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TEHRAN, capital city of Iran. i. A PERSIAN CITY AT THE FOOT OF THE ALBORZ
At the northern borders of Iran’s arid central plateau, the
southern foothills of the Alborz chain, which have the advantage of
major precipitations, are particularly suitable for human settlements.
The abundance of water running down the mountain, either as seasonal
and occasional or perennially flowing rivers, or as underground waters,
has led to the development of a more or less large cultivated strip,
lined by numerous settlements forming a regular series from Azerbaijan
across to Khorasan. Tehran is part of this group of settlements. Its
destiny in the long term has been that of a modest village which
successive historical circumstances of a most exceptional kind have
gradually raised first to the status of a merely regional city, and
afterwards to that of the country’s metropolis.
Troglodyte gardeners. In this arable
strip of the foothills, there was nothing inherently advantageous in
Tehran’s specific location. On the contrary, the town had no
particularly important water resources. It was not situated at the
outlet, but was more or less equidistant from the two main hydrographic
basins which collected the waters coming down the mountains: those of
the Karaj river, which, at about 40 kilometers to the west, had given
birth to the important town of Karaj; and those of the Jājerud, about
thirty kilometers east. The latter, having crossed the little chain
parallel to the main mountain axis of the ante-Alborz, fed the
important town of Varāmin and the villages in the plain around it.
Between these two urban areas, there was only one important city: this
was Ray, at the westernmost point of the ante-Alborz, above the
junction of the road between two variants, north and south of the
secondary range (figure 1). It was here that there soon arose the city
of Ray, watered by the right-hand tributaries of the Jājerud. It was
one of the most important centers of Islamic Persia until its
destruction by the Mongol invasion in the early 13th century. Tehran
was for a long time merely a large village, about ten kilometers north
of Ray and largely dependent on it.
The site was a plain with a slight southward slope (the
medium slope is about 13% between Tajriš, at an altitude of 1,310
meters to the north at the foot of the mountains, and the railway
station, at the southern end of the old city of Tehran, which is 1,100
meters high). The initial establishment had settled at the limit
between the two zones of characteristic plain formations: coarse and
permeable gravel in the north, finer and more impermeable alluvial
deposits in the south. These formed the transition with the barren
desert (kavir), at the level of which the subterranean sheets,
which were still situated at the depth of some dozens of meters to the
north of the city, came to approach the ground surface, making drainage
and construction more difficult. On foothills that were long occupied
by agricultural settlements (the important Neolithic site of about
6,000 BCE at Čašma(-ye) ʿAli [q.v.] is situated in Ray itself), relics
of ceramics were found at various points of the present city of Tehran,
and at Qayṭariya and Darrus north-west of the old town (data and
bibliography in Adle, pp. 19-20). These witness the existence of a
settlement developed on the Tehran site at the period when the Aryans
arrived (ca. 1200-1000 BCE).
This development was no doubt originally connected with
the utilization of current surface waters running down the glacis of
the foothills in numerous rivulets attached to the Jājerud system. In
the 17th century, the English traveler Sir Thomas Herbert (p. 214)
could still discern two branches of them, separating the two parts of
the city. But the development of the plain and the establishment of a
steady network of irrigation channels, were particularly risky here.
The surface of the piedmont is subject, at times of major
precipitations, to exceptionally destructive sheet-floods. One
particularly well-remembered occurrence ravaged the northern outskirts
of the city on May 6th 1869 (Gurney, pp. 60-61, with full details. It
caused considerable destruction, making havoc with the existing natural
networks of water discharge. Ever since the overall technique of
subterranean draining galleries (kāriz) became common in the
first millennium BCE, it helped to check the volatile aspects of
surface flows and regularized the water supply. In this respect, they
still play a crucial role even now (see below). As for unirrigated
(dry) farming (deymi), they merely provided a very precarious
contribution: the average precipitation (200 millimeters a year at
Tehran airport for the period 1943-68; Bahrāmbeygi, 1977, p. 6), places
the city at the borderline of profitability for any cultivation of
crops relying solely on rainfall.
It was thus as an “inhabited garden,” to use Chahryar
Adle’s felicitous phrase, (1992, p. 15), benefiting from its water
resources and cultivations and contributing to the food supplies of the
neighboring city of Ray, that Tehran first appeared in historical texts
(though its origins were certainly much older), in the nesba of
a certain Abū ʿAbd-Allāh Moḥammad b. Ḥammād al-Ṭehrāni al-Rāzi. This
scholar died in ʿAskalān in Palestine in 261/874-5 or 271/884-5, and is
mentioned in the history of Baghdad (II, p. 271; Karimān, 1976, pp.
