104-614: The Seven Valleys ( Persian : هفت وادی Haft-Vádí ) is a book written in Persian by Baháʼu'lláh , the founder of the Baháʼí Faith . The Seven Valleys follows the structure of the Persian poem The Conference of the Birds . The Seven Valleys is usually published together with The Four Valleys ( Persian : چهار وادی Chahár Vádí ), which was also written by Baháʼu'lláh, under
208-408: A "thing" (the void) might be real without being a body and points out the irony that this comes from a materialistic atomist. Leucippus is therefore the first to say that "nothing" has a reality attached to it. Aristotle (384–322 BC) provided the classic escape from the logical problem posed by Parmenides by distinguishing things that are matter and things that are space . In this scenario, space
312-600: A Dari dialect. In the 19th century, under the Qajar dynasty , the dialect that is spoken in Tehran rose to prominence. There was still substantial Arabic vocabulary, but many of these words have been integrated into Persian phonology and grammar. In addition, under the Qajar rule, numerous Russian , French , and English terms entered the Persian language, especially vocabulary related to technology. The first official attentions to
416-410: A dialectical discussion, yet to believe them seems next door to madness when one considers the facts." In modern times, Albert Einstein 's concept of spacetime has led many scientists, including Einstein himself, to adopt a position remarkably similar to Parmenides. On the death of his friend Michele Besso , Einstein consoled his widow with the words, "Now he has departed from this strange world
520-418: A dictionary called Words of Scientific Association ( لغت انجمن علمی ), which was completed in the future and renamed Katouzian Dictionary ( فرهنگ کاتوزیان ). The first academy for the Persian language was founded on 20 May 1935, under the name Academy of Iran . It was established by the initiative of Reza Shah Pahlavi , and mainly by Hekmat e Shirazi and Mohammad Ali Foroughi , all prominent names in
624-505: A language name is first attested in English in the mid-16th century. Farsi , which is the Persian word for the Persian language, has also been used widely in English in recent decades, more often to refer to Iran's standard Persian. However, the name Persian is still more widely used. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has maintained that the endonym Farsi is to be avoided in foreign languages, and that Persian
728-417: A literary language considerably different from the spoken Persian of the time. This became the basis of what is now known as "Contemporary Standard Persian". There are three standard varieties of modern Persian: All these three varieties are based on the classic Persian literature and its literary tradition. There are also several local dialects from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from
832-446: A little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us that believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Leucippus (early 5th century BC), one of the atomists , along with other philosophers of his time, made attempts to reconcile this monism with the everyday observation of motion and change. He accepted the monist position that there could be no motion without
936-468: A new pinnacle of development. According to Hegel in Science of Logic , the dialectical methods consists of three steps. First, a thesis is given, which can be any proposition in logic . Second, the antithesis of the thesis is formed and, finally, a synthesis incorporating both thesis and antithesis. Hegel believed that no proposition taken by itself can be completely true. Only the whole can be true, and
1040-536: A period of several centuries, Ottoman Turkish (which was highly Persianised itself) had developed toward a fully accepted language of literature, and which was even able to lexically satisfy the demands of a scientific presentation. However, the number of Persian and Arabic loanwords contained in those works increased at times up to 88%. In the Ottoman Empire, Persian was used at the royal court, for diplomacy, poetry, historiographical works, literary works, and
1144-453: A pump. John the Scot, or Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 815–877) held many surprisingly heretical beliefs for the time he lived in for which no action appears ever to have been taken against him. His ideas mostly stem from, or are based on his work of translating pseudo-Dionysius . His beliefs are essentially pantheist and he classifies evil, amongst many other things, into not-being . This
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#17327649631251248-439: A serious subject for a very long time. In philosophy, to avoid linguistic traps over the meaning of "nothing", a phrase such as not-being is often employed to make clear what is being discussed. One of the earliest Western philosophers to consider nothing as a concept was Parmenides (5th century BC), a Greek philosopher of the monist school. He argued that "nothing" cannot exist by the following line of reasoning: To speak of
1352-599: A speaker of Persian. Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages , which make up a branch of the Indo-European languages in their Indo-Iranian subdivision . The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish and Balochi are
1456-551: A thing, one has to speak of a thing that exists. If one can speak of a thing in the past, this thing must still exist (in some sense) now, and from this he concluded that there is no such thing as change. As a corollary, there can be no such things as coming-into-being , passing-out-of-being , or not-being . Other philosophers, for instance, Socrates and Plato largely agreed with Parmenides's reasoning on nothing. Aristotle differs with Parmenides's conception of nothing and says, "Although these opinions seem to follow logically in
