It is autumn. It is the season of hozn-e khazan – the melancholic time of the falling leaves. It is time for goodbyes – some forced upon us by the routine of nature, some by plans laid well in advance, some by sheer happenstance. Regardless, an autumnal farewell is never easy.
Last week, it came – the time that I had been dreading for a season or two — the time to surrender custody of the most beloved and cherished addition to my library in a long while.
When the end had neared for his father, Sabatico packed his stuff and went to Europe and per the elder’s wishes accompanied him to his birthland, Kerman. A month or so later, his father passed away in peace and in full repose. Soon thereafter Sabatico packed up his father’s belongings in Europe and shipped to the States.
One summer morning we drove to the customs clearance office on the wharf and began loading the crates into my hatchback. Among them, a few boxes were particularly heavy and upon examination I learned that they comprised a 50-volume collection known as the Loghat-Nameh, the encyclopaedia of the Farsi language. It was begun by Ali Akbar Dehkhoda and finished years later by a cast of notable Iranian literati, lexicologists and linguists. As parts of the Loghat-Nameh were being printed and published in fascicles, Sabatico’s father had them bound into volumes. The result was a magnificent and ornate series.
As Sabatico’s one-bed room rental apartment at the time was too tight for the new cargo from Europe, he had rented a storage space in town. I shuddered at the thought of the Loghat-Nameh ending up in that damp and dark environment. So, I offered to house the tomes at my house until Sabatico could find a more suitable space for them. I was already storing some of his stuff from an earlier relocation and, besides, I was in the throes of studying the origins of the place-name Fenderesk, for which purpose the Loghat-Nameh could have proven an invaluable research tool.
I transported the weighty collection home and placed it on the top of the bookcase in the den. Seven feet high, off the ground, the top shelf was the only area with enough clearance to accommodate books nearly 13 inches tall. I would access the collection shelf by standing on a dining room chair. Needless to say – and as attested to by my recent writings — for more than a year I have been mounting the dining room chairs innumerable times, seeking the wisdom perched on the lofty shelf.
Sabatico is back from his yet another yearlong absence in Europe. Because he now has a more spacious abode, he began a few months ago hinting at the return of his Loghat-Nameh. With the cheek of a foster-parent I demanded that he first set aside a bookcase deserving of the collection. Last month he called to say that he was engaging the services of a carpenter and needed the dimensions of the collection, in inches – up, down and across. Two weeks ago he called to say that the bookcase is ready. In his own very Iranian way, he insisted however that I was welcome to hold onto to the collection for as long as I was working with it.
A few days ago, I repacked the 50-volume collection into my car and drove it to Sabatico’s house. Letting go was hard to do, though, especially when in the night before I had received an inquiry from a reader about a few matters discussed in my earlier essay [Persian plus]. So like a lover loath to depart without that one final kiss, I asked Sabatico to allow me a moment with the collection. While he set about to prepare a brunch from leftover meat patties and potato salad topped with a fried egg, I went to work with the Loghat-Nameh, one last time.
A reader, Siavash, wanted me to verify the origin of dipping a sugar bit in the tea. Apparently, according to the anecdote that he recounted, this manner of drinking tea originated as a way for a Tabrizi cleric to get around his earlier fatwa that had banned the taking of sugar imported from Russia, whose consul had stopped paying him certain monies. I had not known of the story, nor am I in a position to verify its veracity. The inquiry however triggered a few other issues of curiosity for me – chief among, to learn about the etymology of dishlameh, the style of dipping the ghand (sugar) bit in tea, putting it in the mouth and then taking a sip of the tea. A decent sugar bit will hold for a few consecutive sips before dissolving in one’s mouth.
The sugar loaf (kaleh ghand) apparently was a European (French?) invention and did arrive in (northern) Iran by way of Russia. My generation remembers the job of attacking the loaf with a hammer-like implement called ghand-shekan. The tool was a one-piece mini-version of the familiar pick (kolang) by which one digs the ground. My guess is that the arrival of the sugar loaf in Iran from Russia began during the Qajar dynasty and my guess is that the cast of characters in the anecdote is probably authentic. The word dishlameh – according to Dehkhoda, is Turkish, from the root dish, meaning tooth.
The style of drinking tea dishlameh, which in Persian is called (ghand pahlou = sugar on the side), however, must be viewed to have been around for much longer. The proof is in the morphology of what preceded the modern sugar bit. According to Dehkhoda, in Persian, another word for ghand is nabat. The item known as nabat to most Iranians is the grape-like bunch of translucent lumps crystallized around a twine, having the look and feel of hard-candy. The nabat is hard to the teeth and takes a considerable amount of time to dissolve in water. If the nabat were placed in tea and twirled in order to dissolve it, the process would have cooled the tea itself, which to most Iranians it is a useless liquid if not hot. My guess is that long before the European sugar loaf appeared in Iran that Iranians drank their tea dishlameh or ghand pahlou by necessity.
Etymologically, according to Dehkhoda, the word ghand is the Arabicized form of the Hindi-origin kand, which was kahanda in Sanskrit, an Indo-Iranian language. The word sugar, too, is Indo-Iranian. In Sanskrit it was sarkara, in Greek became sakxaron, in Pahlavi version of Persian it became shaker. The sh sound still present in the Farsi shekar echoes in the English sugar.
