The modern region of Khorasan covers three provinces in northeastern Iran: North Khorasan, Razavi Khorasan, and South Khorasan. Razavi Khorasan, the name of which refers to Ali al-Rida, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shia Islam, is by far the most populous and important of the three (see the map below). Before 2004, this entire region constituted a single Khorasan province. Historically speaking, however, the term “Khorasan” – “land of the rising sun” – covered a much larger area. In the strict sense of the term, it also extended across northern Afghanistan and most of Turkmenistan, and is usually mapped accordingly. In this scheme, Khorasan terminated at the Oxus River (Amu Darya), with the lands beyond it called “Transoxiana” in Western sources and sometimes Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr (“the lands beyond the river”) in Persian and Arabic sources. But Persian and Arabic geographers often further extended Khorasan across the Amu Darya to include much of what is now Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Khorasan in this “greater” sense might be regarded as the eastern portion of the historically Persian-speaking zone. As noted in the Wikipedia article on “Khorasan Province:”
Some of the main historical cities of Persia are located in the older Khorasan: Nishapur and Tus (now in Iran); Merv and Sanjan (now in Turkmenistan); Samarkand and Bukhara (both now in Uzbekistan); Herat and Balkh (now in Afghanistan); and Khujand and Panjakent (now both in Tajikistan).
As the map posted above shows, most of this “older Khorasan” is inhabited to this day by Persian speakers, although the language is commonly called “Dari” in northern Afghanistan and “Tajik” in Tajikistan. Storied “Uzbek” cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand are probably still majority Persian-speaking (as the mother tongue), although official statistics claim that most residents primarily speak Uzbek, a Turkic language. Turkmenistan, on the other hand, is no longer part of the Persian language zone. Its once-great Persian cities, such as Merv and Sanjan, were destroyed centuries ago.
As was noted in the previous GeoCurrents post, the historical region of Khorasan is commonly regarded as forming the intellectual core of the Persian-speaking world from roughly 800 to 1200 CE/AD, the time of its greatest scholarly achievements. The Wikipedia article on the region lists 10 prominent scientifically minded scholars from the region who lived during this period. As the maps posted below show, four of them were from what is now the Iranian region of Khorasan (all from the province of Razavi Khorasan), two were from what is now northern Afghanistan, a region once called Bactria, and two were from Transoxiana, or Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr, a region once called Sogdia or Sogdiana. All eight were thus natives of “Greater Khorasan” in the extended sense of the term.
The remaining two scholars were from Khwarazm, an important region focused on the inland delta of the Amu Darya (Oxus) River just to the south of the (former) Aral Sea. This region has rarely been included in Khorasan. AI (Grok), however, tells me that that the noted tenth-century Persian geographer and traveler Istakhri did classify it in such a manner, reflecting “the flexible, sometimes expansive use of “Khorasan” in medieval texts, where it could loosely denote eastern Iranian/Central Asian lands east of the central Iranian deserts.”
The term “Khorasan” can thus be regarded as possibly denoting four separate but nesting regions: modern Khorasan (northeastern Iran); greater Khorasan in the strict sense (adding much of Turkmenistan, and northern Afghanistan); greater Khorasan in the extended sense (adding Transoxiana or Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr); and “greatest” Khorasan (adding Khwarazm).
If Khorasan is to include Khwarazm, in cannot be defined as the eastern portion of the historically Persian-speaking region, as Khwarazm was not, at least during its intellectual heyday, Persian speaking. Its native tongue at the time was Khwarezmian, an Eastern Iranian language more closely related to Pashto (the language of the Pashtun people) than to Persian/Farsi. (It was even more closely related to Sogdian and Bactrian, which had been spoken in Transoxiana and northern Afghanistan respectively before being replaced by Persian.) But Khwarazm had been part of the greater Persian cultural sphere, and by the thirteenth century its own language was also being replaced by Persian. Turkic dialects later spread, and today the people of the region speak the Turkic language Karakalpak (closely related to Kazakh), and are ethnically deemed Karakalpaks (literally meaning “black hats.
The two scholars from Khwarazm noted on the map of medieval scientists from “Khorasan”, al-Buruni and Al-Khwarizmi, deserve further consideration and will therefore be examined in the next GeoCurrents post.