Iran [antikvár]

The Dream of Shah AbbasIsfahan is half the world. So went the saying after the provincial town of Isfahan had, almost overnight, become one of the handsomest cities of the sixteenth century and the capital of one of the century's most remarkable monarchs, Shah Abbas the Great. Although he had formidable competition among his contemporariesQueen Elizabeth I of England, Emperor Charles V of Spain, and Sultan Suleiman of TurkeyShah Abbas manifestly holds his own as warrior, diplomat, administrator, builder, patron of the arts and sciences, and ruler of wisdom and tolerance.But Shah Abbas comes late in Isfahan's history, and to call it a provincial town before he made it his capital is perhaps to do it something of an injustice, since owing to its strategic geographical position it was a place of importance as far back as the third millennium b.c. That was the time when Iranians separated into two distinct groups, one heading toward the west into Media, the other to the south into what the outside world for many centuries called Persia (from Parsa or Fars, the name of the southwestern part of Iran). The Iranians themselves, however, called the region Aryana, "land of the Aryans," or in middle Persian, Eran, and now officially Iran.The first known establishment of any importance of these southern Iranians was Isfahan. Indeed, it was here that the cele-7