12-15) by Ḵaṭib-e Baḡdādi (d. 1071). The earliest extant reference
mentioning specifically to the locality itself, a passing reference to
the excellence of ‘Ṭehrāni’ pomegranates, is in Ebn al-Balḵi’s Fārs-nāma, (p. 134), written between 500 –510/1108-1116. Nothing is known about more ancient periods.
The identification proposed by Michaël Jan de Goeje, in a note to his edition of Eṣṭaḵri (p. 209), with the B.h.zān, B.h.tān, or B.h.nān mentioned
by the latter and other Arab geographers (Ebn Ḥawqal, p. 366;
Moqaddasi, p. 386), is not acceptable (Adle, pp. 20-21), although it
has had its advocates (Qazvini, 1928, n. 36-39; Eqbāl-Aštiyāni, 1942,
quoted by Adle). This site is in fact located by Yāqut (Boldān [Beirut], I, p. 31) at six farsaḵs (about six kilometers) from Ray, and clearly distinguished by him from Tehran, only a farsakò away.
The etymology itself remains problematic and there are no convincing
interpretations at hand (they are discussed by Minorsky, EI1, art. “Teheran,” and by Adle, p. 22). One can discard the popular etymology Tah+rān =
“the one who hunts, who pushes (people)” or “who dwells” at the bottom,
under the ground, evidently suggested by Yāqut’s text, which will be
mentioned later, about the troglodyte ways of the inhabitants.
Schindler (1896, p. 131) had seen in the name a Tir-ān, on the basis of an initial element tir, for
which the sense “plain, desert plain” is attested, the morphological
variance being explained by peculiarities of regional dialect. He
contrasted it with the name of the village (near the city to the north)
called Šemrān: a place where there is a water reservoir. There
was also the idea (Kasravi, 1973, pp. 273-83) to explain the twin terms
Tahrān–Šemrān (the latter spelt Šamirān or Šemirān) by
the contrast between a “warm place” for Tahrān and a “cool place” for
Šemirān. Vladimir Minorsky himself proposed the meaning “what lies
below Ray” on the basis of a Tah (attested to mean depth in the
northern Iranian dialects) and the name of the city of Ray (Raḡān =
Rayyān = Rān). But this is incompatible with the existence of another
locality (a large village north-east of Isfahan), which is called by
this same name of Tehrān, and could evidently have had no connection
with Ray. On the whole, all this seems purely conjectural, and we
should probably give up trying to find out the original meaning of the
name. The spelling itself has changed. The initial ṭ was used for a long time in the same way as t and was the preferred choice in most documents written up to the early 20th century. Yāqut had used the Arabic option of t in his writings, while at the same time pointing out that it was a Persian word (ʿajamiya), which was pronounced Tehrān by the inhabitants, who did not use the sound ṭ in their speech.
The physiognomy of the place, in any case, appeared
clearly when there were more indications in written texts in the 12th
and 13th centuries. Various other occasional data point out that
well-known personalities had passed through Tehran or stayed there for
more or less long periods. Substantial episodic references have been
contributed by Yāqut (Boldān, ed. Wüstenfeld, III, pp. 564-65; Beirut,
I, p. 51; Adle, pp. 36-37, for a detailed discussion of the meaning of
terms used by him). Yāqut had no personal knowledge of Tehran, but was
in Ray in 617/1220, eight years before the Mongol invasion. Here he
collected information about Tehran from an inhabitant of Ray whom he
considered as trustworthy. Later we have descriptions from Zakariyāʾ b.
Moḥammad Qazvini (I, 228), who wrote in 674/1275, to a great extent
reproducing Yāqut’s account, but probably adding to them as well. Yāqut
describes the place as a market-town (qurā) or even “a large market-town” (qariyaton kabiraton) consisting of twelve quarters (maḥalla), a merely symbolic figure perhaps. Each of these quarters was headed by an elder, a (sheikh; Qazvini), and these sheikhs fought
one another to the point that the inhabitants did not dare to venture
into each other’s quarters. Qazvini states that the relations were just
as bad with the authorities. The inhabitants of Tehran had bitter
disputes with the provincial governor about the amount of their taxes,
and when this amount was agreed upon, they wanted to pay it in goods as
valued by themselves; thus paying merely lip service to the authorities.
