Ancient Iran

One major challenge of the study of ancient Iran is that it does not exist in Western academia as a discrete field of study. Prehistory, for example, which ends in the 3rd millennium in Elam but persists into the 1st millennium bce elsewhere on the Iranian plateau, has been studied primarily by anthropologists, the Iron Age by Assyriologists, the Parthians by classical archaeologists, and the Sasanians by scholars of Iranian studies. As a result, ancient Iran does not belong to any individual academic discipline, and in the context of Near Eastern studies, perhaps its most obvious home, it has been treated largely as an ancillary field. Thus Iran has seen less archaeological fieldwork, including excavation, regional survey, and study of standing architectural remains, than other parts of the Near East. This problem has been further compounded by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which effectively barred foreign archaeologists from the country and severed contacts between them and their Iranian colleagues. This situation has improved in recent decades, but there are nevertheless relatively few scholars working on ancient Iran and comparatively little scholarship on its architecture, especially compared to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, or the Mediterranean. To study Iranian architecture, therefore, it is necessary to extract relevant examples from archaeological reports, both preliminary and final. This is especially true for prehistoric periods before the advent of stone masonry, but even for the Sasanian period most architectural scholarship documents individual sites or buildings. The titles listed here thus provide only the raw material for studying ancient Iranian architecture. This bibliography is dedicated to the memory of David Stronach (b. 1931–d. 2020), a prolific and consummate archaeologist and scholar whose contributions to the study of Iranian architecture have been enormous.