The Safavid period marks a definite turning point in the history of Persia and the beginning of a new phase in the history of Islam in that country. Yet, despite its distinct character and the break it seems to display with respect to the centuries preceeding it, there is definitely a long religions and intellectual history which prepared the ground for the sudden establishment of a Shiᶜite order in Persia and the transformation of the country into a predominantly Shiᶜite area. There are several centuries of growth of Shiᶜite theology and jurisprudence, the development of Sufi orders with Shiᶜite tendencies and the establishment of Shiᶜite political power--albeit of a transient character--all preceeding the Safavid period.

As far as Shiᶜite thought is concerned, the advent of the Mongols and the destruction of the major centers of Sunni political power in Western Asia enabled Shiᶜism to flower in Persia more than ever before, culminating in the establishment of Shiᶜism as state religion for a brief period under Sulṭān Muḥammad Khudābandah.

It is difficult to say something new about Nowruz. It is a national festival, and everyone knows what a national festival is. Nowruz takes place and is spoken of every year. Much has been told and much you have heard. Then is repetition appropriate?! Yes it is! Doesn't Nowruz repeat itself? Then you should attend to what is repeatedly said of Nowruz. In science and literature, repetition is boring and useless.

The representation of human beings in medieval chronicles in general and in Persian chronicles in particular is governed by a code of conventions. An individual historical figure is usually depicted according to his rank and to the role attributed to him by a historiographer. Although chronicles narrate actual events and depict real persons and therefore cannot technically be defined as fiction, nevertheless it is possible to distinguish the categorization of the images of historical figures which substantially departs from what must have actually been the case. The evolution of the image of the ideal monarch is of particular interest here. Authors of the earliest chronicles usually single out one or more ruler as an ideal manager of the general welfare. As a rule, historiographers were influenced in their choice of the ideal type by political considerations and tended to define a representative or the representatives of a ruling dynasty as the ideal.

This article sets forth a history (with literary-textual focus) of the Iranian mythological Snake-man, from the earliest Vedic and Avestan evidence, down to Ferdowsi. The continuous development of the myth in Iran is accompanied by changes in the monster's name, which show linguistic reassociations, while a constant in all of this is the figure's representation as an inimical outsider. The Vedic name of the brute's fortification, the background of which in etymology and realia will be shown to be the pre-Aryan Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex, finds a clear but hitherto unobserved correlation in Pahlavi. This illuminates the Indo-Iranian antiquity of the myth in terms of prehistoric inter-ethnic rivalries.

La plus belle charge de la cour, c'est la faveur.

Safavid historiography has oscillated between admiration and vilification in its appraisal of Shah ‘Abbas II's reign (1642-1666). In the accounts of contemporary observers—for the most part European travelers—one finds favorable descriptions of the shah and his court as part of a positive assessment of the overall state of the country. Impressed by the hospitality they enjoyed at the court of Isfahan, these foreign visitors spoke highly of a magnanimous and tolerant monarch; moreover, the absence of rebellion and relatively secure roads prompted them to refer to Iran as a prosperous and stable country. Those who visited Iran within a generation after the shah's death corroborated this image; indeed, in their narratives one already finds an element of nostalgia for the days of ‘Abbas II.

The Iranian revolution of 1978-1979, which toppled the Pahlavi dynasty, came to fruition as a result of massive participation by diverse elements and groups in the social order. Similar to previous riots and uprisings in Iran, the locus of revolutionary activities centered in the country's towns and cities. The urban areas once again emerged as the focal points for demonstrations, riots, strikes, and other antiregime activities. Included among the participants in the revolution were large groups of urban dwellers who had migrated from Iran's villages and towns to its principal cities. The term urban migrants, then, encompasses a wide array of people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and political orientations. For the purposes of this paper, however, the term is used to refer to the urban poor who had migrated from the rural areas to Iran's dominant and largest urban center, the capital city of Tehran.

