By PATRICIA COHEN

Ralph Ellison wrote for 40 years without finishing his novel “Juneteenth.” Antoni Gaudí labored 43 years on the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona, but construction continues today. And in the annals of grand quixotica, Ehsan Yarshater also deserves a prominent chapter.

At 53, he embarked on his magnum opus, a definitive encyclopedia of Iranian history and culture. At 75, he started looking for a successor. He didn’t find one so he kept going himself. Now he’s 91. He’s up to “K.”

“My mission is to finish the encyclopedia,” he said recently from his office at Columbia University’s Center for Iranian Studies. He knows he won’t be able to do it personally, especially since the task keeps expanding as progress is made. There are topics to be added and entries to be updated. So Mr. Yarshater has tried to make sure the work will continue by establishing a private foundation with a $12 million endowment and finally choosing three scholars to replace him as general editor.

The sheer ambition of Mr. Yarshater’s vision is daunting. With money from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has worked to create the most comprehensive account of several millenniums of Iranian history, language and culture in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia.

“There is nothing like it” in scope or quality, said Ali Banuazizi, a professor at Boston College and a former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

Unlike a conventional encyclopedia, which briefly summarizes existing knowledge, Mr. Yarshater’s work, Encyclopedia Iranica, is producing original scholarship. “Most of the articles require research,” said Mr. Banuazizi, because they are topics no one has studied in much depth.

Mr. Yarshater has raised the bar further. “Our aim is that for each subject,” he said, “we should find the best person in the entire world.” With that in mind, he has been searching two and a half years for an expert to write about Sirjan and Rafsanjan, townships in the south of Iran.

Mr. Yarshater has not been back to Iran in 32 years, ever since the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran and established an Islamic republic in 1979. “The encyclopedia’s impartiality does not please the current Persian government,” Mr. Yarshater said in a low, breathy voice. A troublesome tremor that started in his hand several years ago has moved to his knees and vocal cords, slowing him down and compelling him to use an assistant. But otherwise he feels healthy. “My immune system is excellent,” he boasted.

For years Mr. Yarshater’s routine was to work late into the night, coming home only when his wife walked down the hallway from their apartment to the Iranian center to fetch him. “I don’t know many wives who would tolerate that,” he said appreciatively. (She died in 1999; the couple had no children.)

“I’ve seen him work 12 hours without a break,” said Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, who has known Mr. Yarshater for more than 40 years. He remembers a visit when Mr. Yarshater stayed up until 3 a.m. editing. Three hours later, he was in the shower, getting ready to return to work.

Mr. Yarshater expects others to have equal enthusiasm for the task. It took him 17 years to choose his replacements, rejecting one potential successor when he concluded that the man was “too concerned about the number of holidays he could take and the number of hours he would work.”

Now Mr. Yarshater works only until 9 p.m., staying long after his colleagues have turned off their lights. When he returns home, he indulges in his latest hobby: learning Russian.

The 1,480 contributors from around the world who, so far, have composed 6,500 entries are familiar with Mr. Yarshater’s relentlessness. “By hook or by crook, he gets you to do what he wants you to do,” Mr. Karimi-Hakkak said. (Eight hundred entries out of alphabetical order are posted in an online version.)

The managing editor, Ahmad Ashraf, said he spent a year working on an entry on social class. He received a $1,000 honorarium for his effort. “We are working here on half salary,” he said. “This is just a love of the work.”

Editing can be brutal. Until recently Mr. Yarshater meticulously checked and revised every entry. “Maybe I’m a faultfinder,” he conceded. He tries to praise colleagues and assistants, but said “it is not in my nature.”

Because the encyclopedia is primarily a scholarly reference tool, every fact must have multiple sources. “He wanted me to write several hundred entries,” said Roy Mottahedeh, a professor at Harvard. “I wrote one.”

As Mr. Mottahedeh noted, Mr. Yarshater is the last of a generation of scholars who believed it possible to master the grand sweep of human history, along with several languages.

