Fasa

Fasa (Persian: فسا) is a city in the Central District of Fasa County, Fars province, Iran, serving as capital of both the county and the district. The city's population in 2016 was 110,825. Fasa is the fourth most populous city of the province, and dates back to the Achaemenid period.

Fasa's economy is based on agriculture and Pastoralism. Jahrom, Darab, Sarvestan, Kherameh and Estahban are neighbours of Fasa. This city is located on the road from Shiraz to Kerman, This has made Fasa a strategic and important city.

The name Fasa is derived from the older form Pasā. Various etymologies for this name have been proposed. Local tradition holds that Fasa is named after a legendary prince named Pasa, son of Fars and grandson of Tahmuras. In Ibn al-Balkhi's retelling the legend, Fars granted the town of Fasa to Pasa; in Hamdallah Mustawfi's version, Pasa founds the city himself (in this version, he is directly the son of Tahmuras).

Harold Bailey proposed on linguistic grounds that the name is ultimately derived from Old Persian *pa-sāya, meaning "campground". This name would have referred to what was originally a Persian nomadic encampment that later evolved into a town (presumably Tall-e Zahhak, 3km south of present-day Fasa). It would have then come to refer more generally to the entire surrounding plain – i.e. the Fasa plain. The Persepolis Administrative Archives (tablets 49 and 53) mention a place in Fars called (in Elamite) ba-a-ši-ya-an, which George Glenn Cameron had already identified with Fasa; Bailey argued that this is an Elamite rendering of the Persian name *Pasāya.

This identification is not entirely uncontested – for example, Jan Tavernier reconstructs this form as Old Persian *Paišiyā-, literally meaning "before" and being a shortened form of a longer name. Tavernier instead prefers the form *Fasāta, reconstructed from Elamite Pa-iš-šá-taš, as the ancient name of Fasa. Researchers have also considered the meaning of the word Fasa "the city of the Persians". Much earlier, the 13th century writer Yaqut al-Hamawi also suggested that the name meant "the north wind".

Whatever its original meaning was, the name of Fasa later became Pasā in Middle Persian. At some point the ancient site at Tall-e Zahhak was abandoned and the name was transferred to the modern site. Finally, after the Muslim conquest of Persia, since Arabic doesn't have the sound "P", Arabic authors wrote the name as Fasā or Basā. Eventually, the Arabized form Fasā supplanted the old name Pasā locally as well.

The adjective (aka nesba or demonym) associated with Fasa today is Fasā'ī. An older form is Fasāwī, which was used by some medieval writers such as Ibn al-Sam'ani. Within Fars, a completely different demonym was used: according to Ibn al-Sam'ani and Hamza Esfahani (as quoted by Yaqut), the locals said Basāsīrī instead of Fasa'i. This shares an origin with the Persian terms garm-sīr ("hot region") and sard-sīr ("cold region"), so that in effect basāsīrī meant "the Fasa region". Hamza Esfahani also mentioned a place near Na'in called Kasnā, which used the similarly derived adjective kasnāsīrī. A prominent bearer of this nesba was Abu'l-Harith Arslan Basasiri, an 11th-century Turkic mercenary leader who led a rebellion against the caliph al-Qa'im.

The origins of Fasa go back to at least the Achaemenid period and probably earlier. Several prehistoric mounds, such as Tall-e Siah, indicate early human activity in the Fasa region; they mostly are from the Eneolithic period. One of these sites is Tall-e Zahhak, a 660x750 m-wide tell 3 km southeast of present-day Fasa. Tall-e Zahhak represents the old site of Fasa itself, with many archaeological strata spanning a time between the 3rd millennium BCE and the 13th century CE. At some point, the old site at Tall-e Zahhak became abandoned, and the name "Fasa" migrated to the new location that is inhabited today. If the linguistic derivation of the name from Old Persian meaning "encampment" is correct, then Fasa probably began as a nomadic encampment that later developed into a permanent settlement.