EDITORS:

    EDITOR
    Ehsan Yarshater
    Professor Ehsan Yarshater is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University and Director of its Center for Iranian Studies.

    He has authored and served as the editor of numerous scholarly works. Among others he has authored Persian Poetry in the Second Half of the 15th Century (1953), Southern Tati Dialects (1970), and has edited the third volume of Cambridge History of Iran, in two parts, covering the Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods (1983,1986), and Persian Literature (1988). He is the General Editor of the 40-volume Tabari Translation Project, and the Founding Editor of the Persian Text Series, the Persian Heritage Series and the Persian Studies Series. Lecture series in his name have been instituted at Harvard, the University of London, and the University of California at Los Angeles.

    ASSOCIATE EDITOR
    Dr. Nicholas Sims-Williams
    is currently Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He studied Iranian languages and Sanskrit at Cambridge University and went on to do a PhD there under Dr Ilya Gershevitch, his thesis being an edition of a fragmentary manuscript containing Christian texts translated from Syriac into Sogdian, the Iranian language of medieval Samarkand. This was later published as The Christian Sogdian manuscript C2, Berlin 1985, and awarded the Prix Ghirshman of the Institut de France.

    Professor Sims-Williams was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1988 and is also a member of the French and Austrian Academies. He is particularly interested in the Middle Iranian languages of pre-Islamic Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, being equally fascinated by the languages themselves, with their Indo-European roots, and by their Central Asian setting, with its stimulating mixture of languages, cultures, and religions. At present he is engaged in deciphering and publishing a cache of documents in the little-known Bactrian language (see Bactrian documents from Northern Afghanistan, I: Legal and economic documents, Oxford, 2000).

    MANAGING EDITOR
    Ahmad Ashraf
    Professor Ashraf has taught sociology and social history of Persia at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Tehran University. He is the author of several books and numerous articles, including Historical Obstacles to the Development of Capitalism in Iran (1980). His writings have covered such topics as social hierarchies in Persia, traditon & modernity, Iranian national identity, agrarian relations in Persia, and charismatic leadership and theocratic rule in postrevolutionary Persia. Prof. Ashraf has served on the editorial board of the Iranian Studies, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and Iran-Nameh. Since 1992, he has served as a Trustee-at-Large of the American Institute of Iranian Studies.
    SENIOR ASSISTANT EDITOR
    Manuchehr Kasheff
    A distinguished instructor of Persian, Mr. Manouchehr Kasheff has been teaching at Columbia University since 1974. He is the Secretary and Treasurer of the American Association of Teachers of Persian, and has written a number of articles for the Encyclopædia Iranica, the Encyclopædia of Asian Studies, and Iran-Shenasi. He has translated books by A.J. Arberry, S. Runciman and T.S. Eliot into Persian.
    SENIOR ASSISTANT EDITOR
    Mohsen Ashtiany
    A graduate of University of St. Andrews and Oxford University, Mohsen Ashtiany has taught Persian literature and history at Harvard University, Oxford University, University of Manchester and the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of a number of articles in the field of Persian studies. His current project is a monograph entitled Studies in Classical Persian Literature.