Table of Contents

• PADERY, ETIENNE

  Anne-Marie Touzard

  (b. 1674; fl 1714-1725), Ottoman Greek who served as a translator to the French embassy at Istanbul, and as a French consul at Shiraz.

• PĀDYĀB

  Ramiyar P. Karanjia

  a Pahlavi word meaning “ritually clean,”.

• PAHLAVI PAPYRI

  Dieter Weber

  documents written exclusively in Egypt during the Persian (Sasanian) occupation under Ḵosrow II between 619 and 629 CE.

• PAHLAVI PSALTER

  Philippe Gignoux

  name given to a fragment, consisting of twelve pages written on both sides, of a Middle Persian translation of the Syriac Psalter.

• PAIRIKĀ

  Siamak Adhami

  a class of female demonic beings in the Avesta, often translated “sorceress, witch, or enchantress.”

• PALACE ARCHITECTURE

  Dietrich Huff

  The abundant variety of styles in Iranian domestic architecture conceals a basic functional system that has remained unchanged since the Achaemenid period and has been observed and studied in well-preserved palaces and houses of more recent periods, and consequently can be inferred from remaining traces and foundations of excavated archeological monuments.

  This Article Has Images/Tables.

• PALEOLITHIC AGE IN IRAN

  Frank Hole

  The Paleolithic or ‘Old Stone Age’ begins with the first stone tools some 2.5million years ago in Africa, and it ends with the Neolithic or ‘New Stone Age,’ essentially at the beginnings of agriculture.

• PALM READING

  Mahmoud Omidsalar

  (chiromancy or palmistry; Pers. Kaf-bini), a form of physiognomy that deduces personal characteristics from the form of the lines on the subject’s palm.

• PANJIKANT

  Boris I. Marshak

  (Sogd. Pancyknδ), a Sogdian city, the ruins of which are located in the southern periphery of the present-day city of Panjakent in western Tajikistan. The systematic archeological excavations show that this city, situated on the rim of a high terrace overlooking a fertile, well-irrigated valley, was founded in the 5th century C.E. and was inhabited until the 770s.

  This Article Has Images/Tables.

• PAPER AND PAPERMAKING

  Willem Floor

  By 650 CE, the Persians started to import Chinese paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree, though it was so rare a commodity that it was only used for important state documents.