Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #HistoryOfIran

Most recents (10)

Look at these 10/10 extremely good bois

THREAD about birb in Iranian art 🦆🦚🐓🦅🐣

~ NA @eranudturan #HistoryofIran

patreon.com/eranudturan ImageImage
You’ll notice that #ducks are REALLY common in #Sogdian art, appearing primarily in #textile (there’s also a wooden painted panel from Kucha). They almost always hold a necklace in their beaks

~ NA @eranudturan #Historyofiran ImageImageImageImage
They sometimes appear in conjunction with pheasants, who often wear a necklace around their necks.

What’s this motif all about?

~ NA #HistoryofIran ImageImage
Read 13 tweets
You might think looking at these paintings that Panjakent society was a society of warriors.

While there were the odd few pieces of arms and armour found there, so far, no stables have been found.

These paintings usually adorned ordinary houses and often told stories.

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The most famous of these stories is the “Rostam cycle,” the earliest evidence of the famous hero from Ferdowsi’s #Shahnameh. Rostam wears his leopard skin coat and has an elongated skull, a hark back to the Hunnic / Hephthalite kings of Bactria. ~NA @eranudturan ImageImageImageImage
In this story, Rostam sets out to fight the divs (demons), encounters Avlad, has to fight a dragon, duels with the King of the divs, and fights the army of the divs. The whole composition bends around the corners of the room, and was probably copied from a scroll ~NA
Read 18 tweets
Ok, lets talk about Varakhsha, a town near #Bukhara that contained a painted palace and became the seat of the #Sogdian rulers of Bukhara from the Arab conquest (early 8th C) until the rise of the Samanids (late 9th C)

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~ NA @eranudturan #HistoryofIran ImageImageImageImage
The palace was built probably in the late 7th Century, but the most famous paintings, the Red Hall, date from the early 8th C from the reign of Tughshada, the son of the famous Queen of #Bukhara, about whom I wrote here: patreon.com/posts/who-was-…

~ NA ImageImageImage
The Red Hall has a row of men in Indian attire, riding saddled elephants, fighting a series of beasts - leopards, tigers, and dragons. The same scene is repeated again over the length of the wall, with variations in whom the elephant rider is fighting against. ~NA ImageImageImage
Read 16 tweets
Tonight's theme, the final theme:
The Incredible Shrinking Khomeini

From absence to austere founder to...kindly grandfather?
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#Day7
#WrapItUpYo
#ConstantChanges ImageImage
@Swarthy_Bastard We started out this week building on the work of @razaraz, applying the leverage of the historical method to give dimension to a country and revolution that, for the most part, remains flat in the analysis of "experts." For the scholar, tropes are opportunities.
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@Swarthy_Bastard @razaraz Iranian-backed-Shiite-militias. The ayatollahs. The mullahs. The notorious Evin prison and that wall, that stupid wall. I can think of no other topic in which tropes pass for analysis and rigor, in which the shorthand for content is *the* content.
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Read 16 tweets
Does a curriculum shape society or does it merely anticipate or reflect changes already underway? The past decade in Iran points to the surprising and sometimes fraught relationship of textbook lessons to the world outside of the classroom.
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#Day6

huffpost.com/entry/the-virt…
Here I focus on the ongoing struggle for #democracy in #Iran, reaching back well over a century, and its relationship to schooling. How might the IRI become more democratic in spite of itself? Does ed help or hinder?
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#SchooledToVoteAndToProtest

content.time.com/time/world/art… ImageImage
It's become increasingly clear that the tragic events of November '19 marked a turning point in the political development of Iran, as I discuss here for @RStatecraft...
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responsiblestatecraft.org/2020/01/17/why…

@LobeLog @tparsi
Read 24 tweets
Tonight's Episode: The Forlorn Arab as Foil for the Formation of Iranian National Identity

Starring: The Pahlavi & Qajar Dynasties
The IRI
An Adolescent from Palestine
An Orphan Child
A Very Supportive Iranian Friend

With a Very Special Guest Appearance by Baby Nilu
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#Day5 ImageImage
Iran after 1979 had proclaimed itself advocate and agent for the rescue and revival of the oppressed of the world, above all the community of believers or Ummat al-Islamiyah.
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@Swarthy_Bastard As such, the boundaries of Iran’s imagined community extended in the post-1979 era beyond the borders of the traditional “Guarded Domains” to include its Arab and Muslim neighbors, now conceived as both participants and beneficiaries of the Islamic Revolution.
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It's a new day, it's a #Nowruz. Let's go!
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#Day4
#ANationBeforeGod
#NewBornNewTargetedAdvertising ("BPA-free?") Image
@Swarthy_Bastard One of the high dramas of recent days was the back & forth between Pompeo & his counterpart
@JZarif. Pompeo accused the IRI of effectively holding Iran hostage, proclaiming that no one “has damaged Persian culture more...disrespecting Cyrus & holidays like Nowruz.”
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@Swarthy_Bastard @JZarif Putting aside the matter of whether & how Pompeo knows what 80 million Iranians “hold dear,” or the Trump administration’s creepy end times obsession with Cyrus (described well by @ishaantharoor)...
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#EschatologyForDummies

washingtonpost.com/world/2019/11/…
Read 15 tweets
@Swarthy_Bastard Regular readers of my stuff know that I frequently draw upon the insights of scholars such as Afshin Marashi, Kamran Aghaie, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Farzin Vejdani, and @aa51_ansari, who argue that the nation is *the* framework for understanding #Iran.
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@Swarthy_Bastard @aa51_ansari As I argue in this piece from last year for @monkeycageblog, political legitimacy within the Islamic Republic is measured by actors' commitment to the notion that Iran was once, and will once again be, great.
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washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-ca…

@abuaardvark
Read 11 tweets
There comes a moment for every rookie researcher when, having come across new & unexpected evidence in the archives, promptly falls out of his/her chair. That moment for me came early in the work, with the story of "Freedom," of Azadi.
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#Day2
#Ruptures
#ChattingWithChatterjee Image
@Swarthy_Bastard Through the metaphor of birds the 1979 Farsi primer presents the importance of freedom & independence in a simple & accessible way for 1st Graders. If captured, birds, like humans, "do everything possible to be free again. They like freedom. Humans also like to live free."
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@Swarthy_Bastard The story of freedom, however, takes a wild turn in 1982, as Iran's former revolutionaries realized that they must now deal with matters of state and governability. Freedom, it turns out, had limits.
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Read 29 tweets
It took nearly 8 years for Ahmad’s mom to get her pooshesh right. Bounding across the pages of the 1987 Farsi primer, their destination the 1st day of 2nd grade, mother & son represented the severity of virtue, of proper Islam, Islam as it was meant to be according to the IRI
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@Swarthy_Bastard Draped entirely in formless black, the mother embodied what we’ve come to expect from a postrevolutionary curriculum purportedly devoted to the inculcation of political Islam, her piety and devotion matched by the Second Grade textbook's back cover.
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@Swarthy_Bastard Young girls in full-length chadors, marching alongside defiant boys, fists raised beneath the accompanying text: "We with faith in God, with purity and good works...with hard work, sacrifice, and thrift, do defend independence, freedom, and the Islamic Republic."
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Read 18 tweets

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