Before Mr. Yarshater embarked on the encyclopedia, he traveled throughout Iran, studying obscure dialects, and wrote a groundbreaking work in linguistics. In the 1950s he took Western classics to his countrymen by establishing a translation and publishing institute.

“I remember growing up in Iran and reading these books,” Mr. Banuazizi said.

In 1961 Mr. Yarshater was appointed to teach Iranian studies at Columbia, the first full-time professor of Persian at an American university since World War II. He is known for a series of immense undertakings: He was the general editor of a 40-volume translation of al-Tabari’s 10th-century history of the world; editor of some of the Cambridge History of Iran; and the founding editor of a classic multivolume series on Persian history and language. In the mid-1990s he was troubled that Persian poetry — in his view, his people’s greatest cultural contribution — was being ignored. Most English speakers are familiar with Omar Khayyam, but they do not know about the 13th-century Rumi or the 10th-century Ferdowsi, who wrote “Shahnameh,” a national epic of 50,000 couplets.

So he embarked on a new 20-volume collection of Persian literature. “That was when I realized I was suffering from a kind of disease,” he said with a smile. “If something is to be done, I have a feeling that I should start doing it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/books/ehsan-yarshaters-encyclopedia-of-iranian-history.html

Joint announcement by

The Ehsan Yarshater Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University;

The Persian Heritage Foundation; and

The Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation

Professor Ehsan YarshaterIt is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Professor Ehsan Yarshater on September 2, 2018 in Fresno, California.

Endowed with a rare combination of a bold and broad scholarly vision, immense erudition, and unfailing determination, Professor Ehsan Yarshater transformed Iranian studies, creating an enduring legacy at Columbia University which advanced the scholarship and understanding of the histories, cultures and accomplishments of Iranian peoples.

Ehsan Yarshater was Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University and Director of its Center for Iranian Studies until 2016. He was born in Hamadan on April 3, 1920, but grew up mostly in Tehran, where he finished his secondary education at the top of his class.   This earned him a scholarship to study at the Faculty of Literature and the Teacher’s College of the University of Tehran, from which he graduated in 1941.  He entered the service of the Ministry of Education in 1942 as a teacher at Elmieh High School in Tehran and two years later was appointed Deputy Director of the Preparatory Educational College (Danesh-sara-ye Moqaddamati) in Tehran. In the meantime, he studied at the Faculty of Law and received a B.A. at the Legal Branch from that Faculty. At the same time he pursued his study of Persian literature at the University of Tehran and received a Doctorate in this field in 1947.

A year later, he received a scholarship from the British Council to continue his study in England. He opted to study Old and Middle Iranian Languages with the great German scholar W.B. Henning, received an M.A. in 1953 and returned to Iran the same year. He began to work on his doctoral dissertation and received his second Ph.D. from the University of London in 1960 by defending his dissertation, titled Southern Tati Dialects, during the meeting of the Congress of the Orientalists held in Moscow that year.

In 1953, he founded The [Royal] Institute for Translation and Publication (Bongah-e Tarjomeh va Nashr-e Ketab – BTNK), which went on to publish some 500 volumes of books before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, consisting of the Persian text series; the Iranology series, comprising translations of major works of Iranologists into Persian; translations of world classics works intended for young people and books for kindergarten children; and a series of books offering general knowledge in various fields. Many innovations of the BTNK were adopted by other publishers, such as the use of a logo and blurbs on all its publications.  The BTNK was the most important publisher to come into being in Iran and continued in that role as long as it operated.

Upon his return to Tehran in 1953, Dr. Yarshater was appointed first as an Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and the following year of Old Persian. In 1958, he was invited by Columbia University as Visiting Associate Professor of Indo-Iranian for two consecutive years. In 1960, he succeeded Professor Ebrahim Pourdavoud as Professor of Ancient Iranian Culture at the University of Tehran. In 1961 he was invited back by Columbia University to occupy the newly founded Chair of Iranian Studies, endowed by Hagop Kevorkian, a well-known Armenian art collector, and to develop the field.  In 1968, he founded the Center for Iranian Studies at that University.

