Folklore at the Turn of the Twentieth Century in a Very Broad sense is understood to encompass the expressive culture of any notable group of people. As implied by the original meaning of the word “lore” when the term “folklore” was coined in 1846, tradition is a vital ingredient of folklore. Yet not all folklore relies on centuries of tradition: Customs may become obsolete, live on submerged for centuries before being revived, or come into being all anew: Duration rather than historical roots makes folklore. The folk, on the other hand, is not necessarily constituted by the uneducated masses, as a conservative point of view would have it: Folklore is not germane to specific social strata but rather to substantial numbers of individuals sharing similar ideas or activities. In this sense folklore encompasses a wide range of cultural expression, ranging from popular beliefs and customs to myths, legends, and other genres of oral literature/verbal art. The obvious overlap of certain aspects in folklore studies and anthropology is inter alia signaled by contemporary Persian terminology, most commonly rendering folklore as farhang-e mardom and anthropology as mardom-shenāsi.

Encyclopaedia Iranica is a Unique Work. Prof. Ehsan Yarshater and his colleagues have performed a colossal task in preparing and publishing volumes I-VIII. Archaeology, numismatics, pre-Islamic architecture, and art have all been dealt with comprehensively. I have divided the articles into the following groups: 1) Archaeology, architecture, and art; 2) archaeological periods; 3) material culture, architecture and art, and groups of artifacts; 4) monuments; and 5) varia. These articles were written by prominent specialists, many of whom participated personally in the excavations of the relevant monuments or examined them on site.

Combining Aesthetic Intent with Utilitarian Value, Hand-Crafted objects may be beautiful as well as functional. Crafts rely upon human ingenuity and productivity. They encompass both the products and the processes of production that comprise most aspects of material culture. The crafts of preindustrial Iran achieved distinction for their high levels of technical and aesthetic accomplishment. At different times in Iranian history, crafts sustained local economies, generated income from trade, and brought international fame.

As with all arts, crafts tend to be culturally expressive, exhibiting styles that may be geographically and temporally defined. Determinants of style may include availability of materials, local traditions of craftsmanship, levels of state intervention and other sources of influence, as well as aesthetic preferences. In Iran, from household production for home consumption to cottage industry and commercial city workshops, and from nomadic encampments to court ateliers, crafts represent products of nomads, rural villagers, city dwellers, and courtiers.

Approximately Sixty Entries in Volumes I-VI of Encyclopaedia Iranica deal with painting and calligraphy in Islamic Iran. While Priscilla Soucek has contributed many of these, other authors include Dorothea Duda, B.W. Robinson, Barbara Schmitz, M. Dabirsiaqi, A.S. Shahbazi and Thomas Lentz. Anthony Welch, Jennifer Scarce, G. A. Pugachenkova, Soucek, and Robinson have also written general entries on art in Iran in the Islamic period. Rather than treat each entry individually, this review will assess the contribution of each author, characterizing his or her approach and noting some but not all of the entries on painters and calligraphers and their work. Additionally, this review will consider James Allan's article on ARMOR, May Beattie's on the ARDABIL CARPET, Dorothy Thompson's on silk (ABRĪŠAM), and 34 articles on CARPETS and CLOTHING.

Taken as a whole, the 34 entries by Priscilla Soucek validate her reputation as an extremely rigorous scholar of Iranian painting and calligraphy. Professor Soucek's entries raise our hopes that she will eventually publish the definitive book on these fields.

It is Very Difficult, in Fact Impossible, to Review Properly What is in fact an incomplete work, one in which many years separate the writing and publication of the first entries from the last ones and in which so much remains to be done. My purpose, in the remarks which follow, is to identify the main policy decisions that seem to have been made in presenting the architecture of the Iranian world, to comment at some length about the success or failure of entries dealing with various categories of presentation, and, all along, to make suggestions about ways of improving access to the information that has been provided. In most cases I did not identify the names of authors, because all of them made choices as to how to interpret their assignments, and the discussion of such choices is not useful in a review at this stage. Competence in the knowledge of their field is clear for all writers, and there are only a few cases of scholars who had not kept up with information or interpretation and whose articles are lacking in substance.

