154 Христианский Восток V (XI) (2008)

“Zanjī”, “Nabatæan”, etc., although they claimed sometimes that this or that
word is derived from these exotic tongues6.
There were several routes through which Iranian lexica would have reached
Arabian dialects of the pre-Islamic times. One was via Hira / al-īrah, Hagar
/ Bahrain, where asābidha (*aspa-pati-) abandoned their Iranian speech long
ago and where Iranian or Iranian-oriented groups still form large segments of
the population. Another was through the vast Kurdish population that used to
inhabit Eastern Arabia, according to Ibn Baūa. A further route was via Oman,
Sasanian Mazun, whose sultan even in our own days bears a distinctively
Iranian name, Kābūs, a name stemming from the Middle Iranian Kayōs, and
where an Iranian Kumzārī dialect was still spoken in the mid-20th century by
Bedouins in the Omani enclave of the Musandam peninsula7. The ever-present
Persian-speaking population on both sides of the Persian Gulf should also be
mentioned. One should add to this list the caravan cities of Hijaz, of whose
ties with Sasanian Iran we are now much better acquainted than a couple of
decades ago. Iranian words and notions penetrated via different Aramaic dia-
lects, Jewish, pagan or Christian, as well as through Manichaean propaganda8.
And, of course, these ideas and lexica made their entry into the Peninsula via
South Arabia, Yemen, which had been an Iranian province for almost a century,
whether de facto or de jure, and where there had been an Iranian population
until the first centuries of the Hijrah, the so-called banū-[‘]l-ahrār, *āzādān9.
In the last case, the problem is of a rather hypothetical character: nowhere in
the Arabian Peninsula, apart from the Gulf Coast, was the Iranian presence
so well-established; there are numerous indications, which cannot be referred
to here even briefly, that in the early Islamic times the Yamanis and Persians
flocked together against other Muslim groups, of Northern Arabian descent.
Still, the linguistic evidence from Yemen is scarce due to the fact that genuine
written sources, in musnad, in this case, are formalistic and archaizing by defi-
nition, on the one hand, and the Southern Arabian writing tradition virtually
withered away precisely as a result of establishment of direct Persian rule, on
the other. However, there are examples of Iranian lexica borrowed via Yemen

6
L. KOPF, Studies in Arabic and Hebrew Lexicography / Ed. M. H. GOSHEN-
GOTTSTEIN with the assistance of S. ASSIF (Jerusalem, 1978) 249, 252–253.
7
Cf. B. THOMAS, The Kumzari Dialect of the Shihuh Tribe, Arabia, and a
Vocabulary // JRAS (1930) 785–843.
8
See, e.g., R. SIMON, Mānī and Muhammad // Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and
Islam 21 (1997) 118–141.
9
As a parallel: until today there exists in Yemen an Arabic-speaking population
called “Turks”, the descendents of Ottoman soldiers and officials. On South-Arabian
and Persian, cf. Ch. RABIN, On the Probability of South-Arabian Influence on the Arabic
Vocabulary // Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 4 (1984) 125–134, pp. 128–129.