Iranian history has long been a source of fascination for European
and American observers. The country's ancient past preoccupied
nineteenth-century historians and archaeologists as they attempted
to construct a unified understanding of the ancient world. Iran's
medieval history has likewise preoccupied scholars who have long
recognized the Iranian plateau as a cultural crossroad of the
world's great civilizations. In more recent times, Iran has
continued to demand the attention of observers when, for example,
the revolution of 1978-79 dramatically burst onto the world stage,
or more recently, when the Iranian democracy movement has come to
once again challenge the status quo of the clerical regime. Iran's
dominance in the Middle East has brought it into conflict with the
United States and so it is the subject of almost daily coverage
from reporters. Sympathetic observers of Iran-students, scholars,
policy makers, journalists, and the educated public-tend to be
perplexed and confused by this tangled web of historical
development. Iran, as it appears to most observers, is a
foreboding, menacing, and far away land with a history that is
simply too difficult to fathom.
The Handbook is a guide to Iran's complex history. The book
emphasizes the large-scale continuities of Iranian history while
also describing the important patterns of transformation that have
characterized Iran's past. Each of the chapters focuses on a
specific epoch of Iranian history and surveys the general
political, social, cultural, and economic issues of that era. The
ancient period begins with chapters considering the anthropological
evidence of the prehistoric era, through to the early settled
civilizations of the Iranian plateau, and continuing to the rise of
the ancient Persian empires. The medieval section first considers
the Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century, and then moves on
to discuss the growing Turkish influence filtering in from Central
Asia beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The last third
of the book covers Iran in the modern era by considering the rise
of the Safavid state and its accompanying policy of centralization
and the introduction of Shi'ism, followed by essays on the problems
of reform and modernization in the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, and
finally with a chapter on the revolution of 1978-79 and its
aftermath.
The book is a collaborative exercise among scholars specializing in
a variety of sub-fields, and across a number of disciplines,
including history, art history, classics, literature, politics, and
linguistics. Here, readers can find a reliable and accessible
narrative that can serve as an introduction to the field of Iranian
studies. While the number of monographs published within
specialized subfields of Iranian history continues to proliferate,
there have been, to date, no books that attempt to produce a
comprehensive single-volume history of Iranian civilization.
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