Iran: From the Earliest Times to the Islamic Conquest

Midway between Mesopotamia and India, the meeting-ground of Semitic and Aryan influence, the cradle of a great religion which, in either of its modified forms of Mithraism or Manichaeism, might easily have become that of the Western world of today, Iran — Persia — has for three millennia been a meeting-place of peoples and a battleground of civilizations. Its prehistory, now being uncovered by the efforts of Western and of Russian scholars, has not hitherto been exhaustively and competently dealt with between the covers of a single volume in a way that will appeal to the general reader. Professor Ghirshman, who has spent many years in field research in Persia, here outlines its story from the earliest times until the great wars in which over centuries the Persian Empire tried its strength with Greece and Rome, leaving the issue undecided until its unique Iranian civilization was reshaped and transformed by the Islamic conquest. Professor R. Ghirshman, archaeologist, explorer, and historian, was born in 1895, and educated at the Sorbonne, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and the Ecole du Louvre. His first experience of archaeology in the field was in 1930, when he accompanied the French Mission to Tello, in Iraq. The following year he was appointed head of an expedition to Iran, and made excavations at Giyan, Luristan, Assadabad, and Siyalk. In 1935 he began work on the site of Shapur, a Sassanid town founded in the 3rd century A.D., and in 1936 took part in the first archaeological expedition to Afghanistan. In 1941 he was appointed head of the French Délégation Archéologique in Afghanistan, and after the war he was put in charge of the two French archaeological expeditions to Iran by the French government. In 1949 he made a trip by caravan into the mountains of Bakhtiari, where he explored, for the first time in Iran, a cave which was inhabited in neolithic times. Dr Ghirshman has published many works on the archaeology, history, inscriptions, and coins of Iran and Afghanistan. He is a member of a number of learned societies, both French and foreign; has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Teheran; and is a Corresponding Member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.