Professor Yarshater authored several books and served as the Editor or General Editor of numerous scholarly works. His books include Persian Poetry in the Second Half of the 15th Century (in Persian, 1953), and Southern Tati Dialects (1970). He edited the third volume of Cambridge History of Iran, in two parts, covering the Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods (1983, 1986), and Persian Literature (1988).  He was the Founding General Editor of the Persian Text Series, the Persian Heritage Series, the Persian Studies Series, and the Modern Persian Literature Series.  The annotated translation of Tabari’s History in 40 volumes was completed under his General Editorship.

He was also the Founding Editor of the Encyclopædia Iranica, arguably the world’s most extensive scholarly, groundbreaking, and comprehensive reference work authored by multiple scholars. It is dedicated to the broad and inclusive study of all aspects of Iranian civilization in the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, offering a comprehensive and detailed overview of its subject.

He was also the Founding Editor of A History of Persian Literature. This 22-volume, authoritative survey was designed to reflect the status and significance of Persian literature as the single most important accomplishment of the Iranian people through its long history. It includes extensive, and carefully selected specimens of poetry and prose with translations and com.

On Tuesday, August 28 th , 2018, UNESCO published an announcement on the UNESCO’s website and from the World Heritage Centre on the receipt of numerous messages from citizens from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well as from other countries, expressing their concern regarding the ‘Proposed Scheme’ for the A303 Amesbury to Berwick Down project, located within the boundaries of the World Heritage site “Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites”, and the adverse impact it may have on the landscape, archaeological remains, hydrogeology and ecology of the site.

The news page on the UNESCO’s site stated that the World Heritage Centre wishes to thank (everyone) for emails and interest in the protection of this World Heritage site, and that they wish to reassure everyone that the competent authorities of the State Party of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as well as the Advisory Bodies to the World Heritage Convention (ICOMOS) and the World Heritage Centre are fully informed of the concerns raised by the citizens’ campaign. The state of conservation of the property is being monitored by all parties in accordance with the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention.
The news article also stated that the State Party of the United Kingdom and Great Britain has advised that it will manage the timing of the consent and other statutory processes for the A303 trunk road project to take into account Committee Decisions and to ensure that the World Heritage Centre, ICOMOS and the Committee can continue to contribute to the evaluation and decision-making processes at appropriate stages of the project.

When the go ahead for a controversial road tunnel near Stonehenge was given it was despite bitter opposition from archaeologists who fear that it could undermine the prehistoric world heritage site. However, the £1.6 billion project was welcomed by Historic England, the National Trust and English Heritage, the charity that manages the site, which suggested it would “restore peace and tranquility” to the area. The road going to Stonehenge, A303 narrows from a dual carriageway to a single carriageway for 35 miles of the road which links London to the South West, adding an hour to journey and at times creating so much congestion on the road. Of course, the proposals for a tunnel were first announced in 1989 but were repeatedly shelved, until the Government in London announced that it intended to build the tunnel and put the scheme out to public consultation. Department for Transport officials have insisted that the tunnel will avoid important archaeological sites and will not intrude on the view of the setting sun from Stonehenge during the winter solstice. But the activists are deeply concerned and have continuously objected to the plans. According to the Telegraph newspaper in London, University of Buckingham archaeologist David Jacques told the paper: “The chalk in the area across where the tunnel is planned is unstable so any large scale engineering work could result in Stonehenge subsiding.”
Earlier this year, the body which advises UNESCO had said that it “firmly objected ” to the proposals, which it claimed could risk the site’s World Heritage Status.
A spokesperson for the campaign group Stonehenge Alliance said: “The potential risk of loss of Stonehenge’s World Heritage Status casts shame upon our country and those responsible for caring for our heritage.”

