A hundred years ago in colonial Bombay, on September 10, 1922, a group of Parsis established an organization called the Iran League. Meant to strengthen ties with their Iranian Zoroastrian coreligionists inside Iran, the Iran League also endeavored to recast wider economic and cultural relations between India and the country which Parsis regarded as their ancient homeland. That ancient homeland, after all, was undergoing seismic change. In the years following Reza Khan's 1921 coup and the establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, Parsis watched with growing anticipation and excitement as Iran's new leader increasingly promoted a new national culture rooted in Iran's ancient past. Prominent Parsis, many of them leaders in the Iran League, fervently believed that Pahlavi Iran would herald all sorts of progressive change: improved conditions for the Iranian Zoroastrians, deeper appreciation of Zoroastrianism among Iran's Muslim majority, conditions for significant Parsi investment in Iran, and even the possibility of a mass Parsi “return” to the shah's domain, reversing the direction of centuries of Zoroastrian migration.1

This article brings a new perspective to Parsi philanthropy in late Qajar Iran by exploring its British imperial dimensions. It examines how Parsis leveraged British diplomatic heft in their amelioration of Iranian Zoroastrians and how imperial connections helped Parsis translate charity into political and economic power. This was a mutually beneficial process: British diplomats identified strategic value in Parsi philanthropy for Iranian Zoroastrians. It was particularly useful in Great Game rivalries against Russia, as Britain attempted to cultivate Iranian Zoroastrians to shore up its influence in southern Iran. Interactions between Parsis, Iranian Zoroastrians, and British diplomats neatly illustrate the extraordinary influence which small minorities could wield in imperial politics.

This article is concerned with interregional trade dynamics between Elam and Mesopotamia in the early to mid-first millennium BC. During the seventh century BC, two great famines in the Neo-Elamite kingdom, of which climatological changes were a major cause, were documented in the textual records. An era of megadrought made grain procurement from the neighboring regions essential to feed the Neo-Elamite lowland population. This article further explores the impact of the two Neo-Elamite famines and “drought of the century” on the commercial and political mechanisms in the Upper Persian Gulf region.

This article presents a new reading of the Dārāb-nāma (Book of Dārāb, ca. eleventh–twelfth century), a medieval popular narrative in prose (dāstān) ascribed to the storyteller Abū Ṭāhir Ṭarsūsī. While the narrative belongs to the Persian tradition of the Alexander romance, the Alexander figure it depicts bears little resemblance to that presented in high classical verse-forms by the likes of Firdawsī, Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī, or Jāmī. Although still a conqueror, legitimate ruler, and champion of Islam, the Alexander of the Dārāb-nāma appears in a strongly negative light: he is lame, cowardly, and sly. In fact, most of his success he owes to his once opponent and later wife, Būrān-dukht: could she be the true hero in the story? Drawing on a critical examination of characters based on Greimas's actantial model, this study probes the authorial program and intended audience of the Dārāb-nāma, and suggests the work can be read as mock-epic, possibly to cater to a Zoroastrian audience.

This article examines the chapter on īhām (literary amphiboly) in Ḥadāʾiq al-Siḥr by Rashīd Vaṭvāṭ (d. 1182). Ḥadāʾiq, a treatise on stylistics with Persian and Arabic examples, is the oldest extant document to define īhām. Vaṭvāṭ's definition of īhām sheds light on the mechanism and function of this literary technique. This article argues that īhām, according to Vaṭvāṭ, operates through the creation of semantic fields and defamiliarization. Previous scholars who examined this chapter of Ḥadāʾiq, oblivious to this point, have made a number of misinterpretations. However, by analyzing the name he prefers for this figure of speech, the definition he gives, and the examples he cites to explain it, this article demonstrates that Vaṭvāṭ had this function of defamiliarization in mind.

Focusing on the decades between 1887 and 1936, this article examines the relationship between the Parsi-Iranian network of the printed text—often sustained by abundant visual evidence—and the built environment that then returned onto the published pages of printed books and periodicals. It examines several seminal Parsi and Iranian texts, all of which were published in the Bombay-based Parsi press, containing images of outstanding architectural edifices erected in Iran with Parsi financing to map the broader political discourse on modern reform through the strategy of an artistic revival. The piece foregrounds the codependence of Parsi patronage of print and built architecture. Architecture itself is treated as a text that aimed to ground the instability of language and identity in solid foundations. This codependent relation helped support a modernist discourse on Iranian nationalist rebirth.

While the only surviving legends of Cyrus the Great are found in Graeco-Roman sources, such sources ultimately speak to the varied views of Cyrus in Achaemenid Iran. Following a survey of the historical conditions leading to the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus and its consolidation under Darius, this article explores the characteristics of western Iranian historiography of the Median “state” and dawn of the Persian Empire in the Achaemenid period. This article argues that the Median and Iranian orientation of the Achaemenid Empire from the time of Darius provided the grounds for the infusing of Young Avestan myths and legends in western Iran. In particular, this article investigates parallels between stories of Cyrus the Great and those of Kauui Haosrauuah (Kay Khosrow); an investigation that points to the assimilation of the former with the latter that likely began in the Achaemenid period and later led to a two-way interaction of legends about these figures. In addition, this article also explores the Iranian tradition's depiction of Alexander and his association with Kay Khosrow, which is similar to his association with Cyrus the Great in western sources and may further show Cyrus the Great's assimilation with the Iranian tradition through his identification with Kay Khosrow.

