Khorramabad
city in Lorestan Province, Iran
Khorramabad (Persian: خرمآباد; [xorræmɒːˈbɒːd] ; Northern Luri: خۉرمۊه, Northern Luri pronunciation: [xoɾˈmʉ.æ])
is a city in the Central District of Khorramabad County, Lorestan province, Iran, serving as capital of the province, the county, and the district. Situated in a scenic valley surrounded by mountains, the city lies approximately 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) east of the Iraqi border.
Etymology
The name Khorramabad (Persian: خرمآباد) is a classical Persian compound composed of khorram (خرم, "flourishing" or "pleasant") and the suffix -ābād (ـآباد, "cultivated settlement"), translating to "Pleasant Abode" or "Flourishing City."
The native Northern Luri name for the city, Khormuah (Northern Luri: خۉرمۊه) are regional phonetic adaptations of the formal Persian name Khorramabad. These localized toponyms developed through standard Western Iranian sound shifts, specifically the lenition (softening) of the intervocalic plosive /b/ into the semivowel /w/, alongside the apocope (dropping) of the final dental stop /d/. While the Laki form retains the distinct medial syllable, the Northern Luri variant exhibits further vowel rounding and contraction, fusing the elements into the localized locative ending -muah (ـمۊه).
A popular modern folk etymology, primarily found in regional journalism, instead interprets the native name as a compound of xor (خور, "sun") and muah (مۊه, "to set" or "to become"), poetically rendering it as "the place where the sun sets" due to the city's deep valley landscape.
History
Prehistoric sites
The Khorramabad Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contains evidences from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic periods with remains of Mousterian and Baradostian cultures. Systematic excavations in the valley, notably led by Frank Hole, identified key cave sites such as Yafteh, Kunji, and Gar Arjeneh. These locations yielded distinct Upper Paleolithic Baradostian blade industries with radiocarbon dates ranging between 32,000 and 38,000 years ago, serving as primary material for studying the regional transition from Neanderthals to anatomically modern humans.
Antiquity and Elamite period
During the Neo-Elamite period, the geographic area of modern Khorramabad is widely identified by historians and archaeologists as the location of the ancient city of Khaydalu (also spelled Khaidalu or Haydalu).
The public source identifies “Khorramabad” as city in Lorestan Province, Iran. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Khorramabad, city and Lorestan.
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This entry incorporates text from “Khorramabad” 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.