This substantial and largely unknown Persian chronicle of the reign of Shah 'Abbas I (1587-1629) exists in a unique manuscript, recently discovered in the Library of Christ's College, Cambridge. Its author, Fazl-Allah Khuzani Isfahani, member of an important bureaucratic family, provides an insider's account of this crucial period in Persian history, with a wealth of detail about the central and provincial administration and much information not found in other sources. Shortly after the succession of Shah Safi I, Fazl-Allah left for India, where he continued to work on his chronicle. So far,...

Edgard Blochet (1870-1937), the French orientalist, left his mark in several areas of Middle Eastern and Asian studies. In 1910 his introduction to Rashīd al-Dīn's Jāmi' al-tawārīkh was published as volume XII in the E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Series. The Jāmi' al-tawārīkh has been described as the first 'world history'; written at the start of the fourteenth century, in the Mongol Ilkhanate in Persia, it describes cultures and major events in world history from China to Europe and in addition, it covers Mongol history.

Introduction A l'histoire des...

Guy Le Strange (1854-1933) pioneered the study of the historical geography of the Middle East, and especially Persia, notably in his Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge, 1905) and the present work which contains an English translation of Mustaufī's Nuzhat al-qulūb

Ḥamd-Allāh Mustaufī was a fourteenth-century historian and geographer. His Nuzhat al-qulūb (Hearts' delight) sets out to give a description of Iran in the form of a gazetteer. Despite some repetition of previous accounts, there are many snippets of up to date information embedded in his...

MAzandarAn and AstarAbAd was first published as volume VII of the new series of the E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Series (1928). Much of the data was retrieved in the course of two expeditions by the author, one in spring of 1908 and the other between November 1909 and January 1910, the latter providing the chronological framework for Rabino's observations along his itinerary. It is a remarkable work, the product of many years of the careful accumulation of information about a region cut off from the Iranian Plateau by the formidable barrier of the Alburz Mountains and enjoying a complex history...