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Kharosthi ... Khufu

Kharosthi: writing system used in northwestern India before about AD 500. The earliest extant inscription in Kharosthi dates from 251 BC, and the latest from the 4th-5th century AD. The system ...
Khartoum: ("Elephant's Trunk"), city, executive capital of The Sudan, just south of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers. It has bridge connections with its sister towns, Khartoum North ...
Khartoum North: city, east-central Sudan. It lies on the north bank of the Blue Nile and on the east bank of the Nile proper, with bridge connections to its sister cities of ...
Khartoum, Siege of: (March 13, 1884-January 26, 1885), the siege of Khartoum, capital of the Sudan, by al-Mahdi and his followers. The city, which was defended by an Egyptian garrison under the British ...
Khartsyzsk: city, Donetsk oblast (province), eastern Ukraine. It is located on the Krynychne-Ilovaysk rail line in an upland area about 15 miles (25 km) east of Donetsk. Khartsyzsk was founded in ...
Khasavyurt: city and centre of Khasavyurt rayon (sector), Dagestan republic, southwestern Russia. It lies along the Yaryksu River in a cotton-growing area, with cotton-ginning and fruit- and vegetable-canning industries. Agricultural and ...
Khasekhemwy: sixth and last king of Egypt in the 2nd dynasty (c. 2775-c. 2650 BC) who ended the internal struggles of the mid-2nd dynasty and reunited the country.
Khasi: people of the Khasi and Jaintia hills of the state of Meghalaya in India. The Khasi have a distinctive culture. Both inheritance of property and succession to tribal office run ...
Khasi Hills: physical region, central Meghalaya state, northeastern India. The area consists mostly of hilly regions and includes the Shillong plateau; it is drained by tributaries of the Brahmaputra and Surma rivers. ...
Khasi language: one of several members of the Khasian branch of the Mon-Khmer family, which is itself a part of the Austroasiatic stock. Khasi is spoken by some 900,000 people living in ...
Khasian languages: group of languages spoken primarily in the Khasi Hills and Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya state of northeastern India. The Khasian languages form the westernmost branch of the Mon-Khmer language family, ...
Khaskovo: town, southern Bulgaria. It lies in the northeastern foothills of the Rhodope Mountains. Founded about 1385 at the outset of the Ottoman period, it is located on the Sofia-Istanbul road ...
Khatami, Mohammad: Iranian political leader, who was president of Iran (1997-2005).
Khatibi, Abdelkebir: Moroccan educator, literary critic, and novelist. He was a member of the angry young generation of the 1960s whose works initially challenged many tenets on which the newly independent countries ...
Khattusas: ancient Hittite city on the site of modern Bogazkoy (q.v.).
Khawr Fakkan: exclave and port town, Ash-Shariqah emirate, United Arab Emirates. It is on the east coast of the Oman promontory, facing the Gulf of Oman; the port and its hinterland divide ...
Khaz'al Khan: Arab sheikh (ruler) of the city of Mohammerah (now Khorramshahr) who attempted to create an independent state in the oil-rich Iranian region of Khuzestan.
Khazar: member of a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes that in the late 6th century AD established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia. Although the origin ...
Kheda: city, east-central Gujarat state, west-central India. It is situated in the lowlands between the Sabarmati and Mahi rivers. The city existed as early as the 5th century AD. Early in ...
khedive: title granted by the Ottoman sultan Abdulaziz to the hereditary pasha of Egypt, Isma'il, in 1867 and used by his successors Tawfiq and 'Abbas Hilmi II. It was replaced by ...
Khemisset: town, north-central Morocco. The town is located between the imperial cities of Rabat and Meknes, at the edge of the Moroccan upland plateau. It is a market centre for the ...
Khenifra: town, central Morocco. It is situated in the western foothills of the southern Middle Atlas mountains and lies along the banks of the Oum er-Rbia River at an elevation of ...
Kheraskov, Mikhail Matveyevich: epic poet, playwright, and influential representative of Russian classicism who was known in his own day as the Russian Homer.
Kherson: city and administrative centre of Kherson oblast (province), southern Ukraine. It lies on the right (west) bank of the lower Dnieper River about 15 miles (25 km) from the latter's ...
Kherson: oblast (province), southern Ukraine. The oblast extends across the lower Dnieper River and along the shores of the Black Sea, Syvash Lake, and the Sea of Azov. Named for its ...
Khidr, al-: (Arabic, contraction of al-Khadir, "the Green One"), a legendary Islamic figure endowed with immortal life who became a popular saint, especially among sailors and Sufis (Muslim mystics).