1560-569: A thought or activity at a level of intensity that they would not be able to achieve if they were consciously thinking. A classic example of this is an archer attempting to erase the mind and clear the thoughts to better focus on the shot. Some authors have pointed to similarities between the Buddhist conception of nothingness and the ideas of Martin Heidegger and existentialists like Sartre, although this connection has not been explicitly made by
1664-472: A vacuum". This remained so until Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer in 1643 and showed that an empty space appeared if the mercury tube was turned upside down. This phenomenon being known as the Torricelli vacuum and the unit of vacuum pressure, the torr , being named after him. Even Torricelli's teacher, Galileo Galilei , had previously been unable to adequately explain the sucking action of
1768-457: A void. The void is the opposite of being. It is not-being . On the other hand, there exists something known as an absolute plenum , a space filled with matter, and there can be no motion in a plenum because it is completely full. But, there is not just one monolithic plenum, for existence consists of a multiplicity of plenums. These are the invisibly small "atoms" of Greek atomist theory, later expanded by Democritus (c. 460–370 BC), which allows
1872-520: Is impermanence , whereas the Tao has a permanence that cannot be described, predetermined, or named. In this way the Tao is different from any thing that can be named. It is nonexistence, in other words, nothing. Taoists also have the related concept of wu wei . Despite the proven existence of vacuum, scientists through the 17th to 19th centuries thought there must be a medium pervading all space that allowed
1976-465: Is être-en-soi , the brute existence of things such as a tree. The other kind is être-pour-soi which is consciousness. Sartre claims that this second kind of being is "nothing" since consciousness cannot be an object of consciousness and can possess no essence. Sartre, and even more so, Jaques Lacan , use this conception of nothing as the foundation of their atheist philosophy. Equating nothingness with being leads to creation from nothing and hence God
2080-615: Is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages . Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran , Afghanistan , and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties , respectively Iranian Persian (officially known as Persian ), Dari Persian (officially known as Dari since 1964), and Tajiki Persian (officially known as Tajik since 1999). It
2184-664: Is a continuation of Middle Persian , an official language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian , which was used in the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). It originated in the region of Fars ( Persia ) in southwestern Iran. Its grammar is similar to that of many European languages. Throughout history, Persian was considered prestigious by various empires centered in West Asia , Central Asia , and South Asia . Old Persian
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#17327649631252288-628: Is a direct descendant of Middle and Old Persian. Gernot Windfuhr considers new Persian as an evolution of the Old Persian language and the Middle Persian language but also states that none of the known Middle Persian dialects is the direct predecessor of Modern Persian. Ludwig Paul states: "The language of the Shahnameh should be seen as one instance of continuous historical development from Middle to New Persian." The known history of
2392-796: Is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan , as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran . It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet , a derivative of the Arabic script , and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet , a derivative of the Cyrillic script . Modern Persian
2496-675: Is attested in Old Persian cuneiform on inscriptions from between the 6th and 4th century BC. Middle Persian is attested in Aramaic -derived scripts ( Pahlavi and Manichaean ) on inscriptions and in Zoroastrian and Manichaean scriptures from between the third to the tenth centuries (see Middle Persian literature ). New Persian literature was first recorded in the ninth century, after the Muslim conquest of Persia , since then adopting
2600-425: Is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian remains largely intelligible to speakers of Contemporary Persian, as the morphology and, to a lesser extent, the lexicon of the language have remained relatively stable. New Persian texts written in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th-century. The language is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, the official, religious, and literary language of
2704-415: Is done on the grounds that evil is the opposite of good, a quality of God, but God can have no opposite, since God is everything in the pantheist view of the world. Similarly, the idea that God created the world out of "nothing" is to be interpreted as meaning that the "nothing" here is synonymous with God. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) is the philosopher who brought the dialectical method to
2808-454: Is highly poetic , though not composed in verse . Nearly every line of the text contains rhymes and plays on words, which can be lost in translation. As the recipient was of Sufi origin, Baháʼu'lláh used historical and religious subtleties which sometimes used only one or a few words to refer to Qurʼanic verses, traditions, and well-known poems. In English, frequent footnotes are used to convey certain background information. The book follows
