There are two harvests in the year ; that of the Saifi or summer, reaped in the end of autumn, consists of rice, cotton, maize, Holcus sorghum, Panicum Italicum, Cicer arietinum, Ervum lens, mashek, Phaseolus radiatus, the castor-oil plant, sesamum, and some garden vegetables. An exhaustive system of agriculture is practised in Persia, which keeps her impoverished.
In several parts of the country are copper, lead, and iron mines, and Fars yields sulphur in abundance ; and if these mines were worked, the profits would be very great. --.
Persian weights are :— Nokhood (Cicer arietinum).
24 nokhood = 1 miscal, about one-sixth of an ounce. 90 miscals = 1 vakka, nearly 1 lb. avoirdupois.
8 vakkas or 720 miscals = one man of Tabreez. In different places varying from 7 to 7i lbs.
2 Tabreez man -= 1 kharwar or ass-load, 725 lbs.
The value of its external commerce has been estimated at four or five millions sterling. The port of Abushahr (Bushire) trades chiefly with India, and of its five great caravan lines, one passes westward from Central Persia towards Baghdad, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Asia Minor ; second runs northward through Erzerum, and into Europe by the way of Constantinople ; a third goes also to Europe by Tiflis. The fourth runs eastward to Bokhara and China. And the fifth proceeds to India by two distinct lines, which unite at Herat. One of these routes comes to this town from Irak and the south-western provinces of the kingdom ; and the other route leads from the north-west, by Teheran, Nishapur, and Mashed. Eastward of Herat, the united lines pass through Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad, to Attock, from whence it branches out to different parts of India. The manufactures are shawls, carpets, felts, silks, velvets, cotton piece-goods, weapons, paper, leather, and furs. The merchants have each a cypher in which they carry on all their correspondence. Merchants of Yezd are found in Bombay, the Mauritius, Java, and China.
After Persia was overrun by the Muhammadans from Arabia, most of the people seem to have become Muhammadans, and from that time little is known of the funeral customs of the fire-worship pers in the years preceding the arrival of a small remnant of them on the coast of Gujerat. In ancient Persia, the dead were exposed in natural caves or dokhwas, or in the mountain valleys.
At the present day, unless a death happen to take place during the night, the funeral follows im mediately after it. The body is washed with rose-water ; then, being wrapped in a white sheet and cotton shroud, it is carried on a bier to the grave. If the deceased be rich, a funeral feast is kept for several days after the ceremony, and alms are distributed at particular intervals. But when a person of rank dies, it is not unusual for the king to command the body to be conveyed to Meshed-Ali, or one of the other places of Shiah pilgrimage ; followed by his charger bearing the arms, clothes, etc., of the deceased, and also by numerous led horses, with the badges, banners, and other expensive insignia of funeral state.
Mr. Stack, a recent traveller, came to the con clusion that a residence in Persia is calculated to beget a positively Lucretian hatred' of religion. Of the city and shrine of Kum he speaks with abhorrence, as the stronghold of the most dismal superstitions. The plains and city of Kum are shrouded in a haze of heat and dust, blown up by the hot winds.
The Persian language was the court and official language of the Dehli rulers and of all their allies and subordinate Muhammadan and Hindu kingdoms, and the principal Hindu states still continue its use. For a long time, at Dehli, two languages were used by the emperors, and there were two parties in the court, the one speaking Persian, and the other Turki, the mother-tongue of Haber, who was a Turk. In A.D. 1871-72, in eight districts of the N.W. Provinces, the Urdu or Persian reading pupils of the Tahsili and Ha]kabundi schools largely exceeded the Hindi or Nagri reading scholars, ranging from two-fifths to three-fourths. All educated Muhammadan men in India write in Persian, but speak Urdu. Women always write in Urdu. The more celebrated of the Persian writers are Fardusi, Ferishta, Hafiz, Jelal ud-Din, Jami, Khusru, Nizami, and Sadi. Several of the books are not placed in schoolboys' hands ; for instance, the Persian Bahar - i - Danish on woman's guile, the fifth chapter of the Gulistan of Sadi, also the love-story of the Zulikha of Jami, Laili and Majnun, Lazzatsun-Nisaa, TWA Shithi, Tuhfa-ul-Ashakin.