The world’s second-largest national park is under threat from a destructive combination of climate change, oil and gas development and hydroelectric projects, according to a new report
from the Canadian government and published by a number of news outlets.
Wood Buffalo national park, which spans Alberta and the Northwest Territories, was placed on
UNESCO’s endangered list in 2017, and Canadian authorities were given one year to develop a solution to stem the rapid deterioration of the park. The UNESCO had warned that inaction would “constitute a case for recommending inscription of Wood Buffalo national park on the list of World Heritage in Danger” as reported by the Guardian.
In June this year (June 2018), ahead of the UNESCO meeting in Bahrain, the Canadian
government’s report confirmed that the problems are only getting worse. The extensive 4.5m hectare park has long been a home to the Cree and Dene indigenous peoples and it is also habitat for the largest free-roaming buffalo population in the world. 
Wood Buffalo – which became a world heritage site in 1983 – includes part of the world’s largest boreal river delta, formed by the Peace and the Athabasca rivers, which both run through the park and create the conditions for an extremely diverse ecosystem. It has been reported that in 2014, the Miskew Cree First Nation contacted UNESCO over fears the ecosystem was rapidly deteriorating. According to the Guardian, the community members no longer drink the fresh water from lakes or streams over fears of contamination and have reported that wild fish and game have developed abnormal flavors and deformities. While there is no clear explanation of
what has caused problems in the food sources, the Canadian government’s  environmental assessment report says high levels of mercury have been found in fish and bird eggs. 
In 2016 a study by UNESCO researchers warned that the pace and complexity of industrial development around the park was “exceptional” and found the proper mechanisms to adequately study its impacts were absent. The report also found that “the long-term future of the property’s two most iconic species, wood bison and whooping crane, remains uncertain and requires permanent attention” according to the Guardian newspaper. A 2017 another report by UNESCO and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature determined the problems facing Wood Buffalo were “far more complex and severe than previously thought”.
In addition, the new oil and gas operations in the northern reaches of Alberta continue to draw large amounts of water to sustain their operations. “Seasonal flows in the Athabasca River have declined over the past 50 years due to a combination of increased water withdrawals and (past) climate change,” said the Canadian government’s report. Experts on the UN committee also fear increased development in the region –including recently approved mining permits – creates near-unavoidable risks of chemical spills into the water system.
While Canada is trying to respond to the 2017 request of the World Heritage Committee to develop an action plan for the site, and is taking concrete steps to address the recommendations of the recent reactive monitoring mission to Wood Buffalo national park as the Canadian government has stated, environmentalists however, believe that by the time real actions could be taken, it will be too late for one of the most beautiful national parks in the world and a UNESCO Heritage Site.

SOFIA, BULGARIA—Archaeology in Bulgaria reports that researchers led by Ivan Hristov of Bulgaria’s National Museum of History discovered a Thracian fortress in the Black Sea, on currently submerged land that once connected St. Thomas Island to what is now Bulgaria. Last year, the team conducted a survey of the three-acre island and found a Thracian settlement with ritual pits, an early Byzantine settlement, and a monastery dating to the Late Middle Ages. The researchers suggest the island’s location—on the sea and right off the ancient road from Apollonia Pontica to Byzantium—made it prime real estate.

Read more:

http://archaeologyinbulgaria.com/2018/08/23/archaeologists-find-thracian-byzantine-settlements-medieval-monastery-on-bulgarias-st-thomas-island-in-black-sea/

Matthew G. Marsh (University of North Dakota) has written a book review in 2018 in the Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology for Touraj Daryaee’s “Sasanian Iran (224-651 CE)” [left image] and has noted the following with respect to the state of Sassanian studies: “… the last two decades have seen a marked increase in publications on the Sasanian Empire as authors such as Kaveh Farrokh, Touraj Daryaee, P. Pourshariati, among others, have opened up Sasanian studies to an English speaking audience”. [Marsh, M.G. (2018). Review of Touraj Daryaee. Sasanian Iran (224-651 CE). Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, Inc., 2008, xxiii + 140p., ISBN 978-1-56859-169-8. Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology, No. 5.2, pages 75-80].