2912-598: Is more fruitful for man than the knowledge of his own shortcomings". Shoghi Effendi called The Seven Valleys Baháʼu'lláh's "greatest mystical composition." The Seven Valleys was one of the earliest available books of Baháʼu'lláh in European languages, first translated directly into French in 1905 and into English in 1906. Persian language Russia Persian ( / ˈ p ɜːr ʒ ən , - ʃ ən / PUR -zhən, -shən ), also known by its endonym Farsi ( فارسی , Fārsī [fɒːɾˈsiː] ),
3016-446: Is no longer needed for there to be existence. The understanding of "nothing" varies widely between cultures, especially between Western and Eastern cultures and philosophical traditions. For instance, Śūnyatā (emptiness), unlike "nothingness", is considered to be a state of mind in some forms of Buddhism (see Nirvana , mu , and Bodhi ). Achieving "nothing" as a state of mind in this tradition allows one to be totally focused on
3120-428: Is not "nothing" but, rather, a receptacle in which objects of matter can be placed. The true void (as "nothing") is different from "space" and is removed from consideration. This characterization of space reached its pinnacle with Isaac Newton who asserted the existence of absolute space. René Descartes , on the other hand, returned to a Parmenides-like argument of denying the existence of space. For Descartes, there
3224-460: Is not actually attested until 600 years later when it appears in the Sassanid era (224–651 AD) inscriptions, so any form of the language before this date cannot be described with any degree of certainty. Moreover, as a literary language, Middle Persian is not attested until much later, in the 6th or 7th century. From the 8th century onward, Middle Persian gradually began yielding to New Persian, with
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3328-558: Is often viewed as a modern version of an aether theory . Some would consider the study of "nothing" to be absurd. A typical response of this type is voiced by the Venetian Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) in conversation with his landlord, one Dr. Gozzi, who also happens to be a priest: As everything, for him, was an article of faith, nothing, to his mind, was difficult to understand: the Great Flood had covered
3432-475: Is one of Afghanistan's two official languages, together with Pashto . The term Dari , meaning "of the court", originally referred to the variety of Persian used in the court of the Sasanian Empire in capital Ctesiphon , which was spread to the northeast of the empire and gradually replaced the former Iranian dialects of Parthia ( Parthian ). Tajik Persian ( форси́и тоҷикӣ́ , forsi-i tojikī ),
3536-585: Is one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages. According to certain historical assumptions about the early history and origin of ancient Persians in Southwestern Iran (where Achaemenids hailed from), Old Persian was originally spoken by a tribe called Parsuwash , who arrived in the Iranian Plateau early in the 1st millennium BCE and finally migrated down into the area of present-day Fārs province. Their language, Old Persian, became
3640-450: Is the "Valley of Love". Baháʼu'lláh describes how love burns away reason, causing pain, madness and single minded endeavour. He writes that the fire of love burns away the material self, revealing instead the world of the spirit. The knowledge referred to in this valley is the knowledge of God, and not one based on learning; it is explained that pride in one's knowledge and accomplishments often disallows one to reach true understanding, which
3744-495: Is the appropriate designation of the language in English, as it has the longer tradition in western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity. Iranian historian and linguist Ehsan Yarshater , founder of the Encyclopædia Iranica and Columbia University 's Center for Iranian Studies, mentions the same concern in an academic journal on Iranology , rejecting
3848-502: Is the knowledge of God. It is explained that the seeker, when in this valley, begins to understand the mysteries contained within God's revelation, and finds wisdom in all things including when faced with pain and hardship, which he understands to be God's mercy and blessing. This valley is called the last limited valley. The next stage is the valley of unity, and it is explained that the seeker now sees creation not by its limitations, but sees
3952-455: Is the number 0 , which is neither a positive nor negative number . It's sometimes included in the set of natural numbers , denoted by N {\displaystyle N} , but it's always included in the set of real numbers , denoted by R {\displaystyle R} . "Nothing" can also apply to empty sets , indicated by the symbol ∅ {\displaystyle \emptyset } , whose size or cardinality
4056-419: Is to be viewed as something spiritual. Hegel then has: The most prominent figure among the existentialists is Jean-Paul Sartre , whose ideas in his book Being and Nothingness ( L'être et le néant ) are heavily influenced by Being and Time ( Sein und Zeit ) of Martin Heidegger , although Heidegger later stated that he was misunderstood by Sartre. Sartre defines two kinds of "being" (être). One kind
4160-491: The Encyclopædia Iranica notes that the Iranian, Afghan, and Tajiki varieties comprise distinct branches of the Persian language, and within each branch a wide variety of local dialects exist. The following are some languages closely related to Persian, or in some cases are considered dialects: More distantly related branches of the Iranian language family include Kurdish and Balochi . The Glottolog database proposes
