entirely apposite meaning. Dabīrsiyāqī, p. 68, prints the first word as karāyī, and cites several emendations in the note, of widely differing and hardly more satisfactory sense.
11 Kazimirsky read turāb-and “Though men are dust”, but the general meaning of the phrase is hardly in doubt.
12 khayzurān, literally “bamboo”, lacks an erotic nuance in English, so “willow” seems a more appropriate translation. Al-Khayzurān was, however, the name of the celebrated concubine of the Caliph al-Mahdī, and the mother of al-Hādī and Hārūn al-Rashīd, cf. al-Sābī, HilālRusūm Dār al-Khilāfa, tr. Salem, Elie A. (Beirut, 1977), p. 50Google Scholar.