Origin and diffusion of manāt in Persian and other Iranian languages

Persian manāt ‘rouble, silver rouble coin’ was used in the Qājār period, when ‘the Russian rouble (manāt) circulated in the north and the rupee in the south’ (M. ʿA. Jamālzāde). The word occurs in Iranian and other languages of the Caucasus and the Caspian region (Northern Kurdish, Tāt Persian, Tāleši, Gilaki, Māzandarāni; Georgian, Azerbaijani, Armenian, etc.) and can refer to coins used as necklace pendants. This article suggests that the word, commonly regarded as borrowed from Russian moneta ‘coin’, actually derives, through Azerbaijani manat, from the more specific monet ‘silver rouble coin’ peculiar to the Astrakhan area and used by Leo Tolstoy in his Caucasian novel The Cossacks. It also proposes emending a corruption in the Syro-Persian Hymn for Maundy Thursday to manāt ‘silver coins’, whose occurrence confirms a north-western origin or transmission of the hymn and, if it is not a lectio facilior, suggests a composition date around the turn of the nineteenth century in line with the dating of the manuscripts preserving it.