This volume includes a brief historical introduction (David Durand-Guédy, pp. 1–7) and ten contributions, five in English, five in French, all written from a more or less archaeological perspective, with some contributions tending to geography, some towards history, but in all, this is a book on the archaeology of Khurasan or Greater Khurasan. The timeframe spans the entire period from the third millennium bc to the Mongol invasion in the 13th century ad, but most of the contributions concentrate on the early Islamic period. Some cities get more attention than others: Nishapur is the focus in four articles, Merv, Herat and Nisa in one each. The reason behind this is that the volume brings together representatives of recent archaeological research, excavations and surveys and other fieldwork (e.g. in geomorphology) as well as museum work (in the Metropolitan Museum, New York) conducted over the last few years. Therefore, the book must be hailed as a very welcome reminder that archaeological work in Iran (and partly, Afghanistan), even if it has been muted by many difficulties, has not completely come to a halt. The book is richly illustrated (pp. 181–310), most of the illustrations are in colour, but some of them are reproduced at so small a scale that it is difficult to distinguish even major features.
Due to space constrictions, it is not possible to review all contributions. I will concentrate on those which I found most interesting for the historian of early Islamic Khorasan.
Rocco Rante opens the book with a study on “Khorasan Proper” and “Greater Khorasan” (pp. 9–25). He shows that the medieval sources make a distinction between the two. Transoxania is seen as a kind of northern extension of the area which reaches Sistan and Kerman in the south. Greater Khorasan originated only in the Islamic period.
Paul Wordsworth deals with “Merv on Khorasanian trade routes from the 10th–13th centuries” (pp. 51–62). This is part of a project revisiting the routes across the Karakum desert. What was new for me was that the stages on the road between Merv and the Amu Darya were not simply caravanserais, but full settlements, even towns, and that they probably had an extended agricultural hinterland. The example given is Dandanakan (Dandānaqān), of particular interest because it was the site of the decisive battle that opened the way to Iran to the Seljuq Turks (1040, Wordsworth does not mention this detail). The written sources convey the impression that the Seljuqs won because they were better able to cope with desert conditions, and in particular the extreme drought which prevailed in that month of May. The “unpublished Persian manuscript” mentioned (p. 53, n. 3) is the anonymous “Regions of the World” (Ḥudūd al-ʿālam) published in English translation by Minorsky in 1937; the Persian original was edited by Sutudeh in 1962. Indeed, this source also talks about desert in that region. In view of the thesis recently proposed by Richard Bulliet, namely, that a much colder climate afflicted Iranian agriculture from c. 1000 on, it would be of utmost interest to find out whether indeed places such as Dandānaqān could support an urban population from local agriculture, and why the town apparently stopped flourishing sometime in the twelfth century, that is, before the Mongol invasion.
Ute Franke's contribution is entitled “Ancient Herat revisited. New data from recent archeological fieldwork” (pp. 63–88). Her main discovery is that the site of Herat seems to have been occupied much longer than was hitherto thought, with findings going back to the middle of the first millennium bc. Moreover, it remains open – pending further research – which part of the actual site was the first, and whether indeed the history of the city was as continuous as is generally believed.
The late Chahryar Adle returns to the history of architecture in his “Trois mosquées du début de l’ère islamique au Grand Khorasan” (pp. 89–114). His three case studies include the mosque built on the site of the shrine of Bāyazīd Bisṭāmī (at Bastam/Bisṭām), the mosque of Noh-Gonbadan or Haji Piyadah at Balkh, and finally at Zuzan. For me, two points regarding Zuzan were of particular interest: first, the assumption that men called raʾīs were at the head of the town (Zuzan was only a small provincial town) and were also the patrons of major buildings such as the earlier mosques. Second, the career of the malik of Zuzan, Abū Bakr b. ʿAlī al-Zūzanī (d. 1218). This person has yet to be integrated into the main narrative of dynastic history in the last decades of pre-Mongol Iran.
Among the four contributions dealing with Nishapur, it is the short overview which has been most rewarding to me: Haeedeh Laleh, Abolfazl Mokarramifar and Zahra Lorzadeh, “Le paysage urbain de Nishapur” (pp. 115–23). This is the only contribution which sees the unity of city and region in the way Jean Aubin did, and therefore the authors concentrate on the rural sites as much as on the urban ones. Moreover, they make it clear that Nishapur changed its place three times so that there are four stages in the history of the city.
The volume thus takes an important step in bringing archaeology and history together, joining geography and methodology (exact sciences) on the way. This is indeed a perspective that has to be continued. Maybe the next time the initiative could come from historians?
There are some critical remarks: the index is so short as to be hardly of any use (three-and-a-half pages). No attempt has been made to make authors of Arabic and Persian sources appear in the same form (e.g. there are different forms for Ibn Ḥawqal, but never this one). The editing of contributions by non-native speakers of the relevant language (both English and French) has been unsatisfactory.