4264-506: The Kalila wa Dimna . The language spread geographically from the 11th century on and was the medium through which, among others, Central Asian Turks became familiar with Islam and urban culture. New Persian was widely used as a trans-regional lingua franca , a task aided due to its relatively simple morphology, and this situation persisted until at least the 19th century. In the late Middle Ages, new Islamic literary languages were created on
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4368-668: The British colonization , Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent . It took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts on the subcontinent and became the sole "official language" under the Mughal emperors . The Bengal Sultanate witnessed an influx of Persian scholars, lawyers, teachers, and clerics. Thousands of Persian books and manuscripts were published in Bengal. The period of
4472-649: The Sulaymaniyah region in Iraqi Kurdistan where he spent two years anonymously with various Sufi sheikhs using the pseudonym Darvish Muhammad-i-Irani . The work was written in response to questions posed by Shaykh Muhyi'd-Din, a judge, who was a follower of the Qádiríyyih Order of Sufism . About the time of writing to Baháʼu'lláh, he quit his job, and spent the rest of his life wandering around Iraqi Kurdistan. The style of The Seven Valleys
4576-674: The Sultanate of Rum , Turkmen beyliks of Anatolia , Delhi Sultanate , the Shirvanshahs , Safavids , Afsharids , Zands , Qajars , Khanate of Bukhara , Khanate of Kokand , Emirate of Bukhara , Khanate of Khiva , Ottomans , and also many Mughal successors such as the Nizam of Hyderabad . Persian was the only non-European language known and used by Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan and in his journeys through China. A branch of
4680-713: The Turkic , Armenian , Georgian , & Indo-Aryan languages . It also exerted some influence on Arabic, while borrowing a lot of vocabulary from it in the Middle Ages. Some of the world's most famous pieces of literature from the Middle Ages, such as the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi , the works of Rumi , the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám , the Panj Ganj of Nizami Ganjavi , The Divān of Hafez , The Conference of
4784-491: The ezāfe construction, expressed through ī (modern e/ye ), to indicate some of the relations between words that have been lost with the simplification of the earlier grammatical system. Although the "middle period" of the Iranian languages formally begins with the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the transition from Old to Middle Persian had probably already begun before the 4th century BC. However, Middle Persian
4888-597: The " Persianized " Turko-Mongol dynasties during the 12th to 15th centuries, and under restored Persian rule during the 16th to 19th centuries. Persian during this time served as lingua franca of Greater Persia and of much of the Indian subcontinent . It was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including the Samanids, Buyids , Tahirids , Ziyarids , the Mughal Empire , Timurids , Ghaznavids , Karakhanids , Seljuqs , Khwarazmians ,
4992-629: The Birds by Attar of Nishapur , and the miscellanea of Gulistan and Bustan by Saadi Shirazi , are written in Persian. Some of the prominent modern Persian poets were Nima Yooshij , Ahmad Shamlou , Simin Behbahani , Sohrab Sepehri , Rahi Mo'ayyeri , Mehdi Akhavan-Sales , and Forugh Farrokhzad . There are approximately 130 million Persian speakers worldwide, including Persians , Lurs , Tajiks , Hazaras , Iranian Azeris , Iranian Kurds , Balochs , Tats , Afghan Pashtuns , and Aimaqs . The term Persophone might also be used to refer to
5096-565: The Middle Ages, and is because of the lack of the phoneme /p/ in Standard Arabic. The standard Persian of Iran has been called, apart from Persian and Farsi , by names such as Iranian Persian and Western Persian , exclusively. Officially, the official language of Iran is designated simply as Persian ( فارسی , fārsi ). The standard Persian of Afghanistan has been officially named Dari ( دری , dari ) since 1958. Also referred to as Afghan Persian in English, it
5200-543: The Ottoman Empire all spoke Persian, such as Sultan Selim I , despite being Safavid Iran's archrival and a staunch opposer of Shia Islam . It was a major literary language in the empire. Some of the noted earlier Persian works during the Ottoman rule are Idris Bidlisi 's Hasht Bihisht , which began in 1502 and covered the reign of the first eight Ottoman rulers, and the Salim-Namah , a glorification of Selim I. After
5304-530: The Persian language can be divided into the following three distinct periods: As a written language , Old Persian is attested in royal Achaemenid inscriptions. The oldest known text written in Old Persian is from the Behistun Inscription , dating to the time of King Darius I (reigned 522–486 BC). Examples of Old Persian have been found in what is now Iran , Romania ( Gherla ), Armenia , Bahrain , Iraq , Turkey, and Egypt . Old Persian
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#17327649631255408-425: The Persian language, a language historically called Dari, emerged in present-day Afghanistan. The first significant Persian poet was Rudaki . He flourished in the 10th century, when the Samanids were at the height of their power. His reputation as a court poet and as an accomplished musician and singer has survived, although little of his poetry has been preserved. Among his lost works are versified fables collected in