Most Iranian writers view Pahlavi rule over Iran (1921-1979) as a period of secular dictatorship. Many writers during the Pahlavi era responded to what they perceived to be an atmosphere politically repressive and restrictive on their artistic and social activities through the production of a significant amount of fiction, essays, and poetry which may, on the whole, be described as a literature of protest.

Hence, a major concern of Iranian writers since the first days of Reza Shah Pahlavi's rule has been how they could deal with government-imposed censorship of literary works and restrictions on social liberties.

Long before European merchants working for the Dutch and the English East India Companies sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, there were caste-based Indian family firms operating heavily-capitalized commercial institutions throughout north India. The directors of these firms enlisted many thousands of agents and placed them in markets strategic to their engagement in a variety of commercial activities, including large-scale transregional trade, brokering, money changing, and the financing of complex systems of rural credit and industrial production. Rather than triggering the decline of such indigenous commercial institutions, it is during the very period of European expansion into the Indian Ocean that the Indian family firms began to geographically diversify their portfolios by sending their agents to distant markets in port cities, villages, and major and minor urban centers as far away as Moscow.

In a recent work, Stephen Dale has uncovered the existence of an early modern Indian merchant diaspora with communities dispersed throughout Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus and much of Russia.

This article explores the poetry of Shah Ismāᶜīl Safavī (d. 1524), the founder of the Safavid dynasty of Iran. Established as an important historical source by Vladimir Minorsky during World War II, the issues surrounding the poetic corpus of Shah Ismāᶜīl have continued to attract the attention of historians of the Safavids. With examples from the earliest and most authentic manuscript, the idea of viewing this body of works as literary sources versus political propaganda is discussed in this article.

When the Iranian Revolution of 1979 Overthrew Pahlavi Power in Iran the attention of historians was suddenly attracted towards a study of the antecedents of the revolutionary movement and of opposition to the Pahlavi dictatorship in general. This redirection of attention produced, during the 1980s, quite novel historical and historiographical analyses of modern Iran. The army, however, largely escaped these revisionist approaches. Yet it is clear that the image of the army conventionally accepted, the military structures a bedrock of monarchical rule and the officer corps a key element on which the regime could depend, is a considerable oversimplification. Although ideological trends within the army tended to be dominated by secular nationalism and modernism, political attitudes towards the Pahlavi shahs were always capable of marked variegation. The relationship between the shah and the officer corps, both senior and junior, especially during periods of political crisis and uncertainty such as the early years of Pahlavi rule or the oil nationalization crisis, was susceptible to considerable tension.

The Study of Sasanian History and Society has Received a Good share of attention in the past century. Hundreds of articles and several important books and monographs have contributed to our knowledge of the period. The most important monograph on the history of Iran from the third to the seventh century is that of Arthur Christensen. The book was written in the first half of the twentieth century, and although we have come to understand its shortcomings through advancing textual criticism and changing methodological strategies, it still remains the source referred to by all the scholars in this field. Shorter monographs, such as that of Klaus Schippmann, have added important information and a different approach, giving more attention to primary sources and material culture. Since Christensen's magnum opus, the most complete work on Sasanian Iran is The Cambridge History of Iran, which covers many aspects of Sasanian history, language, and culture.

Monetary developments in Iran during the nineteenth century have remained, by and large, unexplored. The reason for this is all too familiar to economic historians: lack of sufficient data on prices. The Iranian central government during Qajar rule did not initiate a systematic collection of quantitative data on prices in the major urban centers and unofficial Iranian sources make only occasional reference to this issue. A recent check, however, of British and French consular reports dealing with commerce and trade during the last 30 years of the nineteenth century has shown that they contain data on prices to the extent that a description of major monetary trends is possible for the period which preceded the constitutional revolution, i.e., 1870-1906.

British and French consuls reported to their respective foreign offices on current prices of basic commodities that prevailed at their places of service and residence.

