Identifying and Reconstructing the Inscription Above the Gate and Facade of the First Dar ul-Funun on Naser Khosrow Street Based on Dmitri Ermakov’s Photographs

In the last hundred years, the city of Tehran has changed so much as a result of which many urban spaces and historical structures have disappeared, especially in the citadel of Tehran (Arg-e Tehran). Buildings such as Dar ul-Funun, from which the country’s educational and research facilities have taken root, have changed so much that their original architectural identity has been tarnished. While in recent years, there has been attempts to revive the main core of Tehran, lack of documents and written and oral data are felt, now more than ever. One of these required documents is historical photographs, many of which are scattered in the archives of museums and governmental and non-governmental centers, often without proper classification or photographic captions. Fortunately, during the last years of Nasser al-Din Shah’s and the early years of Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s (of Qajar dynasty) reign, Dmitri E. Yermakov, a famous Tbilisi photographer who specialized in photography of historical structures and textures, and was a member of the Russian Academy of Archeology and Fine Arts, moved to Tehran and took pictures of urban texture, historical buildings and other subjects. These photos all have captions, most of which are kept at the National Museum of Georgia. These photos can be used to identify the state of urbanization and to revive the historical texture of Tehran. This article, aimed to study these photographs using historical archeology methods.