Encyclopedias, with their Pretensions to Comprehensive or Universal knowledge, are by their very nature audacious undertakings. That such exercises in intellectual hubris sometimes fail is not surprising; it is more astonishing how well some of them accomplish their goal. As evidenced by the volumes published to date, the Encyclopaedia Iranica is clearly another such success in the making. One way to appreciate its achievement is to take stock of its place within the encyclopedic tradition by examining the story of its inception and preparation, its vision and purpose, and its general features and strengths as an encyclopedia.

A Multi-Volume, Multi-Author Encyclopaedia Such as this is a Desktop library; but, more than any library, it represents a set of conscious editorial decisions. The basis of these decisions (if, as is common, the editors do not make it explicit to the reader) may be inferred not just from the choice of topics, but from the balance between them, and from the length and nature of entries. In every case, choice and balance must be largely determined by the availability of previous research: if someone is known to be the world expert on X, then it makes sense to invite them to give a reasonable summary of their findings, even if in the grander political and cultural scheme it might be hard to justify. Bizarre—but delightful—anomalies are bound to result: among many in this encyclopedia, I would single out Willem Floor's two-page entry on DUNG; it is shorter, more approachable, and more inviting to the casual reader than, for example, the anomalous chapter on lizards that occupies a full 70 pages of the first volume of The Cambridge History of Iran.

The Principal Users of the Encyclopaedia are Likely to be Students and scholars of Iranian culture, history, literature, geography, and area studies. Most of these will not be looking so much for technical articles in their own specialties as for general introductory entries in ancillary areas. I hope that another category of user of the fauna and other natural history entries, for which some forty articles have now been published, will be the student or scholar beginning studies of Iranian natural history looking for summary and review articles and bibliographic sources. For such users, the EIr can perform an invaluable service, as there is no other existing source in any language attempting to pull together the knowledge of Iranian natural history as a whole.

To serve the needs of this diverse audience, entries about individual species of native animals ought to include some description or definition of the creature, a brief summary of its natural history, viz., its habits and behavior, its habitat, its status in the biotic community (as prey, predator, relative abundance, etc.), its general distribution, and its range within Iran (and the other areas covered by the EIr); cultural information that applies, such as conservation, economic importance, history of use or human interactions, appearance in literature, folklore, and mythology, should be discussed.

By Definition, an Encyclopaedia is “A Work that Aims at Giving a comprehensive summary of all branches of knowledge… Encyclopaedias usually consist of articles on separate subjects arranged in dictionary or alphabetical order to facilitate use… .” A more differentiated view is given by the New Encyclopaedia Britannica, which describes encyclopaedias as follows: “Today most people think of an encyclopaedia as a multivolume compendium of all available knowledge, complete with maps and a detailed index, as well as numerous adjuncts such as bibliographies, illustrations, list of abbreviations and foreign expressions, gazetteers, and so on…”

Unlike the Encyclopaedia Americana or the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose primary goals have been and still are to serve as comprehensive and always up-to-date works of reference of general knowledge, the Encyclopaedia Iranica would fall under the category of specialized encyclopaedias “that have deliberately been planned for a special purpose” or even better: encyclopaedias of countries and regions “dealing with a single country and region.”

Some Fifteen Years Ago, The First Fascicle of What Seemed to be an almost megalomaniacal undertaking was published; since 1982 the Encyclopaedia Iranica (EIr) has not stopped growing slowly but steadily, and one can not imagine Iranian studies anymore without it. In the course of a decade and a half, in which eight impressive volumes have left the editorial rooms of the Center for Iranian Studies at Columbia University in New York, its wealth of learned information has made it an indispensable multidisciplinary tool for non-specialists and specialists alike interested in just about any aspect of Iranian civilization. Meanwhile it can easily bear comparison to that other major enterprise called Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (RE), which is all the more astonishing in view of the fact that even fewer scholars are working in the field of Iranian studies than in that of Classical studies. Were it not for the exemplary international cooperation between scholars of four continents, this monumental encyclopaedia would probably have remained just a concept.

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.

An Encyclopedia by Tradition Arranges its Material in Alphabetical order. Therefore, the subject matter is broken down into small pieces, which in the case of larger subjects is a problem. Some fields clearly are at an advantage over others, depending on how easily a keyword can be found and fitted to a given set of questions. Some types of keywords seem to lead to a greater fragmentation of the fields treated under them, whereas other types lend themselves more readily to the presentation of larger subjects. The Encyclopaedia Iranica is no exception, and therefore the following review is arranged by types of entries.

The Half-Millennium of Persian History Between The Coming of the Saljuqs and the establishment of the Safavid dynasty is one of repeated upheaval and largely alien rule. The arrival of the Ghuzz tribes in the early 11th century was not an entirely peaceful affair—the author of the Tārīkh-i Sīstān regards it as a calamity for that formerly prosperous province—and much worse was to follow, with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and Timur's campaigns in the late 14th, all of which caused enormous destruction, while leaving a profound impression on Persian society, culture, and political life.

This long and eventful period is seldom treated as a whole; volume 2 of Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam is still perhaps the nearest approach to a united vision of the “Middle Periods” of Islamic history, but of course his view is not confined to Iran. Traditionally, the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 and the end of the Abbasid caliphate is taken as the defining turning point in medieval Persian history, an event that falls almost exactly in the middle of the period under review and which to some extent destroys its unity.

IT is Not so Long Ago That the Period Between 1500 And 1800 Hardly figured in western scholarship on Iran. As recently as 1970 the number of book-length studies on aspects of Safavid Iran was limited to Lucien-Louis Bellan's study of Shah ᶜAbbas I, Walther Hinz's book on the rise of the Safavids in the fifteenth century, Ghulam Sarwar's study of Shah Ismaᶜil I, Vladimir Minorsky's edition of and commentary on the Tadhkirat al-Muluk, Laurence Lockhart's volume on the fall of the dynasty, and Klaus Michael Röhrborn's study of the Safavid administrative system. A number of precocious dissertations, most of them never published as books, completed the list at that time. The period between the fall of Isfahan in 1722 and the rise of the Qajars at the turn of the nineteenth century was even less well served, with the output amounting to little more than studies on Nader Shah by Lockhart, and M. R. Arunova and K. Z. Ashrafyan, respectively, and Mehdi Roschanzamir's thesis on the Zand dynasty.

Two Decades have Passed Since the Overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy, yet the upheavals of the post-revolutionary years have preoccupied scholars so much that the detailed and dispassionate analysis of Iran under its last dynasty is still in its infancy. To be sure, important events like the 1953 coup or the Islamic revolution and major issues such as oil or U.S.-Iranian relations have received the attention they deserve. But when it comes to the long years that separate moments of crisis, we know much more about the exertions of those who opposed Pahlavi rule, be they Mosaddeqists, leftists, or Islamists, than about the activities and policies of those who actually ran the country from 1925 to 1978. This asymmetry makes many an account of Pahlavi Iran an exercise in retrospective prediction, leading all too often to the tempting but logically flawed conclusion that the fall of the dynasty was foredoomed. Scholars’ preference for studying the exceptional rather than the routine is understandable, as the former is, almost by definition, more exciting than the latter.

The Publication of an Encyclopedia of the Size of the Encyclopaedia Iranica is an enormous undertaking in terms of conception and the logistics of its execution. Under the general editorship of E. Yarshater and the managing editorships of the distinguished philologists C. Brunner and P. O. Skjærvø, extensive coverage of the Old and Middle Iranian languages and literatures was assured. In a work of such grand proportion engaging the best scholars from all over the world, information on language and literature is dispersed throughout. Anyone using the EIr needs to be aware that in many cases only a fraction of what one might want to find on a given subject may be under that heading specifically. For example, the subject of Avestan (henceforth Av.) is covered most extensively under that heading, but the various Yashts will be found as separate entries under the names of the Yashts. Lexical items will be scattered, sometimes in places that it takes some ingenuity to find.

The Topics Treated so Far in Encyclopaedia Iranica Under the General rubric of languages and the language sciences may be subdivided as follows, with an approximate tally of the articles devoted to each subtopic: 1. Iranian languages and dialects (34; 9 languages, 25 dialects and dialect groups). 2. Relevant non-Iranian languages and dialects and language areas (19; 10 languages, 9 areas). 3. Scholars, authors, works (36; 26 persons, 10 works). 4. Technical terms, genres and etymologies (12). The articles range in length from a few lines to twenty columns or more, some with subdivisions, some in themselves being subdivisions of larger articles. Obviously it is impracticable to mention more than one hundred articles individually. The following overview will attempt an appraisal of each category and its salient components, referring to particular articles as illustrative of the whole.