Series: Ilex

In Erin and Iran, ten essays by North American and European scholars discuss parallel themes in and interactions between Irish and Iranian cultures. In the first section three essays explore common elements in pre-Christian Irish and pre-Islamic Iranian mythologies, common elements that have often been pointed out by scholars of Indo-European mythology but rarely examined in detail. In the following section four essays address literary subjects, ranging from medieval romances such as Tristan and Isolde and Vis and Ramin to twentieth-century novels such as James Joyce's Ulysses and Simin Daneshvar's Savushun. In the last section three nineteenth-century travelogues are presented, two written by Irish travelers to Iran and one written by an Indo-Persian traveler to Ireland. Together, these studies constitute the first-ever collection of articles dealing with cultural encounters between the Irish and the Iranians.

Onomastic Reforms

by H. E. Chehabi

Published 7 December 2020

In the mid-1920s, the Iranian state legislated a wide-ranging reform of the citizenry's naming practices. Honorary titles and honorifics were abolished, family names were made obligatory, and an office for registering names and citizens' life events (birth, marriage, divorce, and death) was established. The main motivation for this onomastic reform was conscription, which necessitated knowledge of young men's ages, identities, and whereabouts. The introduction of conscription was itself part of the state-building efforts that followed the weakening of the central government induced by the First World War.

In Onomastic Reforms, H. E. Chehabi explains the traditional naming practices of Iranians before the reform, describes the public debates surrounding their obsolescence, traces the legislative measures and decrees that constituted the reform, and explores the ways Iranians chose or invented surnames for themselves.