Rustam's Origins are Certainly Complex, Multilayered, and it Would seem only partly Iranian. His legend itself indicates this; his mother is a foreigner living in Kabul and descended from Zahhak, so that both Sudabah and Isfandiyar are able to refer to him as demon-born, (dīv-zād). Mehrdad Bahar has concluded that much of his legend is Saka, or Scythian, and that it also has strong parallels and probable connections with that of Indra, the Vedic god of war. His integration into Iranian national history as its defender and savior betrays some strains: he is Iran's greatest champion but he enjoys very uneasy relations with some of Iran's kings (notably Kavus and Gushtasp), his sons Suhrab and Faramarz each launch independent attacks against the Iranian court, and his own last battle is against the crown prince of Iran whom he kills. Half foreigner, with a partially demonic ancestry, a man who kills the nation's heir apparent and whose sons declare war on two different Iranian royal families—these are troubling attributes for an ethnic hero, and point to some ambiguity in the evolution of his legend.

The Persians are Obscure in the Archaeological Record, and the routes and dates of their migration into Iran are uncertain. When the Persians appear in the textual record, it is in the context of their interaction with the regional powers of Elam and Assyria. Examination of the relevant sources highlights two areas of Persian settlement in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E.: the central Zagros Mountains region and modern Fars, the latter the core of the first Persian Empire (Old Persian Parsa and Greek Persis). Since there are no extant Persian inscriptions dating before the mid-sixth century, this analysis relies upon Assyrian and Elamite sources.

The Persians may have begun their arrival in southwestern Iran as early as the mid-second millennium. During the Middle Elamite period (c. 1600-1000 B.C.E.), Fars and its primary city Anshan (modern Malyan) were part of the kingdom of Elam. Sometime around 1000 B.C.E., Anshan was abandoned. Large-scale settlement cannot be traced in Fars after that until the Achaemenid period, over four hundred years later.

Private life during the Qajar period is not a subject on which much primary material is available. In an earlier work I made use of material from the Mahdavi Archives in Tehran to describe the life and career of Haj Muhammad Hasan Amin al-Zarb, the first major Iranian entrepreneur. Material from the same archive and other sources allows us a glimpse into the daily life of the household of Amin al-Zarb in Tehran. A native of Isfahan, Muhammad Hasan came to Tehran from Isfahan sometime about 1853. He arrived in the capital and, in his own words, “aside from a few items of clothing and an ᶜabā, my worldly goods consisted of a box of scales and weights (miqāl), the work of Isfahan that I had bought for eleven qirāns, and one hundred riyāls in cash.” By 1863 he had begun the most extensive commercial enterprise in Iran and become the richest and most influential merchant in the country.

To the memory of my ustad, K. Allin Luther, in appreciation of his teaching and example.

Abu'l-Fazl Muhammad B. Al-Husayn Bayhaqi (385-470/995-1077), A Khurasanian scribe of the Ghaznavids, wrote a history of this Perso-Islamic dynasty (388-582/994-1186) in his work referred to as the Tārīkh-i Bayhaqī (composed in 450/1058). The Ghaznavids ruled in an area now comprising eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northern India. With the loss of greater Khurasan to the nomadic Saljuqs at the battle of Dandanqan on 9 Ramadan 431/24 May 1040, the empire was reduced to parts of Afghanistan and northern India, chiefly the Punjab. The downfall of the Ghaznavids in Khurasan also divides the period of the first three kings from those of the later ones. Bayhaqi himself organized the history of the Ghaznavids in terms of “principal” (aṣl), versus “minor” (far˓) territories. For Bayhaqi the principal territories are Khurasan and Jibal, but especially Khurasan, as opposed to the minor territories in India. He wrote his history when he was an old man and after 29 years had passed from the loss of Khurasan. The only surviving volumes of Bayhaqi's history of the Ghaznavids cover the reign of the third Ghaznavid ruler Mas˓ud (421—31/1030-1040), who lost Khurasan to the Saljuqs.

After the Recent Work of Merguerian and Najmabadi, Najmabadi, and Milani (in this volume), it can be little surprise that the topic of women's tricks (makr-i zan) is explicit and pervasive in traditional oral narrative in Persian-speaking communities. In afsānah or fictional folktales, makr-i zan serves as a generic title for a large, but shifting, corpus of individual tales which are perceived by their tellers as primarily concerned with the topos (though the tales may be otherwise identified or characterized by other sources, including literary ones). Indeed, from the general perspective of a strongly patriarchal popular ideology which promotes male authority over female action, any and all female-initiated action (“female agency”) may be construed, explicitly or implicitly, as subversive of the ideal order of patriarchy. While the female actor and female agency are marked as “other” (than ideal) by the topos (or stereotype), women as well as men perform tales about makr-i zan. This paper begins the task of sorting out perspectives on this “otherness” and agency as reflected in the repertoires of various male and female traditional storytellers, in individual oral performances in which makr-i zan are central.