Nameh Farhangestan
Year:2007 | Volume:8 | Issue:4 (32)|Papers Count:11

Drawing on a broad range or sources, including folkloric, mythical, religious, literary, and scientific materials, the author investigates various beliefs and ideas about earthquake in the highly-seismic Iranian Plateau. The set of Persian beliefs that attributes the cause of earthquake to either subterranean creatures or the divine will is compared to those among other nations. Interesting ideas about earthquake are found in the Zoroastrian apocalyptic literature, where, along with Ahrīman, the demon casmag, "well" or "spring", is thought to be the shaker of the earth. While it is hard to establish a lexical association between spring and seism, the former is indeed a natural cause of the latter, yet any further postulation should be supported by extra evidence. Aside from the views that are categorized as superstition by today's scientific standards, there were also those with various degrees of insightfulness and sophistication about the cause of earthquakes. The most comprehensive arguments of this type among Muslims are found in Avicenna's Atār al-olwī_yya, which adopts the Aristotelian theory of "subterranean wind pressure" documented in Meteorologica, yet, as the author argues, not without an important extension: the vibrant gases escape upward where deep wells are dug into the ~round; hence the chances of earthquake diminish. We find a fusion of the Aristotelian theory and popular beliefs in the Pahlavi Bundahishn and then in-the Persian popular genre AJa'eb al-magluqat, with striking similarity between them. Subsequently, there were such Persian scholars as Biruni and Karaji who commented on what we now call hydro-seismology. Another medieval source implies Tsunami attacks on southwestern Caspian shores. Remarkable conclusions can be drawn by comparing the geotectonic of Eurasia and the oldest layers of Indo-Iranian mythology. Lack of mention of earthquake in the latter sources accords with the low seismiscity of the Kazakh Steppe and the South Siberia - the supposed homeland of th proto-Aryans. Seismic geography is further extended by the author to the hypothetical homeland of the proto-Indo-Europeans on the one hand and to the successive southward migrations of Iranian-speaking tribes in central Asia on the other.

The prevailing view of the author in contemporary literary theories has emerged from the theorizations of poststructuralist thinkers such as Roland BARThEs and Michel FOUCAUlT. These Theorists refute the traditional view which regards meaning as exclusively determined by the author and reduces the process of reading to an attempt at discovering the authors "intension" as disguised in the text. Taking their lead from Jacques DERRidA, poststructuralists believe that western literature and philosophy has been based on the erroneous assumption that language is a reliable tool for reflecting reality. DERRidteArms this untenable premise "logo centrism" and considers it to be an illusion to which meaning originates from reality and is capable of reflecting the structure of reality. He argues that the author merely makes mention of a chain of signifiers that evoke a range of signified. As such, it may be postulated that no text has a hidden "message", but that every text in fact manifests a free play of signs. The first sections of this article are a review of traditional views on the relation of the author and the meaning of the text. The second section discusses the new challenges to the status of the author posed by poststructuralist theorists. Citing DERRidA'S arguments about the "metaphysics of presence" and also BARThEvS view about the "death of the author" as well as FoucAulr’s notion of "author-function", it is argued in this section that on the basis of such modern literary theories it is no longer possible to simply refer to the author's name or biography and conclude from there that the text has a single meaning intended by its writer.

Kalame (the word) is no doubt among the most important concepts in all religions and schools of thought. Most religions and schools of thought have devoted and great section of their teachings to the interpretation of the meaning and nature of kalame. Nasser Khosrow is among the scholars who have surrendered to the temptation of explaining kalame in his prose and poetry, discussing it from philosophical and theological points of view, explaining its meaning and relation with the Pen, God, the people and the intellect. He has offered a new theory of the word using the philosophical teachings of the Greek and the teachings of the Koran and Koran and hadis and Esmaili thinkers. His theory presents an interesting semantic pyramid made up of God, World and Man. According to Nasser Khosrow; no side of this pyramid materializes without the semantic truth and the true meaning of kalameh. The purpose of this article is to explain this semantic pyramid and Nasser Khosrow's theological and philosophical interpretations.

This article deals with the strings consisting of one adjective followed by the verb "kardan". TAbATAi (2005) has argued that most of these strings, such as chagh kardan (to make fat), zesht kardan (to make ugly), cannot be considered as compound verb. In this article, the writer, following TAbATAbi’s line of argument, shows that the above strings are made using a general syntactic process, or causation process, as the writer terms it, from copulative sentences. The writer concludes that the compound strings made up of an adjective and the verb "kardan", are causative structures appositive of copulative structures if they can be changed into copulative strings, and cannot therefore be recorded in the leXicon of a language.

Iranian identity is rooted in the myths that our forefathers wrote thousands of years ago and the mythical stories about Iranian kings and heroes were powerful spiritual and national forces that supported national solidarity. The Shahnameh, (The Book of Kings), is a rich source of this ancient heritage of Iranians in which one can clearly trace the continuation of Iranian identity from the world of myths to the rule of the last Sassanid kings. The book has three main characteristics which have contributed to the preservation of Iranian indentity: political, geographical and historical integrity. These characteristics are found not only in the Shahnameh but in the book Xw adāy-nāmag, which was written in Pahlavi and used as one of the sources of the Shahnameh. In the Shahnameh, the political and religious integrity of Iranian thought is clearly discernible in three eras: at the time of Dārā-ye Darayan, at the time of Ardsir Babakan and at the time of Ḵosrow Aniūšīrvān. After the conquest of Iran by Arabs, religious and political integrity vanished, but the geographical integrity continued to exist as Xw ādāy-nāmāg was translated into Arabic and Persian and the Shahnameh was written. After Ferdowsi, the idea continued to exist, manifesting itself specially in the Persian literature, until the rise of the Safavid dynasty, when Iran experienced, once again, political, geographical and historical integrity.

Rawzat al-monajjemIn, a book on astronomy, was written by šāhmardan ebn-e AbelḴeyr-e Rāzā, secretary and scholar, disciple of Abolhasan 'Ali ebn-e Ahmad-e Nasavi, who lived in Gorgan and Estarabad in the fifth century AH. His purpose was to write a book with no redundancy, no Arabic words, easy for the Persian-speaking general public to read. There are many manuscripts remaining, the oldest being scribed about 40 years after the book was written. The book consists of 15 articles, each starting with a brief of Article. Introduction about the subject of the chapter, followed by the list of sections or the issues discussed in the article. A version of the book was prepared by Jalil AkhAVAn jANjani who wrote an introduction to it, and made certain amendments. The book was published by the center for research on written heritage. The present article, having introduced the book, offers comments on the published version.