Mortezá Varzi came from an artistically inclined family and developed his interest and knowledge in music through association with important musicians of his day. He studied the kamanche with Asghar Bahari, the acknowledged master of that instrument. Varzi...

Social architecture is a theoretical approach that takes the city itself as a text. In the anthropologist’s Clifford Gertz’s words the cityscape is “a story people tell themselves about themselves.” The built environment reflects the...

Fifth Printing The civilization of ancient Persia was among the most splendid, powerful and long lasting of the great historical cultures. But our knowledge of it is all too often confined to a few masterpieces of early Persian art and the Persians' role of...

Sistan, a land now on the borders of Afghanistan and Iran, was ruled in the 9th and 10th centuries by the Saffarids, a dynasty of freebooters of lowly origin who carved out a kingdom from eastern Iranian lands that the declining Abbasid caliphate could no...

The importance of Safaivd period (1501-1736) in the history of Iran [Persia] has been increasingly recognized in recent years by scholars both in Iran and in the West. In 1501, the Safavids established the first native dynasty to rule over the whole of Iran...

By the dawn of the twentieth century, Iran was sinking deeper into crisis. It was losing its economic and political independence to the Russian and British empires as a profligate absolute monarchy threw the country ever deeper into debt. A few...

This is the second and final installment of this book. By the dawn of the twentieth century, Iran was sinking deeper into crisis. It was losing its economic and political independence to the Russian and British empires as a profligate absolute monarchy threw...

History of the Wars by Abraham of Erevan, published for the first time in English, is one of the few non-Persian primary sources on the history of Persia (Iran) and Transcaucasia in the first half of the eighteenth-century. It details the Afghan and Ottoman...

Vardapet Arak‘el of Tabriz (d. 1670). The History of Father Arak‘el is the most important Armenian primary source dealing with contemporary events that occurred in Iran, Armenia, Ottoman Empire, and Georgia from 1602 to 1662. It describes the Jelali Revolt;...