مجله تاریخ ایران
سال هفتم شماره 1 (پیاپی 73، زمستان 1392)

Myths about the creation of humankind exist among different nations and cultures. In most of such myths, humankind shares the same parents – an idea which is apparently shared by many nations. There, however, exist certain differences, especially when it comes to how these parents come in being; who comes first: the man or the woman; or what the reason for their creation is. In order to attend to existing differences, the present study offers a comparative analysis of the myths of the creation of humankind found among Iranians, Semites, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, and Manicheans.

The Safavid shah, political administrators, and the clergy took it upon themselves to implement the divine command of enjoining good and forbidding evil (amr bi l-maʻrūf wa nahī ʻani l-munkar). Within the religious structure of the Safavid state, this was one of the duties of the shaykh al-islam. The present paper, however, presents a document according to which the ṣadr al-mamālek-e maḥrūseh appoints someone as moḥtaseb of Qazvīn with instructions not only to oversee the moral & social reforms, but also to handle the economic affairs of the bāzār. This study then explores all the data gathered on the moḥtaseb, both from the document and other library sources of the period. All in all, what this study deems necessary is to re-examine the roles played by various posts constituting the complex machinery of the Safavid government with great attention paid to the time and place within which such posts were defined and assigned.

In the early years of 1340s, armed and public uprising of Sorkhi, Qashqaee, Boyerahmad and Mamasani tribes was suppressed by the government. One means of reaction to such government measures included cultural campaign and reflection of emotions and passions in form of poems some of which are surveyed in the present study. Findings show that from the very beginning of the uprising, local poets and singers wrote and sung heroic verses in praise of tribes' warriors and expressed public concern about the why and how of the uprising, its religious and national aspects as well as its influential leaders and figures. Two of the poets sung their songs in Persian while others sung theirs in the local dialect. Through its application of the historical research methodology as well as a survey of history in literature by means of a literary analysis, the present article reads local poems of the uprising.

In the present study, major discourses of serial novels published from 1320 to 1332 are investigated. Identifying the dominant political discourses of the period including the Islamic, the Royalist, the Nationalist, and the Marxist discourse, it then attempts to find the links among such discourses in Hossein Sokhanyar’s (Masroor) Ten Ghezelbash. The theoretical framework upon which the data analysis here is based is Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. This analysis demonstrates that, among other things, there exists in this work a particular variety of the nationalist discourse within which both Islamic and Royalist discourses are articulated. It is worth mentioning that not only the modern dimensions of the major political discourses of the period in question – including the Nationalist, the Royalist, and the Islamic discourse – are not reflected in this work, but that there exists a certain kind of hostility towards them all. For example, there is no trace of the Marxist discourse within the discourses of this serial novel.

Siāghat and Siāgh was a particular method of writing numbers which was created over time through the simplification of the writing of Arabic numbers. This method of writing, which was popular for financial registration over a thousand years, was used among various social groups in Iran for fiscal operations and daily calculations. At the time of the constitutional government, however, this method of Siāgh-Writing was replaced by a new one in budget. Iran’s “Books of income and expenditure” (Dafater-e dakhl va kharj-e mamlekati) was discarded. Instead, the budget-writing system was put to good use. The present article explores the social changes at the end of the Qajar period and the reasons for the gradual decline in Siāgh-Writing in order to answer the following question: Does this change take place of necessity and due to the presence and influence of the foreign counselors? Or does it originate in the views and ideas of domestic reformists?

.In the 1970s, the second Pahlavi period, through its alliance with the west, played a very influential role in the international relations arena. Taking a historical-analytical perspective, the present article explores the status of Iran in the US foreign diplomacy from the Second World War to the early 1970 in order to elaborate on the why and how of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rapid rise to power. Besides, this study refers to the status of Iran in the diplomacy of the US presidents to further elaborate on the status of Iran in the US presidents’ doctrines and to analyze factors which contributed to Iran’s being an influential regional and universal power in the 1970s. Findings from an in-depth analysis of the US presidents’ diplomacy bears witness to the fact that issues regarding the importance of Iran’s oil resources, Iran’s being coterminous with USRR, and Iran’s capacity for filling the void caused by UK’s absence were among the most crucial factors influencing the US presidents’ doctrines and contributing to Iran’s rise to power in the 1970s.