Khurasan

Xwarāsān is the Middle Persian common noun for sunrise, xwar “sun” with the verb of coming, promoted under the Sasanians into the proper name of the empire’s eastern quarter: the later empire was administered as four kusts, and kust ī xwarāsān, the quarter of the sunrise, ran from the central deserts to the Oxus frontier. The word belongs to the Book Pahlavi literature, among it the geographical treatise Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, whose catalogue of the empire’s cities opens with the east; Book Pahlavi has no Unicode encoding, so the entry carries transliteration only.

The entry is the birth record of a name that outlived its whole frame of reference. The quarter-system that made “sunrise” a province died with the Sasanians; the name did not, because the Arab conquerors kept the province and its name whole, and Khurasan under the caliphate became more important than it had ever been under the kings who named it. The word’s vantage is the entry’s quiet content: sunrise from where? From Ctesiphon, from the Mesopotamian center, so that every later use of the name, by Arabs, Turks, and the Khurasanis themselves, silently adopts the point of view of an empire gone since the seventh century. The east is only east of somewhere; Khurasan is east of a capital that no longer exists.

Khurāsān (خراسان) is the Arabic form of the Sasanian quarter-name, taken over intact with the conquest of the 650s and kept as the name of the caliphate’s greatest eastern province. In Arabic history the name carries enormous weight: it was from Khurāsān that Abū Muslim raised the black banners of the Abbasid revolution in 747, and “the men of Khurāsān” remained the byword for the dynasty’s original army; Yāqūt’s gazetteer treats the province at length, quarter-capitals and all, and reports the name’s Persian meaning. The name remains in living use, on the map of Iran as its northeastern provinces.

Within the family the Arabic entry marks the hinge where a Persian administrative label became an Islamic historical one. Arabic did not translate the name into its own word for east, as it might have; it adopted the Persian word and then filled it with new content, until “Khurāsānī” meant a revolution, a style of piety, a school of scholars. The province named for the sunrise proceeded to behave like one: the Abbasid caliphate, Persian literature’s rebirth, and the Seljuk Turks all rose out of Khurāsān and moved west across the empire. The caliphate took a name that meant “where the sun comes up” and found that dynasties came up there too.

Khurāsān (خراسان) in Classical Persian is the Middle Persian name come home, the direct continuation of Sasanian Xwarāsān in the language’s next stage, now written in Arabic letters. It is everywhere in the literature because the literature was born there: the Samanid and Ghaznavid courts that revived Persian poetry sat in Khurāsān and Transoxiana, and the Shāhnāma itself, composed at Tus in Khurāsān, uses the name for the east of the Iranian world throughout. Persian usage still knows the word’s meaning; the poets could and did play on khur, the sun, in their own province’s name.

The entry closes the family’s circle in a way the Arabic entry cannot. For Arabic, Khurāsān was a borrowed label; for Persian it remained a transparent word, “sunrise-land,” in the mouths of the people who lived there, so that the province is the rare case on this atlas of a population inhabiting a direction and knowing it. The literature that Khurāsān produced then carried the name west and made it a legend in Persian letters, the homeland of the language’s own renaissance. Most regions of this atlas are named by outsiders looking in; Khurāsān was named by an empire looking east, and then filled by people who looked at their own horizon and found the name still true every morning.