Parvaneh Pourshariati’s book [above, at right] “Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran”, is also a comprehensive and in-depth text that provides a detailed examination of the factors leading to the fall of the Sassanian Empire in the 78th century CE.

Marsh’s review has also cited two of Kaveh Farrokh’s recent textbooks co-authored with top expert scholars such as Katarzyna Maksymiuk (Institute of History and International Relations, Faculty of Humanities, Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities, Poland), Gholamreza Karamian (Department of Archaeology & History Central Tehran Branch, Tehran Azad University) and Javier Sánchez-Gracia (HRM Ediciones, Zaragoza, Spain) and in the following section of his review (page 79, 2018) – APPENDIX II – ADDITIONAL WORKS ON THE SASANIAN EMPIRE:

Farrokh, K. (2017). Armies of Persia: the Sassanians. Barnsley, England: Pen & Sword Publishing.

By Laura Geggel

This golden bling dates back to Roman times. Credit: Courtesy of Jason Massey

An amateur historian just unearthed a treasure that would turn any archaeologist green with envy: an ornate gold ring dating back to ancient Roman times.

On the face of the ring — which is thought to be 24-karat gold — ancient artisans placed a black onyx with an engraving of the Roman god of victory driving two horses, 

Jason Massey, a member of the Detecting for Veterans group, discovered the detailed ring on July 29 while surveying a field near the town of Crewkerne, England. [Photos: Mosaic Glass Dishes and Bronze Jugs from Roman England]

The 1.7-ounce (48 grams) ring has yet to be formally analyzed, but experts at the British Museum said the ring likely dates to sometime between A.D. 200 and A.D. 300, the BBC reported.

At first, Massey thought the ring was a gold coin, because he found it in the middle of a stash of 60 ancient Roman coins that were buried in the field, he told the BBC. This site has proved fruitful for Massey; in November, he and his friends found a lead-lined coffin and more than 250 coins that also dated to the time of the Roman Empire, the BBC reported.

These lavish finds indicate that a “very high-status Roman villa” once sat at this site, Massey said.

“There’s [a] load of figures floating about [for the value of the ring], but we’re interested in the villa, who’s lived there and where they’ve come from and who the person was that wore this ring,” Massey said.

According to Ciorstaidh Hayward-Trevarthen, a finds liaison officer in Somerset and Dorset, England, “There are a couple of gold rings of that sort of date from Somerset, but they’re not common,” she told the BBC.

And, just as it is today, gold is “an indication that the owner is fairly wealthy,” Hayward-Trevarthen said.

This ring is far from the only Roman artifact uncovered by amateurs. In 2015, a man with a metal detector discovered an exquisitely preserved Roman-era grave in a village north of London, and in 2013, amateur archaeologists uncovered a massive network of tunnels under the Roman emperor Hadrian’s villa, in Tivoli, Italy.

Original article on Live Science.

For the last few years, the Islamic government of Iran has allowed large industrial-scale fishing vessels to become freely active in the Persian Gulf. This action has been faced with ongoing protest by the fishers of southern Iran, who complain that the presence and activities of Chinese fishers has resulted in their unemployment. Nevertheless, no one in the Islamic government has paid serious attention to these protests, sometimes denying the validity of such claims.

Kianoush Jahanbakhsh, one of the members of the City Council in Bandar Abbas Port, has supported people’s claims and announced: “Pay attention to what people say. What they say is truthful. The large Chinese vessels have raised the rate of joblessness and are annihilating generations of livestock in the Persian Gulf.”

He believes it his duty to speak on behalf of the people, but adds that his voice will likewise not be heard.

Another person who agrees with the above claims is Ahmad Moradi, a parliamentary delegate from Hormozgan, who says that, “The Chinese fishing vessels have cruelly curtailed the livelihood of the local fishers and have brought scarcity upon the main food source of the people. Now poor local people are being forced to mainly get their food from the market, with much higher prices.”