Rethinking history: authorial process in Mongol Iran

Wider research contextheoretical framework Rethinking history engages the field of Mongol-era cultural history by revealing changing ideas about the Mongols among Persian historians. It adds to scholarship on Persian historiography through original research into texts from a pivotal moment in the development of that genre. Through its innovative use of unique manuscripts of historical texts, it expands the field of manuscript studies. It capitalizes on the subjective nature of historical chronicles to understand how individual authors perceptions of Mongol sovereignty changed over time. Hypotheses/research questions/objectives The post-modern recognition that texts reflect their authors political and mental circumstances has allowed historians to use discrepancies between sources to compare their authors personal perspectives. However, studies of individual works too often assume the existence of a single original text. It is hypothesized that variants of a text found in surviving manuscript copies might offer insight into the authors evolving thoughts about the role of the Mongols in history. This project examines three historical chronicles where variations were introduced in the period immediately after they were first written to track the gradual acculturation of the Mongols through the works written by their Persian subjects. Approach/methods For each of the texts chosen for study, manuscript copies will be compared to determine the significance and order of their variants. A system for tracking variants across manuscripts and sorting these into a schema of textual change over time was developed in a previous study of a separate historical chronicle. The methods developed ad hoc for that project can be refined and applied systematically across texts, allowing them to be integrated into a general study of authorial process in Mongol Iran. Level of originality/innovation This project allows individual texts to illustrate historical change over time. Modern scholarship is premised on the stability of print publication. However, textual instability is a factor of any non-print culture, including pre-modern Persian historical writing. Rather than try to eliminate that instability, this project highlights it to advance our understanding of the author and his surroundings.

"Rethinking History" aimed to reconstruct changing ideas about history and sovereignty in Iran between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by examining manuscript witnesses of historical chronicles written during the period. This approach treats manuscript variation as an opportunity to study a text's early life, rather than an obstacle to finding a "correct" or "original" version. The proposal included three discrete projects. While the results have diverged somewhat from those anticipated, they align with the original intent to conduct focused micro-histories of individual texts to better understand intellectual culture and practice in Mongol Iran. The first project concerns a thirteenth-century rendition of a Zoroastrian astrological apocalyptic tradition that dates back to the early Islamic period. As this tradition was periodically revised, it came to reflect the historical thinking of each period in which surviving witnesses were created. This project has yielded a co-authored book, The Book of Jamasp the Sage: a Zoroastrian Apocalypse from Mongol Iran, planned for publication with Edinburgh University Press in 2026, and a forthcoming chapter on the astrology and astral magic found in a thirteenth-century grimoire now in Paris. It has also spawned a new research initiative examining non-technical applications of astrological lore in the period. Another project aimed at examining various histories of the Salghurid dynasty that ruled southern Iran from 1148 until 1282. Four versions of their history were prepared by scholar-bureaucrats working at the Mongol court in northern Iran. Three of these texts have been edited and submitted to the project, "Knowledge, Information, Technology, & the Arabic Book" (KITAB) for inclusion in their corpus of machine-readable Arabic-script texts. Using the KITAB tools for text analysis, I will be able to analyse the extent and nature of text reuse among these three histories. The end result will be a case study in how Mongol-era Persian scholars read and used each other's work. The final proposed project concerned the Collection of Lineages, which Muhammad b. Ali Shabankarai rewrote twice for different patrons over a period of intense political change during the collapse of the Mongol state in Iran. However, war in Ukraine made a crucial manuscript in St. Petersburg inaccessible, and accessible copies were deemed to not exhibit enough variation to yield significant results. Instead, I conducted close readings of manuscripts of Rashid al-Din's Blessed History of Ghazan, producing four articles reconstructing important moments in the early history of the text. Two articles have been published, a third is in press, and a fourth is currently under revision for inclusion in a forthcoming volume. Together, they require us to reconsider questions about the creation and early reception of this most important history of the Mongols.