as museum-driven, object-oriented research. Throughout this period, france had a monopoly on archaeological research in the country, and they concentrated almost entirely on the great Elamite and Achaemenid site of Susa in Khuzistan. There was no expansion of archaeological research in Iran immediately after the hiatus caused by World War I because the French retained their monopoly for several more years and western archaeologists had much easier access to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, which had all become foreign mandates. In 1927, Reza Shah’s government radically revised the antiquities regulations, and the French monopoly was finally broken. The scope of archaeological research widened greatly thereafter as other international expeditions finally gained access, and there was also some general improvement in field methods, which, hitherto, had been primitive. Because of the pronounced geographical and environmental regionalization of the country, the main thrust of Iranian archaeology from then on has been the establishment of regional sequences.

World War II brought another hiatus in fieldwork, but after it, the discipline continued to improve, especially from the late 1950s onward with the launching of many major new projects and the first impact of “the new archaeology.” In addition to elaborating regional sequences, there was a strong focus on sophisticated regional surveys and on achieving a more comprehensive investigation of the entire country. All work came to an abrupt halt as a result of the 1979 revolution, and it is only recently that fieldwork, conducted by the Iranians themselves, has resumed in a very limited manner.

Knowledge of Iran’s Past Prior to the Late Nineteenth Century

By the end of the Sassanian period (a.d. 651), knowledge of the preceding Achaemenid (550–331 b.c.), Hellenistic/Seleucid (331–175 b.c.), Parthian (175 b.c.–a.d. 224), and Sassanian (a.d. 224–651) periods was virtually lost within Iran itself. Alexander the Great was (and still is) remembered in oral tradition and the Iranian national epic, the Shahnameh [Book of Kings]—but as the half-brother of Darius III. The advent of Islam in the mid-seventh century a.d. effectively discouraged any scholarly or popular interest in a pagan past. Only under the Qajar shahs in the nineteenth century did Iran experience a revival of concern with the Achaemenids and their successors. Although there was no systematic research, it became fashionable to copy Achaemenid reliefs for architectural decoration and to carve new reliefs in an archaic style. Indirect knowledge of Achaemenid Iran was preserved in Europe through the Old Testament and classical Greek sources, especially Herodotus (though he never visited the country) and Xenophon. Reports from other ancient Greek travelers and mercenaries and the testimony of expatriate Persian refugees in greece provided additional detail.

From the fourteenth century onward, European travelers brought back descriptions of the great ruined cities of persepolis and Pasargadae, though their true identity remained unknown until the beginning of the seventeenth century. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, an increasing number of European travelers, diplomats, and scholars—mostly French, British, and Dutch—reported in greater and greater detail about the standing monuments of Iran (Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Drijvers 1991; Wright 1977).

The first excavations occurred in 1825 when Colonel Stannus, the East India Company resident at Bushire, dug at Persepolis and made the first set of molds of sculptures along the north facade of the Apadana. Colonel Macdonald, head of a mission to Iran, also excavated at the site shortly afterward. In 1835, henry creswicke rawlinson, a former officer in the Indian army who had studied Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani, was posted to Kermanshah as a military adviser, and by 1837, he had produced fairly accurate copies of the trilingual (Old Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite) cuneiform relief carved by Darius I in about 520 b.c. on a rock face at Bisitun (Behistun). In the subsequent decade, Rawlinson unraveled the Old Persian and Akkadian texts. In 1840–1841, austen henry layard, later distinguished by his work at the great Neo-Assyrian capitals of nineveh and nimrud, traveled throughout western Iran and visited