PERSIAN GULF, a great inland sea lying between Arabia and Persia, and entered from the Indian Ocean through the Gulf of Oman; is 650 m. long and from 50 to 250 m. broad.  The Arabian coast is low and sandy, the Persian high.  The chief islands are in the W., where also is the Great Pearl Bank.  The only river of importance received is the Shat-el-Arab, which brings down the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris.

PERSIAN WARS, wars conducted by Persia in the three expeditions against Greece, first in 490 B.C. under Darius, and defeated by the Athenians under Miltiades at Marathon; the second, 480 B.C., under Xerxes, opposed by Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and defeated by the Athenians under Themistocles at Salamis by sea; and the third, in 479 B.C., under Xerxes, by the Greeks under the Spartan Pausanius at Plataea.

PERSIANS, a name given to sculptured draped male figures used as columns.

PERSIANS, THE, belonged to the Aryan race, hence Iran, the original name of their country; they were related rather to the Western than the Eastern world, and it is from them that continuous history takes its start; they first recognised an ethereal essence, which they called Light, as the principle of all good, and man as related to it in such a way that, by the worship of it, he became assimilated to it himself.  Among them first the individual subject stood face to face with a universal object, and claimed a kinship with it as the light of life.  The epoch thus created was the emancipation of the human being from dependent childhood to self-dependent manhood, and it constituted the first epoch in the self-conscious history, which is the history proper, of the human race.  The idea the Persians formed of the principle of good came far short of the reality indeed, but they first saw that it was of purely illuminating quality and universal, and that the destiny of man was to relate himself to it, to know, worship, and obey it.  With the ethereal principle of good they associated an equally ethereal principle of evil, and, as they identified the one with light, they identified the other with darkness.  Man they regarded as related to both, and his destiny to adore the one and disown the other as master.  As the light had no portion in the darkness, and the darkness no portion in the light, the religion arose which pervades that of the Bible, which requires the children of the former to separate from those of the latter.

PERSIFLAGE, a French term for a light, quizzing mockery, or scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt for them.

PERSIGNY, FIALIN, DUC DE, a French statesman, a supporter all along of Louis Napoleon, abetting him in all his efforts to attain the throne of France, from the affair of Strasburg in 1836 to the coup d’etat of December 1851, and becoming in the end Minister of the Interior under him; had to leave France at his fall (1806-1872).