Isidore of Charax, in his description of the region known as Upper Media, mentions several cities and stations located on today's Kangavar-Asadabad plain. Subsequently, historians and geographers of the Islamic period have supplemented the information about the ancient routes and places of the region. While, in the last two centuries, some researchers have located some ancient toponyms in the region, this research, for the first time, has reconstructed all the old routes and its possible branches leading to the city of Hamadan (Ecbatana), on the Kangavar-Asadabad plain during the last two thousand years. In addition, some suggestions have been made for the location of some historical places mentioned by old geographers. To achieve this goal, three categories of historical and geographical texts have been used, including the later Islamic texts (the Safavid and Qajar texts), the early Islamic texts (mainly Arab and Iranian geographical texts of the ninth and tenth centuries), and the pre-Islamic texts (mainly Greek and Roman texts, especially the Parthian Stations of Isidore of Charax), whose connection to each other is not intuitively obvious at first glance. While it is not difficult to recognize historical places and routes of the studied area in the later texts, it is complicated in the case of the two older groups due to their significant gap with the present time. Overall, the result of this research indicates that multiple routes were used for passing the Kangavar-Asadabad plain during different periods. Although all these routes eventually led to the metropolis of Ecbatana (modern Hamadan), the choice of one route in ancient times seems to have depended on various factors, including the season of the year and weather conditions, road safety, the kind of caravan (light or heavy), and so on.

This article examines five Sasanian bullae from the fire temple of Ādur Gušnasp with seal impressions depicting Aphrodite and Eros, and Aphrodite Anadyomene. It is argued that the original seal with Aphrodite and Eros likely dates from the late 1st century BCE to the early 1st century CE, reused between the 5th–7th centuries CE, while the Aphrodite Anadyomene seal is from the 2nd or 3rd century CE. Contextualizing these findings within Graeco-Roman and Iranian cultures, this article explores reinterpretations of Graeco-Roman iconography for both Zoroastrian and non-Zoroastrian audiences, as well as highlights that bullae with concave impressions of cylindrically curved objects on the reverse had once been attached to vessels, not just documents. Additionally, this article also discusses other sealings on the new bullae, some with Middle Persian inscriptions, identifying a mgw (priest) and an astrologer, providing the first attestation of the word axtar (constellation) on a Sasanian seal.

This article draws on documentary texts from multilingual archives of early Islamic Central Asia to illustrate connections between the Arabic and Middle Iranian scribal world. Here, I contend that some lesser-known evidence from Sogdia contributes new elements to current debates on the contact between Arabic and Middle Iranian scribal traditions and provides a measure of “intensity” of Arab rule in the region more generally. In particular, ostraca from various Transoxanian administrative centers provide documentary confirmation that a class of biliterate Arabic-Sogdian scribes was active in the local bureaucracy as early as the mid-8th century. When viewed in dialogue with archives from coeval Iran and Iraq, the Transoxanian evidence helps lead to a more nuanced understanding of the so-called “Pahlavi diplomatic substrate” model.

This treatise, possibly written between 541 and 557 (1147–1162), illuminates the perspectives of a subaltern group persecuted by the Nizari Ismaili hierarchy for agitating to bring about the manifestation (ẓuhūr) of their imam. Ismailis in Iran awaited the manifestation of a descendant of Nizār b. al-Mustanṣir who was killed in Cairo in 488/1095 after a failed attempt to succeed his father as the Fatimid imam-caliph. In 559/1164, the fourth ruler of the Nizari polity proclaimed the Qiyāmat-i buzurg (the Great Resurrection) and was subsequently recognized as the Nizari imam. This text records how its author construed the transference of imamate from Egypt to Iran. It structured continuities between the Fatimid and Nizari daʿwa (summons) and between communities of followers of Nāṣir-i Khusraw and Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ, the founder of the Nizari Ismaili polity. If the dating is correct, then the Ḥikāyat is one of the earliest known Nizari texts and is a very early exemplar of the Nizari appropriations of the poet, philosopher, and Fatimid dāʿī (summoner), Nāṣir-i Khusraw.