5512-401: The Persian model: Ottoman Turkish , Chagatai Turkic , Dobhashi Bengali , and Urdu, which are regarded as "structural daughter languages" of Persian. "Classical Persian" loosely refers to the standardized language of medieval Persia used in literature and poetry . This is the language of the 10th to 12th centuries, which continued to be used as literary language and lingua franca under
5616-886: The Perso-Arabic script. Persian was the first language to break through the monopoly of Arabic on writing in the Muslim world , with Persian poetry becoming a tradition in many eastern courts. It was used officially as a language of bureaucracy even by non-native speakers, such as the Ottomans in Anatolia , the Mughals in South Asia, and the Pashtuns in Afghanistan. It influenced languages spoken in neighboring regions and beyond, including other Iranian languages,
5720-484: The Sasanian Empire (224–651). However, it is not descended from the literary form of Middle Persian (known as pārsīk , commonly called Pahlavi), which was spoken by the people of Fars and used in Zoroastrian religious writings. Instead, it is descended from the dialect spoken by the court of the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon and the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan , known as Dari. The region, which comprised
5824-588: The Sassanids (who were Persians, i.e. from the southwest) from the preceding Arsacids (who were Parthians, i.e. from the northeast). While Ibn al-Muqaffa' (eighth century) still distinguished between Pahlavi (i.e. Parthian) and Persian (in Arabic text: al-Farisiyah) (i.e. Middle Persian), this distinction is not evident in Arab commentaries written after that date. "New Persian" (also referred to as Modern Persian)
5928-462: The Seljuks, the Sultanate of Rum , took Persian language, art, and letters to Anatolia. They adopted the Persian language as the official language of the empire. The Ottomans , who can roughly be seen as their eventual successors, inherited this tradition. Persian was the official court language of the empire, and for some time, the official language of the empire. The educated and noble class of
6032-415: The aether instead to explain refraction . Early theories generally proposed a mechanical medium of some sort, allowing the possibility of the same medium supporting both light and gravity. Proof that light has a wave nature, rather than Newton's corpuscles, was provided by Thomas Young in his 1803 interference experiment , seemingly confirming the need for an aether. The most well known attempt to detect
6136-498: The area of Lake Urmia in the records of Shalmaneser III . The exact identity of the Parsuwash is not known for certain, but from a linguistic viewpoint the word matches Old Persian pārsa itself coming directly from the older word * pārćwa . Also, as Old Persian contains many words from another extinct Iranian language, Median , according to P. O. Skjærvø it is probable that Old Persian had already been spoken before
6240-446: The attributes of God in all created things. The seeker, it is written, is detached from earthly things, is not concerned with his own self and has no ego; instead he praises God for all of creation. The next valley for the seeker is the valley of contentment, where it is explained that the seeker becomes independent from all things, and even though he may look poor or is subjected to suffering, he will be endowed with wealth and power from
6344-401: The centre of attention after James Clerk Maxwell proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave in 1865. Early aether theories include those of Robert Hooke (1665) and Christiaan Huygens (1690). Newton also had an aether theory, but to Newton, it was not the medium of transmission since he theorised light was composed of "corpuscles" which moved by simple mechanical motion. He needed
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#17327649631256448-457: The code fas for the dialects spoken across Iran and Afghanistan. This consists of the individual languages Dari ( prs ) and Iranian Persian ( pes ). It uses tgk for Tajik, separately. In general, the Iranian languages are known from three periods: namely Old, Middle, and New (Modern). These correspond to three historical eras of Iranian history ; Old era being sometime around the Achaemenid Empire (i.e., 400–300 BC), Middle era being
6552-512: The collapse of the Sassanid state, Parsik came to be applied exclusively to (either Middle or New) Persian that was written in the Arabic script . From about the 9th century onward, as Middle Persian was on the threshold of becoming New Persian, the older form of the language came to be erroneously called Pahlavi , which was actually but one of the writing systems used to render both Middle Persian as well as various other Middle Iranian languages. That writing system had previously been adopted by
6656-466: The dialectical synthesis was the means by which the whole could be examined in relation to a specific proposition. Truth consists of the whole process. Separating out thesis, antithesis, or synthesis as a stand-alone statement results in something that is in some way or other untrue. The concept of "nothing" arises in Hegel right at the beginning of his Logic . The whole is called by Hegel the "Absolute" and
6760-430: The entire world; before, men had the misfortune of living a thousand years; God conversed with them; Noah had taken one hundred years to build the ark; while the earth, suspended in air, stood firmly at the center of the universe that God had created out of nothingness. When I said to him, and proved to him, that the existence of nothingness was absurd , he cut me short, calling me silly. "Nothingness" has been treated as
