In an article antitled “Belles-Lettres, Ethics and Didactic Literature: Thoughts on Three Concepts in Iranian Culture,” Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak poses the question whether the large body of andarz literature, “…may be said to form…‘the grammar of ethical thought’ in Persian.” The author briefly reviews the most recent scholarship on the subject, including Charles-Henri de Fouchécour's comprehensive and singular work, and concludes by calling for the necessity of close analyses of works of andarz from rhetorical, cultural, and social perspectives. It is through such close analyses, he maintains, that we can begin to understand “the grammar of ethical thought in Persian.”

Karimi-Hakkak underscores the pragmatic aspect of andarz literature. As de Fouchécour also observes, ‘The point of departure was…not a set of moral precepts, but convenience: Morality was knowing how to live in society (farhang, adab).” The authors of andarz literature provided both general and specific directives as to how one could best live in society.

Board games were played in many parts of the ancient world and so it is very difficult to attribute the origin of any board game to a particular region or culture. Board games have been found in ancient Mesopotamia, the oldest from the city of Ur, but one must also mention the game of Senet in ancient Egypt. Often board games were placed in the tombs of the pharaohs and sometimes the dead are shown playing with the gods, for example one scene shows Rameses III (c. 1270 B.C.) playing with Isis to gain access to the nether world. The importance of this image lies in the depiction of the cosmological and religious significance that ancient peoples attributed to board games—they were not just games played for pleasure. Reference to board games in Persia can be found as early as the Achaemenid period, where, according to Plutarch, Artaxerxes played a board game with dice.

Those who are familiar with the history of Muslim civilization in Southeast Asia in general, and in Thailand in particular, might be conversant with traces of the Malay or Arabic cultural and religious influences in this region. Cultural interchanges between Iran and maritime Southeast Asia during the pre-Islamic period have been studied by a number of scholars including Brian Colless who wrote several works on the activities of Nestorian and Armenian Christians in the region during the Sasanid period. Much more work has been done on Iranian influences in the spread of Islam into Southeast Asia although the interpretation of the phenomenon often depends on the religious perspective of the writer. Much of the modern literature focuses on actual or alleged Persian elements in Malay language, literature, and culture.

The purpose of the present paper is to review some of the literature to date on the Iranian community in the Siamese Ayutthaya kingdom in the seventeenth century and to highlight the main problems those studies have focused on.

Tobacco was ‘discovered’ by Christopher Columbus when he reached the Caribbean islands. The Carib Indians used tobacco, both for its medicinal and pleasurable properties and for ceremonial purposes. The result was tobacco's conquest of the world, which began with its introduction to Europe (France in 1556; Portugal, 1558; Spain, 1559, and England, 1565). The Portuguese soon also introduced it in India, probably around 1580. Tobacco is said to have been introduced to the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul) about 1601, but this probably happened much earlier. Its introduction into Iran, via India and/or Turkey, most likely occurred in the late 1590s. One source states that tobacco came to Iran in or around 1605. However, tobacco was certainly known before that time in both the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, since Anthony Sherley used tobacco when he arrived at the Orontes River (al-ᶜAsi) in Syria (part of the Ottoman Empire) on his first journey to Iran in 1598 and, as a tobacco addict, he certainly would have taken it with him to the latter country.

A major ambiguity attaches to the zurkhanah, the traditional gymnasium of Iran. It is celebrated as an abode of chivalry and traditional values such as generosity, forbearance, and fair play, but it also has a reputation of harboring unruly elements on the margins of legality, men who are willing to rent their strong-arm services to whomever pays most. In this article I propose to explore this ambiguity and trace its roots in the social history of the institution. To do this, I shall first provide a quick update on the state of traditional athletics today, then expound on the paradox, and finally attempt to explicate it by discussing the identities of three social types that frequented the zūrkhānah.

The Iranian zūrkhānah, literally “House of Strength,” is the traditional gymnasium in which athletes practice a series of gymnastic and bodybuilding exercises that have been called “ancient sport,“ varzish-i bāstārī, since 1934.

In the spring of 1939, Tehran's recently Constructed Amjadieh stadium hosted a part of the public celebration of the wedding ceremony of crown prince Mohammad Reza and Princess Fawzieh of Egypt. Several thousand spectators, mostly men and women well-clad in ‘international’ dress, enjoyed a spectacle featuring short presentations of over a dozen so-called ‘new’ and ‘old’ sports such as soccer, acrobatics, and zūrkhānah exercises. Wearing his Boy Scout uniform, Mohammad Reza was present(ed) as the energetic leader of these sportsmen and women and reflected in persona the hope for a healthy productive nation, while the athletes on the ground below were proving to the Egyptian guests that not only the husband-to-be of Fawzieh, but also many of his countrymen were imbued with the spirit of modern sport and a healthy life.