This paper revisits the usual narrative of Dāʾūd al-Qayṣarī's life, bringing to light evidence of his stay in Ilkhanid Tabriz. Recent studies mention a connection with Ilkhanid Iran, where he would have met his master ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī, but present no substantiated details as to when and where this happened and how these events fit in his life. A document held at the Bodleian, corroborated by evidence from other manuscripts, shows that the common narrative of Qayṣarī's life (in which links with Iran are almost entirely absent) is untenable, and presents evidence of Qayṣarī's presence in Ilkhanid Tabriz. These new elements invite us to revise our perception of Qayṣarī's oeuvre, in particular the idea that it was written under the auspices of the nascent Ottoman power, and further investigate the intellectual scene in Tabriz in the last years of the reign of Abu Saʿīd and of his vizier Ghiyāth al-Dīn.

In November 1980, a twenty-nine-year-old contract worker in Hammond, Louisiana by the name of Stephen K. Clark was arrested and charged with criminal mischief for painting a thirty-foot mural of Mickey Mouse “making an obscene gesture to Iran” on the side of Sunflower supermarket. According to the store's manager, Clark had been hired to give the store a fresh coat of yellow paint before going wildly off script. The Hammond city prosecutor told the press that Clark would face jail time if convicted for his renegade painting, which, alongside the enormous image of Mickey, featured a word balloon proclaiming “We're fed up. Hey Iran!”1 This was no one-off use of Mickey's likeness to send a message to Iran. At the dawn of the 1980s, the image and sentiment Clark felt compelled to share had become curiously popular across the United States, appearing in surprising places all over the country.

The works of prominent contemporary Iranian composers Hossein Alīzādeh and Parvīz Meshkātīān demonstrate a novel approach to the text-music relationship, characterized by a new understanding of the interaction between music's internal syntax and structure and the external world. This innovative approach, which can be described as “musical realism,” strives to represent textual meanings through musical gestures, particularly within the tasnīf genre, a metrical, pre-composed song with a pre-determined way of accompaniment, which developed over the past century.1 This approach, emerging primarily in contemporary compositions, is exemplified by the above two composers, who illustrate textual meaning through the intricate utilization of innovative treatments of modes, rhythm, melody, and texture relying on the potentials of the core of Persian musical tradition, the radīf – a collection of traditional Iranian melodic figures passed down orally through generations and serving as the foundational framework for improvisation and composition.2 By examining select instances from these composers’ works, I highlight the growing emphasis on a realist music-text relationship and its interplay with both the inner structures of Persian classical music and the broader context of Iran's modern position in the world.

This compact book offers a closely researched account of the early years of the Qajar dynasty and state, whose political development was permanently marked by the territorial struggle with the Russian Empire in the South Caucasus in its first three decades. Behrooz's work builds on Muriel Atkin's classic Russia and Iran 1780–1928 (1980), and although unlike Atkin he does not make use of any sources in Russian, the range of Persian-language material he draws upon is much greater, and the two books complement each other well. The first two chapters effectively set the political scene, providing a review of the circumstances of Aqa Muhammad Khan's rise to power, his struggle with the Zand rulers of Shiraz, and the extensive preparations he made to secure the succession of his nephew, Baba Khan Jahanbani, the future Fath Ali Shah. These bore fruit when Aqa Muhammad Shah was murdered by his own servants in Shusha in 1797. Significantly, this took place during a campaign to subdue Qarabagh. The central figure of the book, and of the wars against Russia, is Fath Ali's son Abbas Mirza, but a particular strength of Behrooz's account is his close understanding of the family and intertribal relationships among the Qajar elite, as well as of the petty dynasties that ruled in Qarabagh, Iravan, Badkubeh (Baku), and Derbent in this period.