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Mīrkhwānd and Persian Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

ALI M. ANSARI
ALI M. ANSARI*
Affiliation:
University of St [email protected]
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Abstract

Pre-modern historians of the Persianate world have primarily been used by modern historians as sources of factual information and rarely to gain insight into the means, methods and world-views of the historians themselves. The 15th C Persian historian Mīrkhwānd is a case in point despite the fact that his extensive discussion on the utility of history lends itself well to an historiographical assessment. While his understanding of the purpose of history may differ in some aspects for the modern discipline, his concerns and application were not as distinctive as we might like to think.

Type
Part III: The Sources
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 26 , Issue 1-2 , January 2016 , pp. 249 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2016 

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References

1 For an essential guide to the range of writing on historiography, see Bentley, M. (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), p. 997 Google Scholar. Bentley's introduction provides a useful if wry look at the development of the field. For a broad survey of various ‘national’ schools, see Schneider, A. and Woolf, D., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, V: Historical Writing since 1945 (Oxford, 2011), p. 718 Google Scholar. Although the latter contains no chapter on Iranian or Persian historical writing, the former thankfully does, under the broader rubric of ‘Asian’ traditions, by one David Morgan. Morgan was among the earliest to advocate a stronger appreciation of Persian historians, most obviously Rashīd al Dīn Faḍlallāh, the Ilkhanid wazir, and arguably the author of the first truly global history. See the relevant entry in Cannon, J., Davis, R.H.C., Doyle, W. and Greene, J.P. (eds.), The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (Oxford, 1988), pp. 351–352 Google Scholar.

2 Among the notable exceptions to this neglect are the valuable studies by Meisami, J.S., Persian Historiography to the end of the Twelfth Century (Edinburgh, 1999)Google Scholar and Peacock, Andrew, Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy: Bal‛amī's Tarikhnama, (London, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, along with the collections by Atabaki, T. (ed.), Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture (London, 2009)Google Scholar, and Melville, C. (ed.), Persian Historiography (London, 2012)Google Scholar.

3 M. Waldman, quoted in Meisami, Persian Historiography, pp. 2–3.

4 Meisami, Persian Historiography, p. 3; see also Melville (ed.), Persian Historiography, p. xxvii.

5 See in this regard the excellent article by Robert Irwin, “Saladin and the Third Crusade: A case study in historiography and the historical novel”, in Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography, pp. 139–152.

6 Meisami, Persian Historiography, pp. 6–9.

7 Aristotle, Poetics, translated M. Heath (London, 1996), p. 178.

8 On the mistranslation of Ranke's famous dictum, see Bentley, M., Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London, 1999), p. 39 Google Scholar.

9 Mīrkhwānd, Tārīkh-Rawḍat aṣ-ṣafāʾ fī sīrat al-anbiyāʾ wa l-mulūk wa l-khulafā [The history of the gardens of purity in the biography of the prophets, kings and caliphs], (ed.) and corrected by J. Kiyanfar (Tehran, 1380/2001), I, p. xxiv. The editor helpfully provides the summary views of Iranian and European scholars (including, among others, Browne and Petrushevsky) on the value of the work: see pp. xxvii–xxxvi.

10 Ibid ., p. xxxix

11 On the professional environment and significance, see C. Melville, “The historian at work”, in Melville (ed.), Persian Historiography, pp. 56–100.

12 Mīrkhwānd, , History of the Early Kings of Persia: From Kaiomars, the First of the Pishdadian Dynasty to the Conquest of Iran by Alexander the Great, translated D. Shea (London, 1832), p. iiiGoogle Scholar.

13 Although ‛ilm is usually translated as ‘science’ (the term used by Shea), the meaning is more similar to its usage in French, rather than English, where the term is increasingly identified with the natural sciences. Consequently a better translation in this context might be ‘discipline’.

14 Shea (trans), History of the Early Kings of Persia, p. 25.

15 Ibid ., pp. 33–34.

16 Ibid ., p. 35.

17 Juwaynī, Tārīkh-i Jahān-gushā, I, p. 4; translated J.A. Boyle, Juvaini, The History of the World-Conqueror (Manchester, 1958; reprint Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. 7.

18 As Melville (“The historian at work”, p. 73), notes, ‘civilian casualties’ were common among the vizierate

19 Shea (trans.), History of the Early Kings of Persia, p. 36.

20 Ibid ., p. 37.

21 Ibid ., p. 38.

22 In this section, Mīrkhwānd uses the terms fārsī and tāzī to indicate the language and ‘Arab’ and ‘‛Ajam’ to suggest the territory. See Mīrkhwānd, (ed.) Kiyanfar, I, pp. 19–20. Ḍaḥḥāk is later given the epithet tāzī, which suggests that the term might also be used to denote ethnicity.

23 Shea (trans.), History of the Early Kings of Persia, p. ii.

24 On the history of this idea, see Venturi, F., “Oriental despotism”, Journal of the History of Ideas XXIV 1 (1963), pp. 133–142 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Bal‛amī, Tārīkh-nāma-yi Ṭabarī, I (Tehran 1380/2001), pp. 258–263.

26 See for example, S. Quinn and C. Melville, “Safavid historiography”, in Melville (ed.), Persian Historiography, p. 244.

27 The Persian text can be found in Kiyanfar's edition, II, pp. 642–646. The passages quoted above are, unless otherwise noted, from Shea's translation, History of the Early Kings of Persia, pp. 177–185. Differences in the translation of key words are noted with the Persian equivalent in brackets drawn from the Kiyanfar edition. Thus, for example, Shea uses ‘Oration’ rather than ‘Khuṭba’, which is the word used in the Persian.

28 An alternative translation might be peasants or farmers.

29 Shea (trans.), History of the Early Kings of Persia, p. 179.

30 Ibid ., p. 181.

31 Ibid ., pp. 184–185; this last section is of course a variation on the theme of the ‘circle of justice’ attributed to Ardashīr I.

32 For the Anglo-British context, see Kidd, C., Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 205–216 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One of the key figures in the ‘Western’ narrative was of course Hegel in The Philosophy of History (New York, 1956). I have discussed this in detail in my Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge, 2012).

33 Arjomand, S., “Artaxerxes, Ardašīr, and Bahman”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 118:2 (1998), pp. 245–248 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Shea (trans.), History of the Early Kings of Persia, p. 338. The translation by Shea also includes a clumsy etymology for the name Ardashir which does not appear in the Persian edition by Kiyanfar

35 This term suggests that Mīrkhwānd does not consider these histories to be without contention.

36 Shām basically correlates to a Greater Syria that would have covered much of the Western Levant.

37 Adapted from Shea (trans.), History of the Early Kings of Persia, p. 341.

38 The Persian text suggests very young children, perhaps babies: Kiyanfar's edition, p. 732.

39 See the Biographica of Gibbon, E., The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (ed.) and abridged by Wormsley, David (London, 2000), p. 1526 Google Scholar. On the extensive size of Gibbon's library, see Morgan, D., “Edward Gibbon and the East”, Iran XXXIII (1995), p. 87 Google Scholar.

40 For Gibbon's interest in the Persians, see Pocock, J.G.A., Barbarism and Religion: Barbarians, Savages and Empires, IV (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 17–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar