The history of Iran is still told very much in terms of events on center stage. A common enough lament: the intrigues at court, the deeds—edifying or otherwise—of the ruler and his entourage, the marching of armies and squashing of revolts, the rise and fall of dynasties, these seem to be the main stuff of history. When recognized for what it is, the tossing of waves, we blame the sources for the fact that we can't see below the stormy surface. There is some truth in this, of course; the main narrative histories are notoriously palace-centered or, later, camp-followers. The regions of Iran tend to come into focus only when they are, in fact, briefly transformed into centers. An example of this is Sistan, one of the few provinces to be the subject of detailed modern studies. Even then, it tends to be the same sort of story, writ small.

Confronted with the task of writing a chapter on “History as Literature” for the volume on Persian historiography in the new History of Persian Literature, I found myself asking, “What does this title mean? And what might it imply?“ In medieval Islamicate societies, “history” (Arabic ta˒rīkh, Persian tārīkh) referred both to a specific discipline and to works dealing with the objects of that discipline. If, as written works, histories may be broadly classed as “literature” (for which neither Arabic or Persian had a corresponding term until the modern period), this might suggest that historians placed style over substance, or/and that history is “imaginative writing” and may, as such, contain an element of “fiction.” Indeed, as I shall note below, recent research on Arabic historiography (which poses somewhat different problems, in the main, than does Persian) has argued that many of the “historical” accounts which appear therein are, in fact, “fiction” passed off as history.

Today Sistan is an impoverished region of the Afghan-Persian borderland, the condition of whose economy and populace appeared excessively forlorn to the few European travellers and officials who visited it or who worked there in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus the Indian Army officer, boundary delimitation commissioner, and consul C. E. Yate, writing of his experiences in the 1890s, stated, “What with their debts to the katkhudas who advanced the grain, the cultivators and people of Sistan generally were in a wretched state of poverty. I do not think I ever saw a more miserable-looking lot.“ Yet Sistan, until later medieval times at least, had enjoyed a much more glorious past.

“Sistan,” Middle Persian Sakastan “land of the Sakas,” whence Arabic Sijistan, is of course the more recent name in history for the Drangiana of the classical Greek geographers and historians.

The biographical dictionary is perhaps the best known and commonest type of local history at least for the pre-Mongol period of Iranian history. It is well known that for quite a few Iranian cities, just as for cities, towns, and regions in other parts of the Islamic world, dictionaries of this type were written from the third/ninth to the seventh/thirteenth century. Until the seventh/thirteenth century, the standard language for this literary genre was Arabic even in non-Arabic-speaking countries. Later, starting with the seventh/thirteenth century, some of the works were translated into Persian. But the translators did not limit themselves to a more or less truthful rendering of the original text, but took many liberties with it. Thus, because of the often important changes introduced by the translators, it seems more appropriate to speak of Persian versions or adaptations rather than translations.

In the first part of this article the books belonging to this genre known to be extant are presented, with a brief look at their translations.

The history of Isfahan in the pre-Mongol period has not yet received its due measure of scholarly attention; the focus of research has tended to be on the seventeenth century, when Isfahan was the brilliant capital of the Safavid empire. Nonetheless, it is quite evident that the city was, in pre-Mongol times, no less brilliant a center of Islamic culture as articulated in both Arabic and Persian. No book-length study on the city's earlier history is known to me. This article does not aim to fill this gap, but to follow the theme of the present issue which is historiography rather than history. It focuses on the “history” of Isfahan written by Mufaddal b. Saᶜd b. al-Husayn al-Mafarrukhi al-Isfahani, Kitāb maḥāsin Iṣfahān.2 The work was written most probably between 1072 and 1092. Nothing is known about the author except that he came from a respected Isfahani family with many generations of learning and nobility behind it.

During the medieval period iran produced one of the richest repertoires of local histories in the Islamic world. Ibn Funduq, the author of the local history of Bayhaq studied here, enumerates 15 local histories of Khurasan alone. These include three local histories of Marv by al-ᶜAbbas b. Musᶜab b. Bishr, Abu'l-Hasan Ahmad b. Sayyar (198-268/814-881), and Abu'l-ᶜAbbas b. Saᶜid al-Maᶜdani (d. 375/986). (al-Sakhawi calls Musᶜab b. Bishr's work a “history of (the city).“) To these Ibn Funduq adds two local histories of Herat by Abu Ishaq Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Yunis (?) al-Bazzaz and Abu Ishaq Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Saᶜid al-Haddad. (Sakhawi, apparently confused, attributes both histories to Abu Ishaq Muhammad b. Yasin al-Harawi al-Haddad); a Tārīkh-i Bukhārā va Samarqand by Saᶜd b. Janah; two histories of Khwarazm by al-Sari b. Dalwiya and Abu ᶜAbdallah Muhammad b. Saᶜid respectively; a history of Balkh by Abu ᶜAbdallah Muhammad b. ᶜAqil al-Faqih;

Neither this article nor the work of Nadir Mirza is primarily concerned with the Amazon or with the quest for the Nile sources. But a certain amusing curiosity aside, the fact that Nadir Mirza touches on subjects like this in a historical work on Tabriz is a clear hint that we are leaving the traditional boundaries of Iranian local historiography—and not only in the metaphorical sense.

To place Nadir Mirza's history of Tabriz in a more general context is a rather difficult task. Such a context is provided of course by the longstanding tradition of Persian local and regional historiography—as treated in the present collection of articles—and particularly in connection with the late development of this genre in the nineteenth century. Local works of historiography from the Qajar period quite often defy attempts at classification according to medieval categories such as chronicles, biographical dictionaries, or adab-literature.