This study investigates compound verb processing in second language speakers (L2) of Persian. Forty-six near-native L2 speakers of Persian were tested to examine the processing of transparent (non-idiomatic) and opaque (idiomatic) compound verbs, under masked priming paradigm. The results revealed a significant nominal priming effect in the opaque condition, and a numerically stronger nominal priming effect in the transparent condition. There was also an increase in the processing load on the parser when the target was an opaque compound. The results of this study seem to be compatible with the dual access or dual route hypothesis, yet with the version that assumes the two routes are activated in parallel rather than the version that assumes high frequency words are represented lexically but low frequency words are decomposed.

Contacts between Russians and Persians have a long history going back to 1592 during the reign of the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736). However, the impact of Russia upon Persia was only felt as a result of military defeats in 1813 and 1828. In nineteenth century Persia there were many geographical obstacles which prevented foreigners including Russians from trading with Persia. This situation changed with the Treaty of Turkmanchai and its commercial protocol which gave Russian merchants special benefits and advantages. Consequently, by the 1860s Russian steamships started postal, passenger and cargo service from Baku to Persian Caspian ports and railheads advanced through the Caucasus to Tiflis. Persia traded with Russia on a much larger scale than with any other country. One of the Persian merchants who traded extensively with or through Russia to Europe was Haj Muhammad Hassan Amin al-Zarb (1834–98), the most prominent merchant of his time, and subsequently his son Haj Husayn Aqa Amin al-Zarb II. The article discusses Amin al-Zarb's trade and relations with Russia based upon unpublished material in the Amin al-Zarb archives in Tehran.

Among the Achaemenid inscriptions, DPg has been the topic of several studies since the very beginning of cuneiform studies. The photographs prepared by the DARIOSH (Digital Achaemenid Royal Inscription Open Schema Hypertext) project at L’Orientale University of Naples shed light on some ambiguities of this specific inscription and led to the proposal of a new text edition of DPg. The purpose of this article is to follow the whole history of studies on DPg until today and then propose a new reading of the inscription and a discussion of related issues, including its unique creation formula and orthography.

This essay addresses itself to the century long history of cinema in Iran, focusing on the history of the senses as they combine with and are extended by film technologies. It argues that Khomeini's aim was to produce a transformed and Shi'ite Iran by purifying the sensorial national body by means of film technologies.

This article constitutes a preliminary attempt to explore the geographical dimension of premodern Persian lyric poetry from the perspective of the relationship between the historical adherence of a text to external reality and the rhetorics of intertextuality and performativity. The pretext for this exploration is the poem known as “Tork-e Shirazi” or “The Turk from Shiraz,” one of the most celebrated ghazals of Hafez of Shiraz. The analysis focuses in particular on the first two lines of the ghazal, whose rich and ambiguous imagery has challenged the community of readers, interpreters, and scholars for centuries. On the basis of historiographical, formalist, and poststructuralist approaches to the study of lyric poetry, the article outlines a generative paradigm that analyzes a given text from the perspective of its abstract, genre-specific, conventionally negotiated, and referential levels of meaning. The contribution of geocritical studies will be combined with rhetorical analysis to conceive of Hafez’s text as a geopoetic map in which the cities of Shiraz, Samarkand, and Bukhara are put in conversation with the mental and historical representations of Iran and India between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, during the transition from the Mongol to the Timurid models and ideals of power.

This essay examines the graphic memoir An Iranian Metamorphosis, by the acclaimed cartoonist Mana Neyestani, in the context of Iranian diaspora literature, particularly the genre of comics. Neyestani’s book is analyzed for its engagement with the politics of exile literature, and its attempt at challenging a two-dimensional view of the political discourse, in which the ethical boundaries of pro- and anti-government are overtly simple. The essay focuses on the book’s narrative techniques that exhibit a complex awareness of what is anticipated from a representative work of Iranian exile memoir, and the way it negotiates its own narrative politics. To clarify the arguments, several comparative examples are drawn from two well-known graphic narratives by Iranian diaspora authors, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Amir and Khalil’s Zahra’s Paradise.