Khilafat movement: force that arose in India in the early 20th century as a result of Muslim fears for the integrity of Islam. These fears were aroused by Italian (1911) and Balkan ...
Khimki: city and centre of a rayon (sector), Moscow oblast (province), western Russia. It lies along the Moscow-St. Petersburg railway northwest of the capital. Incorporated in 1939, Khimki grew from a ...
khirqah: (Arabic: "rag"), a woolen robe traditionally bestowed by Sufi (Muslim mystic) masters on those who had newly joined the Sufi path, in recognition of their sincerity and devotion. While most ...
khitan: in Islam, circumcision of the male; by extension it may also refer to the circumcision of the female (properly khafd). Muslim traditions (Hadith) recognize khitan as a pre-Islamic rite customary ...
Khitan: any member of a Mongol people that ruled Manchuria and part of North China from the 10th to the early 12th century under the Liao dynasty (q.v.). See also Manchuria.
Khiva: city, south-central Uzbekistan. It lies west of the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus River) on the Palvan Canal, and it is bounded on the south by the Karakum Desert and on ...
Khlebnikov, Velimir Vladimirovich: poet who was the founder of Russian Futurism and whose esoteric verses exerted a significant influence on Soviet poetry.
Khmelnytsky, Bohdan: leader (1648-57) of the Zaporozhian Cossacks who organized a rebellion against Polish rule in Ukraine that ultimately led to the transfer of the Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper River ...
Khmelnytskyy: city and administrative centre of Khmelnytskyy oblast (province), western Ukraine. It lies along the upper Southern (Pivdennyy) Buh River. Originally a Polish military post, it dates from the late 15th ...
Khmelnytskyy: oblast (province), western Ukraine. The oblast extends across the Volyn-Podilsk Upland and slopes gently down in the south to the Dniester River. The oblast's natural forest-steppe vegetation has been almost ...
Khmer: any member of an ethnolinguistic group that constitutes most of the population of Cambodia. Smaller numbers of Khmer also live in southeastern Thailand and the Mekong River delta of southern ...
Khmer Issarak: (Khmer: "Independent Cambodians"), an anti-French nationalist movement organized in Cambodia in 1946. It quickly split into factions, and by the time of independence in 1953 all but one of these ...
Khmer language: Mon-Khmer language spoken by most of the population of Cambodia, where it is the official language, and by some 1.3 million people in southeastern Thailand, and also by more than ...
Khmer literature: body of literary works of Khmer peoples of Southeast Asia, mainly Cambodia.
Khmer Rouge: radical communist movement that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 after winning power through a guerrilla war. It was purportedly set up in 1967 as the armed wing of the ...
Khmuic languages: group of languages spoken primarily in Laos in areas scattered around Luang Prabang and extending into parts of Thailand and northern Vietnam. The Khmuic languages form a branch of the ...
Khnum: ancient Egyptian god of fertility, associated with water and with procreation. Khnum was worshiped from the 1st dynasty (c. 2925-2775 BC) into the early centuries AD. He was represented as ...
Khoei, Abolqasem al-: Iranian-born cleric who, as a grand ayatollah based in the holy city of Al-Najaf, Iraq, was the spiritual leader of millions of Shi'ite Muslims.
Khoekhoe: any member of a people of southern Africa whom the first European explorers found in areas of the hinterland and who now live either in European settlements or on official ...
Khoekhoe languages: a subgroup of the Khoe language family, one of three branches of the Southern African Khoisan languages. Two main varieties have been distinguished: the first includes the extinct South African ...
Khoisan languages: a unique group of African languages spoken mainly in southern Africa, with two outlying languages found in eastern Africa. The term is a compound adapted from the words
Khoja: caste of Indian Muslims converted from Hinduism to Islam in the 14th century by the Persian pir (religious leader, or teacher) Sadr-ud-Din and adopted as members of the Nizari Isma'ili ...
Kholmogory: village, port, and administrative centre of Kholmogory rayon (sector), Arkhangelsk oblast (province), northwestern Russia. It lies along the Northern Dvina River, 47 miles (75 km) southeast of the city of ...
Khomeini, Ruhollah: Iranian Shi'ite cleric who led the revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 and who was Iran's ultimate political and religious authority for the next 10 years.
Khomyakov, Aleksey Stepanovich: Russian poet and founder of the 19th-century Slavophile movement that extolled the superiority of the Russian way of life. He was also an influential lay theologian of the Russian Orthodox ...
