Persian Girl Names
From the poetry of Iran — names of gardens, stars, jewels and beloved things.
Persian naming is one of the most poetic traditions in this library, and that is not a figure of speech — a very large share of these names come out of literature rather than out of religion or family custom.
Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, completed around the year 1010, supplies a stock of heroine names that Iranians still use: Tehmina, Rudaba, Manijeh, Farangis. Nizami's Khosrow and Shirin gives Shirin. These are literary characters who became ordinary given names, which is a pattern with few parallels at this scale anywhere else.
The second great source is the imagery of classical Persian verse, where a fixed vocabulary of moon, rose, nightingale, cypress and wine recurs for a thousand years. The compounds built from it — mah- for moon, gul- for flower, -naz for grace, zar- for gold — are still generating names. Mahnoor, Gulnaz and Nasreen all belong to it.
Persian's reach is much wider than Iran. It was the court and literary language across Central Asia, Afghanistan and Mughal India for centuries, and its naming vocabulary went with it — which is why so much of the Urdu section is Persian at root.
A pre-Islamic layer survives too, in names drawn from Zoroastrian and Avestan sources.