35 - KHWARAZMIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Summary

Chorasmia, one of the provinces of the Achaemenian Empire (Huwārazmiš), which provided a “dark blue stone” (turquoise?) to adorn the palace of Darius at Susa, yet receives only a late mention by name in the Zoroastrian scriptures (Yasht x. 14, X^vāirizm). Many scholars, for various reasons, have explained this apparent eclipse of a flourishing country by declaring that Chorasmia was a part of the very heartland of the early Iranians, the airyanm vaējō “Aryan range” of the Avesta, later Ērānwēz of the Pahlavī books. Be that as it may, no word identified as Old Chorasmian has been preserved for us, apart from the name itself. Even the meaning of this is still disputed, though meaning it clearly has if we accept that the final element -zmī contains the word for “land”, Persian zamīn. One explanation which has not yet been seriously advanced is that the beginning of the name, Hwāra-, may have been the ancestor of Persian kh^vār “abject”, Kurdish khwār “down, low”, that in effect Chorasmia meant “Netherland”. Such a name would well fit the lands lying around and between the lower reaches of the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, today the oasis of Khiva and the Qizil Qum desert, and ending on Shelley's

lone Chorasmian shore… a wide and melancholy waste of putrid marshes.