Khon Kaen: town, northeastern Thailand, on the Khorat Plateau. It is a rice-trading centre on the railway between Nakhon Ratchasima and Udon Thani. Khon Kaen University was founded in 1965; the Rajamangala ...
Khond: people of the hills and jungles of Orissa state, India. Their numbers are estimated to exceed 800,000, of which about 550,000 speak Kui and its southern dialect, Kuwi, of the ...
Khone Falls: series of cataracts on the Mekong River, extreme southern Laos, on the Cambodian border. The falls are the principal impediment to navigation of the river and have impeded economic use ...
Khons: in ancient Egyptian religion, moon god who was generally depicted as a youth. A deity with astronomical associations named Khenzu is known from the Pyramid Texts (c. 2350 BC) and ...
Khorana, Har Gobind: Indian-born American biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that helped to show how the ...
Khorasan: historical region and realm comprising a vast territory now lying in northeastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, and northern Afghanistan. The historical region extended, along the north, from the Amu Darya (Oxus ...
Khorasan carpet: handwoven floor covering made in the region of Khorasan, in northeastern Iran. Herat carpets are the classic carpets of the district. From the late 18th and early 19th centuries there ...
Khorat Plateau: saucer-shaped tableland of northeastern Thailand. It occupies 60,000 square miles (155,000 square km), is situated 300-650 feet (90-200 m) above sea level, and tilts southeastward. The plateau is drained by ...
Khorram-dinan: esoteric Islamic religious sect whose leader Babak led a rebellion in Azerbaijan (now divided between Iran and Azerbaijan) that lasted from 816 until 837.
Khorramabad: city, western Iran. It commands a river gap in the Lorestan mountains used by the main road from Khuzestan to the highland plateau. A summer market for the nomadic Lur ...
Khorramshahr: city and port, southwestern Iran. It lies on the right (west) bank of the Karun River where it enters the Shatt al-Arab, 45 miles (72 km) from the Persian Gulf. ...
Khorugh: capital of the Gorno-Badakhshan ("Mountain Badakhshan") autonomous region, south-central Tajikistan. It is situated near the border with Afghanistan in the southwestern Pamirs range at an elevation of 7,200 feet (2,200 ...
Khosrow I: Persian king who ruled the Sasanian empire from 531 to 579 and was remembered as a great reformer and patron of the arts and scholarship.
Khosrow II: late Sasanian king of Persia (reigned 590-628), under whom the empire achieved its greatest expansion. Defeated at last in a war with the Byzantines, he was deposed in a palace ...
Khotan: oasis town in the southwest of the Uighur Autonomous Region of Sinkiang, China. Khotan forms a county (hsien) and is the administrative centre of the Ho-t'ien (Khotan) prefecture (ti-ch'u), which ...
Khotan rug: floor covering handwoven in or about the ancient city of Khotan (Hotan) in the southern Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan). Khotan rugs were once called Samarkand rugs after ...
Khouribga: city, provincial capital, and province, Centre region, northwestern Morocco. The city is situated on an infertile, upland plateau (unofficially called the Plateau des Phosphates) west of the Moyen (Middle) Atlas ...
Khrapovitsky, Antony: Russian Orthodox metropolitan of Kiev, antipapal polemicist, and controversialist in theological and political affairs who attempted an exclusively ethical interpretation of Christian doctrine.
Khrushchev's secret speech: (February 25, 1956), in Russian history, denunciation of the deceased Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made by Nikita S. Khrushchev to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist ...
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich: first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953-64) and premier of the Soviet Union (1958-64) whose policy of de-Stalinization had widespread repercussions throughout the communist world. In ...
Khuang Aphaiwong: Thai politician who founded and led Thailand's strongest opposition party and was three times premier of Thailand (1944-45, 1946, 1947-48). Khuang was a member of the Khmer family that under ...
Khubar, Al-: oasis and port city, Al-Sharqiyah mintaqah (province) and region, eastern Saudi Arabia, on the Persian Gulf south of Al-Dammam. The city is a commercial and industrial centre ...
Khuc Thua Du: Vietnamese ruler in 906-907 whose rise to power, as a result of a successful rebellion in 906, constituted one of the first attempts of the Vietnamese to achieve independence.
Khuddaka Nikaya: (Pali: "Short Collection"), diverse group of separate Buddhist texts constituting the fifth and last section of the Pali Sutta Pitaka ("Basket of Discourse"). Although it contains some ...
Khufu: second king of the 4th dynasty (c. 2575-c. 2465 BC) of Egypt and builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza, the largest single building to that time.