Word: persia
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Kublai Khan's family rules China. Korea and Mongolia from Dadu (today's Beijing), but related Mongol khanates in central Asia and Russia are virtually independent if not hostile; and the once subservient (and Buddhist) Il-Khans of Persia have converted to Islam. Meanwhile, drawn by the decay of Byzantium, Osman and his Turks germinate the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia...
...count sex and violence, there's no human impulse older than the urge to find a nice, affordable house, something outside of town but not too far. In Crabgrass Frontier, the essential history of suburbanization, Kenneth T. Jackson quotes a letter to the King of Persia, inscribed on a clay tablet and dated 539 B.C., that describes the pleasures of the Ur-suburb. (Literally. It was in Ur.) "Our property...is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust...
...child-abuse allegations were reportedly made last December, after one of the couple's three biological daughters--Persia, 13, Pallas, 12, and Aza, 8--told her mother of abuse. Erdrich reported this to a health-care professional, who was obliged by law to tell police. Although such charges have become an increasingly frequent ploy in custody battles, Erdrich denied last week that she and Dorris were fighting over custody. With Dorris' death, the case is closed, and Erdrich's lawyers have filed a motion to keep the files sealed...
...Friday was another. Members of the extremist group Hamas gave their own judgment when they shattered the Jewish holiday afternoon in downtown Tel Aviv with a powerful bomb. As costumed merrymakers paraded down the city's streets to celebrate Purim, which commemorates the deliverance of the Jews in ancient Persia from a plot to slaughter them, a man entered one of the cafes and detonated himself, killing three Israelis and injuring at least 47 more. A six-month-old girl, her tiny, blood-soaked body cradled in a policewoman's arms, added one more horrific image to the Holy Land...
...Buddhas. Each enlightened being has his or her own heaven, a concept probably borrowed from Hinduism, in which gods and goddesses inhabit a series of heavens. The primal heaven, however, was probably the one called Sukhavati, which may itself have borrowed some elements from the florid paradises of Zoroastrian Persia (whence the word pairi-daeza, or enclosure, the origin of our word paradise). As Sakyamuni, the Buddha of our cosmos, teaches, if the denizens of Sukhavati "desire cloaks of different colors and many hundred thousand colors, then with these very best cloaks the whole Buddha country shines." Presided over...