6864-404: The essences of God's self and the mystic's self remain distinct, in contrast to what appears to be a complete union in other traditions. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá explained in one of his talks that The Seven Valleys is a guide for human conduct, that one should search out one's "own imperfections and not think of the imperfections of anybody else", to "strive to be free from imperfections" and that "nothing
6968-555: The existence of the aether was conducted by Albert A. Michelson in an experiment of 1881 , later repeated with Edward W. Morley in 1887 with more precision. This failed to show the desired effect, but reluctant to abandon the aether theory, various attempts were made to modify it to account for the Michelson-Morley result. Finally, Albert Einstein , building on the work of Hendrik Lorentz , published his theory of special relativity in 1905 which dispenses entirely with
7072-652: The extent of its influence on certain languages of the Indian subcontinent. Words borrowed from Persian are still quite commonly used in certain Indo-Aryan languages, especially Hindi - Urdu (also historically known as Hindustani ), Punjabi , Kashmiri , and Sindhi . There is also a small population of Zoroastrian Iranis in India, who migrated in the 19th century to escape religious execution in Qajar Iran and speak
7176-435: The following phylogenetic classification: Nothingness Nothing , no-thing , or no thing , is the complete absence of anything as the opposite of something and an antithesis of everything . The concept of nothing has been a matter of philosophical debate since at least the 5th century BC. Early Greek philosophers argued that it was impossible for nothing to exist. The atomists allowed nothing but only in
7280-577: The formation of many modern languages in West Asia, Europe, Central Asia , and South Asia . Following the Turko-Persian Ghaznavid conquest of South Asia , Persian was firstly introduced in the region by Turkic Central Asians. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties. For five centuries prior to
7384-476: The formation of the Achaemenid Empire and was spoken during most of the first half of the first millennium BCE. Xenophon , a Greek general serving in some of the Persian expeditions, describes many aspects of Armenian village life and hospitality in around 401 BCE, which is when Old Persian was still spoken and extensively used. He relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like
7488-663: The goal of the journey is to follow "the Right Path", "abandon the drop of life and come to the sea of the Life-Bestower", and "gaze on the Beloved". In the conclusion of the book, he mentions: The valley of search is described as the first step that a seeker must take in his path. Baháʼu'lláh states that the seeker must cleanse his heart, and not follow the paths of his forefathers. It is explained that ardour and patience are required to traverse this valley. The next valley
7592-466: The language of the Persians. Related to Old Persian, but from a different branch of the Iranian language family, was Avestan , the language of the Zoroastrian liturgical texts. The complex grammatical conjugation and declension of Old Persian yielded to the structure of Middle Persian in which the dual number disappeared, leaving only singular and plural, as did gender. Middle Persian developed
7696-403: The lowest possible energy state. First proposed by Paul Dirac in 1927, the lowest energy state has constant random vacuum fluctuations which bring into existence short-lived virtual particles . This is somewhat reminiscent of early philosophical plenum ideas, and means that vacuum and nothing are certainly not synonyms. Perhaps the best-known usage of the term "nothing" in mathematics
7800-432: The middle-period form only continuing in the texts of Zoroastrianism . Middle Persian is considered to be a later form of the same dialect as Old Persian. The native name of Middle Persian was Parsig or Parsik , after the name of the ethnic group of the southwest, that is, "of Pars ", Old Persian Parsa , New Persian Fars . This is the origin of the name Farsi as it is today used to signify New Persian. Following
7904-536: The most widely spoken. The term Persian is an English derivation of Latin Persiānus , the adjectival form of Persia , itself deriving from Greek Persís ( Περσίς ), a Hellenized form of Old Persian Pārsa ( 𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿 ), which means " Persia " (a region in southwestern Iran, corresponding to modern-day Fars ). According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the term Persian as
8008-466: The nationalist movement of the time. The academy was a key institution in the struggle to re-build Iran as a nation-state after the collapse of the Qajar dynasty. During the 1930s and 1940s, the academy led massive campaigns to replace the many Arabic , Russian , French , and Greek loanwords whose widespread use in Persian during the centuries preceding the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty had created
8112-499: The necessity of protecting the Persian language against foreign words, and to the standardization of Persian orthography , were under the reign of Naser ed Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty in 1871. After Naser ed Din Shah, Mozaffar ed Din Shah ordered the establishment of the first Persian association in 1903. This association officially declared that it used Persian and Arabic as acceptable sources for coining words. The ultimate goal
8216-427: The need for a luminiferous aether to explain the transmission of light. Although a physical medium was no longer required, the concept of aether still did not entirely vanish. It remained necessary to assign properties to the vacuum for various purposes. In some respects vacuum and aether are treated as synonyms by science. In modern quantum field theory , a completely empty vacuum is not at zero-point energy ,