This article examines Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī's Sabʿa-yi Sayyār (889/1484), a Chaghatay rewriting of Niẓāmī's Haft Paykar and Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī's Hasht Bihisht. In the prologue of his masnavī, the Timurid poet expresses harsh criticism against his Persian models. He targets his predecessors’ frame stories, and more specifically their depiction of Bahrām Gūr's behavior while listening to the seven nested narratives. In fact, Navāʾī's reshaping of the poem epitomizes several Timurid trends with regard to the Persianate cultural complex: a tendency toward standardization, as well as a keen interest in Naqshbandī Sufism. Incidentally, the latter aspect shows Jāmī's influence on the Chaghatay polymath's literary output.

The staff of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), an international educational philanthropy, were professionally and personally buffeted by health and medical concerns. This article examines the value of their letters, arguing they serve as a deep reservoir of biased yet valuable evidence that corroborates other sources while also providing insight into the health and disease conditions of Iran's provincial cities. This article also asks why, in the early twentieth century, AIU staff failed to acknowledge Iranians who were similarly invested in medical services and public hygiene. Ultimately, the letters help scholars witness historical evolutions in Iran and in the AIU staff's understandings of the Iranian social and medical landscape they inhabited.

This paper surveys some wood carvings belonging to four mosques in the villages of Firizhand, Quhrud, Abyana, and Barzuk. Carved between the years 700/1300-1 and 705/1305–6, they consist of architectural elements such as doors, columns, and capitals. The recently found woodwork evidence from the demolished Jamiʿ mosque of Barzuk reveals that this building and its decorations were executed by a multiskilled artist, who was most likely a descendant of Abu Zayd. Moreover, the newly discovered columns from the Masjid-i ʿAli in Quhrud show that, in contrast to what was previously thought, the current building is not contemporary with its dated door and was erected in later centuries. Interestingly, these wooden mosques were built during the last years of Ghazan Khan's rule and witness his order to construct mosques in all the villages of the country. This woodwork offers significant insight into the artistic and cultural situation of the early fourteenth century.

The publication of four Gujarati travelogues written by Parsis traveling to Iran in quick succession in the 1920s marked the intensification of a relationship that had hitherto been based mainly on philanthropy directed towards the Zoroastrians of Iran. The Pahlavi regime, with its assurances of religious tolerance and equity, prompted Parsis to consider deepening their connection with Iran through trade and business investments and also examine the possibility of return to their motherland. The encounters which constitute these travelogues could be framed as experiments which helped the Parsi community in India to construct a framework for developing this relationship. The Parsi travelogues, while attempting to recover a Zoroastrian past in Iran, also try to map the future for the community by addressing its present anxieties and aspirations.

That Safavid Iran was scene to a boom in the occult sciences (ʿulum-i gharība) is now beginning to be acknowledged by specialists; what has yet to be appreciated is the extent to which that boom represented a smooth and conscious continuation of Mamluk, Aqquyunlu, Ottoman and especially Timurid Sunni precedent. In particular, lettrism (ʿilm-i ḥurūf), developed by the Pythagoreanizing, imamophile New Brethren of Purity as universal imperial science, was embraced by leading Safavid thinkers and doers as a primary Sunni means of Shiʿizing Iran. This occult continuity is epitomized by the oeuvre of Maḥmūd Dihdār Shīrāzī “ʿIyānī” (fl. 1576), the most prolific Persian author on lettrism of the sixteenth century and teacher to Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1621) himself. His Unveiling Secrets (Kashf al-asrār)—a passionate prosimetric paean to Imam ʿAlī as cosmic principle in strictly Akbarian-Būnian terms, like Rajab al-Bursī’s (d. after 1410) work before it—is contextualized and translated here as a case in point.

This article discusses use of the meter mutaqārib in Persian masnavī (narrative) poetry as related to its content from a comparative perspective. One of the aims is to demonstrate the various connections between a set of narrative poems composed in mutaqārib. The article questions previous assumptions about the form and style of early Persian verse romances and contributes to further discussion of approaches to Persian narrative poetry.

This paper examines the Pahlavi Dynasty Museum, which was inaugurated in 1976 during the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pahlavi rule. Built inside the Marble Palace, the shah's former residence in the center of Tehran, the museum was intended to memorialize the achievements of the Pahlavis, presenting the official Pahlavi version of Iran's modern history. The museum was unique in many respects, not least because it was the only former Pahlavi palace that had been converted into a museum to honor the Pahlavis, but it shared the objectives of other museums constructed during this period. During the late Pahlavi era, a major aspect of the state's cultural policy was to sponsor initiatives that strengthened the official state narrative, which argued that the Pahlavis were the legitimate heirs of a 2500-year-old monarchical tradition. The article explores how the state attempted to express these narratives through the museum's design and exhibits.

This article investigates the history of economic relations between Iran and the Parsi community of India during the Reza Shah period. Encouraged by the policies of the new Pahlavi state, Parsi entrepreneurs began a serious effort to investigate the possibilities of economic investment in Iran. The article details three Parsi economic missions that were conducted in Iran during this period, and analyzes their assessments of Iran's potential for development in fields such as energy, textile manufacturing, commercial agriculture, and modern transportation systems. As the article argues, while these Parsi-led initiatives were part of a larger history of renewed engagement between Parsis and Iranians, for a variety of political and economic reasons, by the outbreak of World War II few of the Parsi plans for investment in Iran had come to fruition. While remaining largely forestalled in the interwar period, the article also suggests that Parsi economic assessments foreshadowed many of the planning strategies carried out in Iran's post–World War II history of economic development.