Titles and Emoluments in Safavid Iran: A Third Manual of Safavid Administration contains unique and important information on offices, ethnic attitudes and administrative developments in Iran’s Safavid government (1495–1720). It provides the official honorific title for each official (and the variations thereof), which show the importance of these titles in the intricate structure of social and political standing among the power elite. The commentary’s long database of all known administrative jurisdictions with names and dates of each of its governors gives us a more nuanced understanding of how the Safavid administration functioned, not only at the central level but also at the provincial one. This, together with a detailed index, allows the reader to find the names of individual governors and follow their careers.

Titles and Emoluments in Safavid Iran facilitates the analysis of power relations between the central and tribal interests as well as other groups, and the changes therein over time. It is an essential historical resource for all those interested in Iran’s Safavid era.

No writer’s work has been studied more closely or often than the plays of William Shakespeare, that master of language and peerless explorer of the human heart. Books about him number in the thousands, yet Shakespeare, Persia, and the East brings a truly fresh perspective to his genius. In the three dozen plays he composed between 1590 and 1612, Shakespeare ranged far and wide in his imagination, setting some of his tales in places as varied as Denmark, Venice and Athens—while drawing on a rich array of imagery and lore from lands further east. This remarkable book by a lifelong student of Shakespeare Cyrus Ghani reveals how rich a source of inspiration those exotic Eastern realms were for the playwright.

Elizabethan England was especially fascinated by Persia, whose deep-rooted culture was then flourishing under the Safavid dynasty. An Englishman first visited there in 1562, two years before Shakespeare’s birth. More contacts between England and Persia followed, prompted by hopes of a lucrative trading relationship and a possible military alliance against the Ottoman Turks. A pair of English adventurers, Anthony and Robert Sherley, spent years attempting to establish these ties, not always scrupulously, and their story was well known to England’s greatest dramatist.

To illuminate the creative uses Shakespeare made of the East, this book first looks at the life of the playwright himself, then at the dynasties that did so much to shape England and Persia in that tumultuous age. Other sections in the book profile key figures in the efforts to forge a connection between the two lands, with particular focus on the colorful Sherleys and their fatally ambitious sponsor, the Earl of Essex—a great admirer of Shakespeare. The final section of the book briefly describes the plays and cites their many allusions to the East—testimony that this literary giant was very much a man of his time.

The poems of four great and contemporary 14th century poets of Shiraz introduced and translated by Dick Davis. two men and one woman, the poets are Hafez, Obeyd-e Zakani and Jahan Khatun.