It was not the first time that the Pahlavis had placed sport at the center of a public celebration. After the crown prince's return from schooling in Switzerland, similar spectacles—although on a smaller scale—had been organized on his birthdays, and he often appeared in public as the leader of the Boy Scout movement, too.

In May 1844 a young merchant from Shiraz, Sayyid ᶜAli Muhammad, made the claim that he was the Bāb (Gate). To his contemporaries the term referred to an intermediary between the community of believers and the messianic figure of Islamic eschatology, the Mahdi. By 1848 the religious movement that formed around him had attracted tens of thousands of adherents. The September of that year saw the beginning of the Shaykh Tabarsi episode in Mazandaran, which became the first of four major clashes between the Babis and the Qajar state.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the background, immediate circumstances, and events of the Shaykh Tabarsi conflict. It examines those developments, both in the political sphere and within the Babi community, that led to the outbreak of open warfare in 1848, and focuses on the question of the objectives of the Babi participants in the conflict.

In late 1997 Iranian football made international headlines. In an article on the Islamic summit held in Iran, The Economist wrote that almost "anything can become a political football in Iran, including football." This attention was precipitated by the political ramifications within Iran of the national team's tie against Australia in Melbourne on November 29th, which secured it a place in the 1998 World Cup in extremis. Since then, major international soccer games have often given rise to massive street demonstrations by young people. That football should cause so much excitement in Iran is not astonishing if one looks at it from a global perspective. Football is a game in which each team works together to try to occupy as much of the "territory" of the other as it can, culminating in attempts symbolically to "conquer" the other side's stronghold by kicking the ball into the goal. The playing field thus becomes a metaphor for the competition between communities, cities, and nations: football focuses group identities.

The name of the Armenian-Iranian photographer Antoin Sevruguin (ca.1838-1933) is not found today in the literature of the world history of photography. Although his photographs were published in several English books about Iran during his own time, the standard Western works on the history of photography, including those covering the Near East, all fail to mention Sevruguin. He does appear, however, in Yahya Zoka's Persian-language history of photography in Iran (1997).

In 1999 the Smithsonian Institution, which houses one of the two major collections of Sevruguin's work, published Sevruguin and the Persian Image: Photographs of Iran 1870-1930. Almost simultaneously, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, Netherlands, which houses the other collection, published a book called Sevruguin's Iran, a combined effort by the Netherlands and the Islamic Republic of Iran and containing both English and Persian text. Once again, this Middle Eastern artist has emerged in Western scholarship.

The Russians with the British, some now cheer,
have made a solemn oath this very year,
that within the politics of Iran,
they will not interfere from this time on.
It's a shame that the appeased of this land,
are content with the matter now at hand,
for when cat and mouse together lie,
the grocer may's well kiss his store goodbye.
Iraj Mirza, 1907(On the Anglo-Russian Treaty)

This paper is a study of early U.S. policy towards Iran and its significance in the field of twentieth-century Iranian-American relations. The paper also has the broader objective of investigating the roots of Iran's hostility towards America during the 1979 Iranian revolution. The early history of Persian-American relations has rarely been examined but, as I will argue, it was during this time (i.e., 1856-1921) that Iranians conceived an image of America as a sympathetic power—an image which the United States government falsely promoted and which resulted in Persia's overly heightened expectations of America. When these expectations were not met in later periods (i.e., 1953-1979), Iranians reacted with a magnified sense of hatred for the United States. The hostility expressed during the revolution came as a great shock to the United States.

Every edition is essentially an act of interpretation. One generally begins with recording the testimony of a number of surviving witnesses, which may be extant manuscripts or quotations of the text in ancillary sources. One then weighs these testimonies in order to arrive at an editorial decision.

The archaic language of the Shāhnāmah requires editors who desire to tackle it to gain a solid knowledge of Iranian philology, the linguistic usages common to Firdawsi's period, scribal practices common to copyists of classical Persian, and the usus scribendi of the individual scribes who copied their Shāhnāmah witnesses. Naturally, it behooves editors of both classical and modern texts to acquaint themselves with the technological and cultural details of book production. For editors of classical Persian, much of this learning comes gradually from practical experience with manuscripts or manuscript reproductions.