8320-414: The next period most officially around the Sasanian Empire , and New era being the period afterward down to present day. According to available documents, the Persian language is "the only Iranian language" for which close philological relationships between all of its three stages are established and so that Old, Middle, and New Persian represent one and the same language of Persian; that is, New Persian
8424-406: The next, it is explained that the seeker continues to be astonished by the works of God. The final valley is the valley of true poverty and absolute nothingness , and it is the furthermost state that the mystic can reach. The seeker is poor of all material things, and is rich in spiritual attributes. It is explained that it is the state of annihilation of self in God, but not an existential union:
8528-732: The northern part of Greece). Vardar Yenicesi differed from other localities in the Balkans insofar as that it was a town where Persian was also widely spoken. However, the Persian of Vardar Yenicesi and throughout the rest of the Ottoman-held Balkans was different from formal Persian both in accent and vocabulary. The difference was apparent to such a degree that the Ottomans referred to it as "Rumelian Persian" ( Rumili Farsisi ). As learned people such as students, scholars and literati often frequented Vardar Yenicesi, it soon became
8632-542: The official language of the Achaemenid kings. Assyrian records, which in fact appear to provide the earliest evidence for ancient Iranian (Persian and Median) presence on the Iranian Plateau, give a good chronology but only an approximate geographical indication of what seem to be ancient Persians. In these records of the 9th century BCE, Parsuwash (along with Matai , presumably Medians) are first mentioned in
8736-528: The path of the soul on a spiritual journey passing through different stages, from this world to other realms which are closer to God, as first described by the 12th Century Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar in his Conference of the Birds . Baháʼu'lláh in the work explains the meanings and the significance of the seven stages. In the introduction, Baháʼu'lláh says "Some have called these Seven Valleys, and others, Seven Cities." The stages are accomplished in order, and
8840-446: The philosophers themselves. In some Eastern philosophies , the concept of "nothingness" is characterized by an egoless state of being in which one fully realizes one's own small part in the cosmos. The Kyoto School handles the concept of nothingness as well. Laozi and Zhuangzi were both conscious that language is powerless in the face of the ultimate. In Taoist philosophy , however real this world is, its main characteristic
8944-638: The present territories of northwestern Afghanistan as well as parts of Central Asia, played a leading role in the rise of New Persian. Khorasan, which was the homeland of the Parthians, was Persianized under the Sasanians. Dari Persian thus supplanted Parthian language , which by the end of the Sasanian era had fallen out of use. New Persian has incorporated many foreign words, including from eastern northern and northern Iranian languages such as Sogdian and especially Parthian. The transition to New Persian
9048-406: The rather modern scientific position of starting with the observed data (motion, etc.) and constructing a theory based on the data, as opposed to Parmenides' attempts to work from pure logic. Russell also observes that both sides were mistaken in believing that there can be no motion in a plenum, but arguably motion cannot start in a plenum. Cyril Bailey notes that Leucippus is the first to say that
9152-588: The region during the following centuries. Persian continued to act as a courtly language for various empires in Punjab through the early 19th century serving finally as the official state language of the Sikh Empire , preceding British conquest and the decline of Persian in South Asia. Beginning in 1843, though, English and Hindustani gradually replaced Persian in importance on the subcontinent. Evidence of Persian's historical influence there can be seen in
9256-602: The reign of Sultan Ghiyathuddin Azam Shah is described as the "golden age of Persian literature in Bengal". Its stature was illustrated by the Sultan's own correspondence and collaboration with the Persian poet Hafez ; a poem which can be found in the Divan of Hafez today. A Bengali dialect emerged among the common Bengali Muslim folk, based on a Persian model and known as Dobhashi ; meaning mixed language . Dobhashi Bengali
9360-443: The scientific discovery of a physical vacuum . Existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger (as interpreted by Sartre) have associated nothing with consciousness . Some writers have made connections between Heidegger's concept of nothing and the nirvana of Eastern religions. Modern science does not equate vacuum with nothing . The vacuum in quantum field theory is filled with virtual particles . The quantum vacuum
9464-613: The site of a flourishing Persianate linguistic and literary culture. The 16th-century Ottoman Aşık Çelebi (died 1572), who hailed from Prizren in modern-day Kosovo , was galvanized by the abundant Persian-speaking and Persian-writing communities of Vardar Yenicesi, and he referred to the city as a "hotbed of Persian". Many Ottoman Persianists who established a career in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul ) pursued early Persian training in Saraybosna, amongst them Ahmed Sudi . The Persian language influenced
