Classical Persian

New Persian in its classical literary form: the continuation of Middle Persian that emerged at the Samanid court of Khurasan in the ninth and tenth centuries, written now in the Arabic script and salted with Arabic vocabulary, but Iranian to the bone. Its speakers called it Fārsī, or in its eastern courtly register Darī. From Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma onward it became the literary and chancery language of an enormous world, carried by courts rather than conquests: Ghaznavid and Seljuk Anatolia, the Delhi Sultanate, and Central Asia all wrote Persian, so that the language names places from the Bosporus to Bengal.

In this atlas the file hosts what Persian itself coined or reshaped: new compounds like Hindūstān and Panjāb, and inherited names whose Persian careers carried them into the present. Arabic loanwords that Persian took over unchanged (Miṣr, Dimashq, al-Shām) remain on their Classical Arabic entries; the boundary follows the Byzantine Greek precedent, beginning where the new stage adds something the older entry does not tell.

@misc{onomastikon-classical-persian,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Classical Persian},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/classical-persian}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}