Parasang
historical Persian unit of travel distance
The parasang (Persian: فرسنگ, romanized: farsang), also known as a farsakh (Arabic: فَرْسَخ, romanized: farsaḵ), is a historical Iranian unit of walking distance, the length of which varied according to terrain and speed of travel. The European equivalent is the league. In modern terms the distance is about 3 or 3½ miles (6 km).
Historical usage
The parasang may have originally been some fraction of the distance an infantryman could march in some predefined period of time. Mid-5th-century BC Herodotus (v.53) speaks of an army traveling the equivalent of five parasangs per day.
In antiquity, the term was used throughout much of the Middle East, and the Old Iranian language from which it derives can no longer be determined (only two—of what must have been dozens—of Old Iranian languages are attested). There is no consensus with respect to its etymology or literal meaning. In addition to its appearance in various forms in later Iranian languages (e.g. Middle Persian frasang or Sogdian fasukh), the term also appears in Greek as parasangēs (παρασάγγης), in Latin as parasanga, in Hebrew as parasa (פרסה), in Armenian as hrasakh (հրասախ), in Georgian as parsakhi, in Syriac as parsḥā (ܦܪܣܚܐ), in Turkish as fersah, and in Arabic as farsakh (فرسخ). The present-day New Persian word is also farsakh (فرسخ), and should not be confused with the present-day farsang (فرسنگ), which is a metric unit.
The public source identifies “Parasang” as historical Persian unit of travel distance. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Parasang, historical and Persian.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parasang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.