Bibliography
for Persia.

General works

The whole sweep

• Daryaee, Touraj, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. The standard one-volume reference covering all periods.
• Axworthy, Michael. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 2008. The accessible single-volume narrative for general readers.
• Foltz, Richard. Iran in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Chapter I — Cyrus and the Achaemenids

The first world empire

• Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Trans. Peter T. Daniels. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002. The canonical modern history of the Achaemenid period, 1,200 pages.
• Kuhrt, Amélie. The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 2007. All the primary sources in translation.
• Wiesehöfer, Josef. Ancient Persia. Trans. Azizeh Azodi. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.
• The Cyrus Cylinder is on display at the British Museum; the full Akkadian text and translation are at www.britishmuseum.org.
• Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Tom Holland. London: Penguin Classics, 2013. The principal Greek-language source on Achaemenid Persia.

Chapter II — Alexander, the Seleucids, the Parthians

Greek and Parthian centuries

• Olbrycht, Marek Jan. Early Arsakid Parthia (ca. 250–165 B.C.). Leiden: Brill, 2021.
• Sherwin-White, Susan, and Amélie Kuhrt. From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire. London: Duckworth, 1993.
• Curtis, Vesta Sarkhosh, and Sarah Stewart, eds. The Age of the Parthians. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.

Chapter III — The Sasanian Empire

The silver age

• Daryaee, Touraj. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.
• Pourshariati, Parvaneh. Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.
• Canepa, Matthew P. The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship Between Rome and Sasanian Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Chapter IV — The Arab Conquest and the Persianate Caliphate

From conquest to revival

• Frye, Richard N. The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East. London: Phoenix, 2000.
• Kennedy, Hugh. The Great Arab Conquests. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
• Hoyland, Robert G. In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Ferdowsi. Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. Trans. Dick Davis. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. The Persian national epic, completed c. 1010.

Chapters V–VII — Medieval and early-modern Persia

Turkic, Mongol, Safavid, Afshar, Zand

• Morgan, David. The Mongols. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
• Manz, Beatrice Forbes. The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Newman, Andrew J. Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
• Matthee, Rudi. Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011.
• Axworthy, Michael. The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
• Perry, John R. Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran, 1747–1779. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Chapter VIII — The Qajars and the Long Nineteenth Century

Squeezed between empires

• Amanat, Abbas. Iran: A Modern History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. The standard one-volume modern history; 1,000 pages, the strongest single English-language treatment of the Qajar and Pahlavi periods.
• Keddie, Nikki R. Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
• Bayat, Mangol. Iran's First Revolution: Shi'ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1909. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Chapter IX — The Pahlavis

Reza Shah, Mossadegh, Mohammad Reza

• Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Abrahamian, Ervand. The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations. New York: The New Press, 2013. The standard treatment of Operation Ajax with the post-2013 CIA archival material.
• Milani, Abbas. The Shah. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
• Mottahedeh, Roy. The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
• Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah's Men. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003. Journalistic but the popular standard account of the 1953 coup.

Chapter X — After Persia

The Islamic Republic and the diaspora

• Bakhash, Shaul. The Reign of the Ayatollahs. New York: Basic Books, 1984. The early canonical account of the post-revolution period; later reprinted with updates.
• Razoux, Pierre. The Iran-Iraq War. Trans. Nicholas Elliott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Mottahedeh, Negar. #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Primary documents

The voices of the period

• Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations. Trans. Hamid Algar. Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981.
• Behrouzan, Orkideh. Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Recent oral history of the post-1979 generation.
• Shamlou, Ahmad, et al. A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans. Ed. Persis M. Karim. New York: George Braziller, 1999.