The Study of Sasanian History and Society has Received a Good share of attention in the past century. Hundreds of articles and several important books and monographs have contributed to our knowledge of the period. The most important monograph on the history of Iran from the third to the seventh century is that of Arthur Christensen. The book was written in the first half of the twentieth century, and although we have come to understand its shortcomings through advancing textual criticism and changing methodological strategies, it still remains the source referred to by all the scholars in this field. Shorter monographs, such as that of Klaus Schippmann, have added important information and a different approach, giving more attention to primary sources and material culture. Since Christensen's magnum opus, the most complete work on Sasanian Iran is The Cambridge History of Iran, which covers many aspects of Sasanian history, language, and culture.

An Encyclopedia by Tradition Arranges its Material in Alphabetical order. Therefore, the subject matter is broken down into small pieces, which in the case of larger subjects is a problem. Some fields clearly are at an advantage over others, depending on how easily a keyword can be found and fitted to a given set of questions. Some types of keywords seem to lead to a greater fragmentation of the fields treated under them, whereas other types lend themselves more readily to the presentation of larger subjects. The Encyclopaedia Iranica is no exception, and therefore the following review is arranged by types of entries.

The Half-Millennium of Persian History Between The Coming of the Saljuqs and the establishment of the Safavid dynasty is one of repeated upheaval and largely alien rule. The arrival of the Ghuzz tribes in the early 11th century was not an entirely peaceful affair—the author of the Tārīkh-i Sīstān regards it as a calamity for that formerly prosperous province—and much worse was to follow, with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and Timur's campaigns in the late 14th, all of which caused enormous destruction, while leaving a profound impression on Persian society, culture, and political life.

This long and eventful period is seldom treated as a whole; volume 2 of Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam is still perhaps the nearest approach to a united vision of the “Middle Periods” of Islamic history, but of course his view is not confined to Iran. Traditionally, the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 and the end of the Abbasid caliphate is taken as the defining turning point in medieval Persian history, an event that falls almost exactly in the middle of the period under review and which to some extent destroys its unity.

IT is Not so Long Ago That the Period Between 1500 And 1800 Hardly figured in western scholarship on Iran. As recently as 1970 the number of book-length studies on aspects of Safavid Iran was limited to Lucien-Louis Bellan's study of Shah ᶜAbbas I, Walther Hinz's book on the rise of the Safavids in the fifteenth century, Ghulam Sarwar's study of Shah Ismaᶜil I, Vladimir Minorsky's edition of and commentary on the Tadhkirat al-Muluk, Laurence Lockhart's volume on the fall of the dynasty, and Klaus Michael Röhrborn's study of the Safavid administrative system. A number of precocious dissertations, most of them never published as books, completed the list at that time. The period between the fall of Isfahan in 1722 and the rise of the Qajars at the turn of the nineteenth century was even less well served, with the output amounting to little more than studies on Nader Shah by Lockhart, and M. R. Arunova and K. Z. Ashrafyan, respectively, and Mehdi Roschanzamir's thesis on the Zand dynasty.

Two Decades have Passed Since the Overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy, yet the upheavals of the post-revolutionary years have preoccupied scholars so much that the detailed and dispassionate analysis of Iran under its last dynasty is still in its infancy. To be sure, important events like the 1953 coup or the Islamic revolution and major issues such as oil or U.S.-Iranian relations have received the attention they deserve. But when it comes to the long years that separate moments of crisis, we know much more about the exertions of those who opposed Pahlavi rule, be they Mosaddeqists, leftists, or Islamists, than about the activities and policies of those who actually ran the country from 1925 to 1978. This asymmetry makes many an account of Pahlavi Iran an exercise in retrospective prediction, leading all too often to the tempting but logically flawed conclusion that the fall of the dynasty was foredoomed. Scholars’ preference for studying the exceptional rather than the routine is understandable, as the former is, almost by definition, more exciting than the latter.

The Publication of an Encyclopedia of the Size of the Encyclopaedia Iranica is an enormous undertaking in terms of conception and the logistics of its execution. Under the general editorship of E. Yarshater and the managing editorships of the distinguished philologists C. Brunner and P. O. Skjærvø, extensive coverage of the Old and Middle Iranian languages and literatures was assured. In a work of such grand proportion engaging the best scholars from all over the world, information on language and literature is dispersed throughout. Anyone using the EIr needs to be aware that in many cases only a fraction of what one might want to find on a given subject may be under that heading specifically. For example, the subject of Avestan (henceforth Av.) is covered most extensively under that heading, but the various Yashts will be found as separate entries under the names of the Yashts. Lexical items will be scattered, sometimes in places that it takes some ingenuity to find.

The Topics Treated so Far in Encyclopaedia Iranica Under the General rubric of languages and the language sciences may be subdivided as follows, with an approximate tally of the articles devoted to each subtopic: 1. Iranian languages and dialects (34; 9 languages, 25 dialects and dialect groups). 2. Relevant non-Iranian languages and dialects and language areas (19; 10 languages, 9 areas). 3. Scholars, authors, works (36; 26 persons, 10 works). 4. Technical terms, genres and etymologies (12). The articles range in length from a few lines to twenty columns or more, some with subdivisions, some in themselves being subdivisions of larger articles. Obviously it is impracticable to mention more than one hundred articles individually. The following overview will attempt an appraisal of each category and its salient components, referring to particular articles as illustrative of the whole.