9568-418: The spaces between the invisibly small atoms. For them, all space was filled with atoms. Aristotle took the view that there exists matter and there exists space , a receptacle into which matter objects can be placed. This became the paradigm for classical scientists of the modern age like Newton . Nevertheless, some philosophers, like Descartes , continued to argue against the existence of empty space until
9672-473: The spiritual worlds and will inwardly be happy. Happiness is explained to be the attribute of the true believer, and it cannot be achieved by obtaining material things, since material things are transitory. In the valley of wonderment the seeker, it is written, is struck dumb (mute) by the beauty of God; the seeker becomes conscious of the vastness and glory of creation, and discovers the inner mysteries of God's revelation. Being led from one mystery of creation to
9776-573: The standard Persian of Tajikistan, has been officially designated as Tajik ( тоҷикӣ , tojikī ) since the time of the Soviet Union . It is the name given to the varieties of Persian spoken in Central Asia in general. The international language-encoding standard ISO 639-1 uses the code fa for the Persian language, as its coding system is mostly based on the native-language designations. The more detailed standard ISO 639-3 uses
9880-717: The standard Persian. The Hazaragi dialect (in Central Afghanistan and Pakistan), Herati (in Western Afghanistan), Darwazi (in Afghanistan and Tajikistan), Basseri (in Southern Iran), and the Tehrani accent (in Iran, the basis of standard Iranian Persian) are examples of these dialects. Persian-speaking peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan can understand one another with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility . Nevertheless,
9984-657: The title The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys . The two books are distinctly different and have no direct relation. In February 2019 an authorized translation of both titles and some others was published by the Baháʼí World Centre in the collection The Call of the Divine Beloved . The Seven Valleys was written after March 1856, probably around 1857-1858 in Baghdad after Baháʼu'lláh had returned from
10088-414: The transmission of light or gravity. Thus, in this period, it was not accepted that complete nothing was possible. Theories describing such a medium are collectively known as aether theories , so named as an evocation of the aether , the classical element from Greek philosophy. In particular, the medium that is supposed to allow the transmission of light is called the luminiferous aether . This became
10192-485: The use of Farsi in foreign languages. Etymologically, the Persian term Farsi derives from its earlier form Pārsi ( Pārsik in Middle Persian ), which in turn comes from the same root as the English term Persian . In the same process, the Middle Persian toponym Pārs ("Persia") evolved into the modern name Fars. The phonemic shift from /p/ to /f/ is due to the influence of Arabic in
10296-448: The void to "exist" between them. In this scenario, macroscopic objects can come-into-being , move through space, and pass into not-being by means of the coming together and moving apart of their constituent atoms. The void must exist to allow this to happen, or else the "frozen world" of Parmenides must be accepted. Bertrand Russell points out that this does not exactly defeat the argument of Parmenides but, rather, ignores it by taking
10400-597: Was already complete by the era of the three princely dynasties of Iranian origin, the Tahirid dynasty (820–872), Saffarid dynasty (860–903), and Samanid Empire (874–999). Abbas of Merv is mentioned as being the earliest minstrel to chant verse in the New Persian tongue and after him the poems of Hanzala Badghisi were among the most famous between the Persian-speakers of the time. The first poems of
10504-412: Was matter, and there was extension of matter leaving no room for the existence of "nothing". The idea that space can actually be empty was generally still not accepted by philosophers who invoked arguments similar to the plenum reasoning. Although Descartes’ views on this were challenged by Blaise Pascal , he declined to overturn the traditional belief, horror vacui , commonly stated as "nature abhors
10608-597: Was patronised and given official status under the Sultans of Bengal , and was a popular literary form used by Bengalis during the pre-colonial period, irrespective of their religion. Following the defeat of the Hindu Shahi dynasty, classical Persian was established as a courtly language in the region during the late 10th century under Ghaznavid rule over the northwestern frontier of the subcontinent . Employed by Punjabis in literature, Persian achieved prominence in
10712-613: Was taught in state schools, and was also offered as an elective course or recommended for study in some madrasas . Persian learning was also widespread in the Ottoman-held Balkans ( Rumelia ), with a range of cities being famed for their long-standing traditions in the study of Persian and its classics, amongst them Saraybosna (modern Sarajevo , Bosnia and Herzegovina), Mostar (also in Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Vardar Yenicesi (or Yenice-i Vardar, now Giannitsa , in
10816-492: Was to prevent books from being printed with wrong use of words. According to the executive guarantee of this association, the government was responsible for wrongfully printed books. Words coined by this association, such as rāh-āhan ( راهآهن ) for "railway", were printed in Soltani Newspaper ; but the association was eventually closed due to inattention. A scientific association was founded in 1911, resulting in
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