The Safavid, Afshar, and Zand Periods

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.