The Discovery of the Iranian Culture by French Scholars during the Seventeenth Century ( draft for unpublished proceedings of the conference "The Study of Persian Culture in the West—Sixteenth to Early Twentieth Century", St Petersbourg, 24-27 June 2004) (original) (raw)
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Traces of Iran's Culture in: Europe and America
This article is trying to narrate the "Forgotten Story of the Iranian Civilization" in the world. That starts from 10,000 years, and it continues to do so, up to the present. In order to avoid too much details, we will try to limit ourselves to the most important aspects, and with the most significant cultural parts, that this great country has played, in the world stage, in general, and more specifically, in Europe, and the Americas. We will try to study the religious, linguistic, cultural, historical and social influences of Iran/ancient Persia/ in the American continent.
Iranian Studies, 1987
There is, in France, a pronounced awareness of an “Iranian world” that can be identified in terms of cultural, linguistic, ethnic (Aryan peoples) or geographic (highlands, cold winters) characteristics common to the civilizations of all Iranian-speaking peoples living in Afghanistan, Iran, Kurdistan or south central USSR, in particular, Tajikistan. This “world” stands in contrast to the Arab, Indian and Turkish ones. The notion of a Middle East extending from Casablanca to Kabul does not exist in French. Newspapers usually refer to the Moslem lands to the south and east of the Mediterranean as the “Arab world,” as if Turkish- and Persian-speaking peoples were peripheral minorities therein.Owing to its colonial and military heritage, France has long given special importance to the Maghrib (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria), the Near East (Lebanon and Syria, in particular) and, as a result of the Napoleonic campaigns and Champollion's expeditions, Egypt.
The printed word, the graven image, the learned traveller, and the stage 1. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow book lovers, it is an honor to be with you tonight and to have been given the opportunity to indulge several of my longstanding interests, pre-Islamic Iran and the intellectual history of scholarship about a part of the world that has fascinated me for many years. Tonight I wish to touch on four aspects of Western interest in pre-Islamic Iran dating from the mediaeval era to the mid-18th century. My focus is, first, on Latin and Greek sources on Iran that were available in Europe before the earliest eyewitness accounts of the country and its antiquities were published; second, the graven image, i.e. illustrations of pre-Islamic Iranian monuments published in Western sources, from the late 15 th to the early 18th century; the learned traveller, i.e. discussions of sites and monuments written by visitors to Iran, with a focus on the Achaemenid capital Persepolis; and finally, theatrical and operatic treatments of ancient Iran in Europe, from the beginnings of Elizabethan tragedy in the 16th century to Italian opera of the 17th and 18 th centuries. With those preliminaries out of the way, let us take a look at the Biblical and Classical sources on pre-Islamic Iran that first exposed European readers and church goers to the ancient peoples of ancient Iran. 2. The conversion of Europe's many diverse peoples to Christianity, beginning in the 4th century, exposed a large number of Europeans to the Old Latin Bible or Vetus Latina, which was quickly superseded by St Jerome's Latin translation of 2 the Bible known as the Vulgate. This was an important source on pre-Islamic Iran. 3. The principle events described in the Book of Esther, for example, took place at Susa, or Shushan the palace in the province of Elam, a major site in southwestern Iran that has been excavated off and on since the mid-19th century. Elam figures prominently in the Book of Jeremiah and Jews from Elam were present in Jerusalem at Pentecost, according to the Book of Acts (2:9). The Medes and Persians are also present in the Old Testament, as are both Cyrus the Great and Darius I. But while the Old and New Testament preserve some intelligence on pre-Islamic Iran, the Bible had only a minuscule amount of information on Iran compared to the Classical sources. 4. Now you might think, because it dwells so much on the Persian Empire, that Herodotus' Histories would have been the primary source of European knowledge about Iran before printing was invented at Subiaco, near Rome, in 1464. But Herodotus wrote in Greek, a language that few people in mediaeval Europe could read, a fact illustrated by the presence of only 9 manuscripts of Herodotus in Greek dating from the 10th through the 14th century in all of Europe. Latin's much greater currency was guaranteed because it was the language of the Roman Church. As the Belgian mediaevalist Marc Laureys put it, 'the Latin language...was endowed with a sacred dimension that surpassed the confines of temporal history and gave it an inherent and timeless prevalence over all other languages.' In this situation, therefore, educated Western readers were much more
The Safavids under Western Eyes: Seventeenth-Century European Travelers to Iran
Journal of Early Modern History, 13, 2009
Th is essay takes a fresh look at the voluminous yet understudied Western travel writing about 17th-century Iran. It argues that, after this material is properly subjected to close scrutiny for authorial bias, interest and intertexuality, it remains exceedingly valuable for the information it provides on Safavid Iran. Early modern European travelers to Iran brought remnants of past religious and cultural prejudice with them, yet the best explored the country with an open eye, an appreciation for diff erence, and even a critical perspective on their own culture. Th ey also provide remarkable, at times unique information about Iran and it inhabitants, opening up aspects of Safavid left uncovered by indigenous sources.