As the aroma of Sabatico’s culinary engineering signaled progress, I opened another volume of the Loghat-Nameh to look for the origin of the name “Kord,” or “Kurd,” if you prefer. A while back I had received an inquiry from a reader in Germany who wanted to know my take on the origin of the name “Kord.” According to his Assyrian friend, the term derived from an Assyrian word meaning “lazy” and the people so designated were sent into the mountains!
When I received the aforementioned inquiry, I contacted my friend and equally amateurish linguist Omran, a Kord from Lorestan, to give me his take on the origin of the name “Kord.” He responded by saying that Kord is Arabicized form the Iranian word gord, meaning hero, a strong man. I do not know if the Assyrian-origin word for “Kord” is correct or not. Nor do I have any reason to bicker with Omran’s interpretation of Kord as gord. I do have however a few thoughts of my own on the subject.
According to Dehkhoda, the Greek classical writers referred to the Kords as kuvrati and according to Encyclopaedia Britannica the Kardouchoi who attacked Xenophon may have been Kurds. I assume that the Greek name(s) for the Kords probably did not mean anything in Greek itself. The name kuvrati may have been related to ku, which in Iranian language of the Persians and Medes would have meant “mountain.” That the name Kord be synonymous with “mountain” is further strengthened by the evidence of the geography of the terrain inhabited by them. Nowhere is this better captured than in the opening sentence in Encyclopaedia Britannica (1981, micropaedia) — “people of the Zagros Mountains and the eastern extension of the Taurus.”
I relayed this “mountain” theory to Omran; he responded with the observation that a lot of people in ancient Iran were mountain people, why just call the Kords as such? A legitimate observation. I paused however to recall that I had read at one point about the Kords in Balouchetsan. Were these Kord in Balouchestan ethnically related to the Kords from western Iran? In the Gorgan region we have Kord Mahaleh, named after the Kords who were resettled there from western Iran. There had been a large tribal entity in Fars that was called Shabankareh Kords. Or were the Kords in Balouchetsan simply so called because of a linguistic derivation from the Iranian “kuh.” I do not know the answer to this – and have not researched it. I do know however that there is a mountain place in Fars called Kiyalan. Because, according to Omran, the word for mountain in Kordish is chia I venture the guess that Kiyalan probably referred to a mountain area inhabited by Kords.
According to Dehkhoda, the word kord means shepherd (chupan) and sheep-herder (gusfand-ran). This interpretation certainly fits the lifestyle of a people described in Encyclopaedia Britannica as “[n]omads, who lived throughout the year in their black goat-hair tent, driving their flocks between the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands of Turkey and Iran.”
By analogy to the “mountain” theory, however, there was nothing characteristically special of the ancient Kords to gain them alone a designation meaning “shepherd.”
I believe the origin of the name “Kord” is the word kuvardin, which Dehkhoda defines as a black outfit, an outfit made of black felt. The approximation of this word with the aforementioned kuvrati of the Greeks is extraordinary. The juxtaposition is all the more remarkable when one considers that the black color of the attire (kuvardin) is the same as the color of the tents made of black goat-hair.
There is Achaemenian evidence to suggest that Persians could have called a people in reference to their attire. In the inscriptions at Naqsh-e Rostam, for example, one reads of Darius’ countries that included the Saka with pointed caps and the petasos-wearing Ionians. The factual existence of kuvrati in Greek writings may well be proof of the existence by inference of the designation kuvardin among ancient Iranians for the present-day Kords. Just as the Greeks translated the tall-cap Saka as Orthocorybantes (reference to tall Persian hat), they turned also Kuvardin to Kuvrati.
One may well posit that Kuvardin was probably a reference to mountain-dweller, for which one could look to Farvardin, the first month of the Iranian calendar, as a word example that could allow the division of Kuvardin into ku or kuv for “mountain” and explain away vardin as a verb-suffix.
With lunch behind us, Sabatico offered me a cup of tea, which I sweetened with granulated sugar. The hot water for the tea came from a mini-version of a stovetop samovar. In [Persian plus] I wrote about the word samovar, going along with Dehkhoda’s explanation that it was of Russian origin. “No,” wrote back Omran, “the word sam in Lori means power, energy — as in the phrase Nader Shah [had] sam.” Omran implied that samovar in Persian could well have meant an article that generated power, steam.
As I drove away from Sabatico’s, I kept remembering a saying that I had heard from my father about lending and returning books. “Only a fool lends a book,” he would say, “a greater fool is the one who returns it.” Foolish perhaps – yet I know not of any greater sign of a trusting friendship than lending a book.
About
Guive Mirfendereski is a professorial lecturer in international relations and law and is the principal artisan at trapworks.com. Born in Tehran in 1952, he is a graduate of Georgetown University's College of Arts and Sciences (BA), Tufts University's Fletcher School (PhD, MALD, MA) and Boston College Law School (JD). He is the author of A Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea >>> Features in iranian.com