It was perhaps partly for this reason of insecurity that
Tehran at the time harbored a peculiar feature that appeared striking
to early observers. The dwellings, dispersed as they were within dense
and bushy enclosures, provided a safe haven for the inhabitants, since
access to them was to a great extent made very difficult by the fact of
their being subterranean or semi-subterranean, that is to say, totally
or partially covered under the ground. Qazvini described them as
“similar to jerboa holes” (ka-nafi-qāʾi al-yarbuʿ). These
troglodytic or semi-troglodytic habits, continued at least partially up
to fairly recent times. Although authors of the Safavid period no
longer mention it, Ker Porter (I, p. 312) still saw in 1818, within the
city, at a distance of two or three hundred meters from the Qazvin
gate, wells and excavations leading to subterranean lodgings for poor
people or used as stables for beasts of burden. These troglodyte habits
might certainly have contributed to security within the troubled
atmosphere of the town. But in fact, the phenomenon was quite frequent
all over northern Persia as a way of combating the winter frosts
(numerous examples in Planhol, 1960, 1964, p. 31, 1, 1968, pp. 420-2;
other references in Adle, p. 24), and not all the houses were
subterranean in Tehran at the time of Yāqut and Qazvini. Yet their
number must in any case have been sufficiently important to attract the
attention of visitors as an exceptional case.
These stubborn and pugnacious people evidently had a bad
reputation. There was no reason to attribute this hardly flattering
quality, as did Karimān (pp. 100 and 102), to the animosity of certain
(Sunni) authors of these texts against the inhabitants of a small town,
which was already certainly Shiʿite (see below). They were in any case
very skilful gardeners, making a living of the product of their gardens
(basātin) and orchards, and evidently taking their fruits and vegetables to the market at their adjacent large town, of Ray. Balḵi (loc. cit.)
already praised the remarkable quality of their pomegranates, and this
has often been repeated later. About five centuries later, it was
reported that Shah ʿAbbās the Great had eaten so many fruits in Tehran
that he had fallen ill, and Pietro della Valle (III, pp. 434-35) wrote
that this was the reason why the king never again entered Tehran as
such (see, however, below, for another explanation for this).
The inhabitants cultivated exclusively with the hoe and
spade, and had no plows, a fact which has led to some hasty
conclusions. They certainly had cattle, contrary to the statement of
Adle, p. 36, who wrongly interpreted Yāqut’s text. The latter
mistakenly attributed the absence of plows to the fact that the
inhabitants might fear attacks by their neighbors on their cattle or
small livestock (dawāb), the existence of which is in any case
implied in the text. The point is evidently a literary development by
Yāqut, who mentioned the insecurity in the town, although, as we have
seen, he had no personal experience of it. The large livestock,
indispensable for providing the manure for the gardens, and without
which the agricultural prosperity of the place could hardly be
contemplated, was certainly provided by more or less permanent supply
of grazing and fodder (lucerne), thanks to the abundance of water.
Tehran presented a familiar example of a widespread agricultural model
found in every oasis and all irrigated sectors of the Iranian plateau
(Planhol, 1993, p. 483), based on the combination of hoe cultivation
and intensive use of manure, as well as a great deal of manual labor.
It was here indeed particularly well represented, within a very
specialized and certainly monetarized economy, integrated with the
great urban market of Ray, where the inhabitants of Tehran no doubt
procured part of their cereals.
The emergence of urban functions. How did
this large market town of gardeners, with its clever though rebellious
and quarrelsome peasants, manage to acquire the prestige of a city, the
necessary prelude to an even more august future? It was evidently the
consequence of the almost total destruction of Ray by the Mongol
invasion. Of course, Tehran was equally damaged. Nor did the
devastation spare the countryside. Ḥamd-Allāh Mostawfi, writing in
1340, considered Tehran as “an important small town” (qaṣaba-ye moʿtabar), but declared that it was no longer as populated as before (Nozhat al-qolub,
ed. and tr. Le Strange, text p. 53; tr., p. 60). Yet the decline of Ray
had certainly been more catastrophic, and besides it never ceased.
While this stretch of dusty and desolate ruins no longer had anything
attractive and was being progressively abandoned by its survivors, the
rural area of Tehran, livened up by its gardens and waters, could
indeed quite quickly acquire a pleasant aspect. It was hence probable
that the inhabitants of Ray began to settle there. Within a century, it
became in any event the most important nucleus of the region. The
evolution of its description in contemporary Mongol texts is
significant. In sources belonging to the years 1284 and 1294
(references in Minorsky, art. “Teheran,”EI1), it is qualified as
“Tehran near Ray,” a description still marking the hitherto at least
nominal supremacy of the former great city. But an attempt at
re-populating it by the Il-khanid ruler Ḡazān Khan (1295-1304; q.v.)
met with failure (Mostawfi, Nozhat al-qolub, ed. and tr. Le Strange, p. 53, Eng. tr. p. 59; Le Strange, Lands,
p. 216); and in 1340, when Mostawfi was writing, it was Varāmin which
had become the capital of the Mongol province, and Tehran was one of
the four districts composing it (Mostawfi, p. 54), and certainly
including Ray, over which its preeminence was from then on established.
Tehran had become the main center of the region.
It could hence be rightly considered as a “city,” and even a “great city” (grand ciudad),
and that is how it was described by Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo (q.v.), the
Spanish ambassador at Timur’s court (pp. 117-18 of the Spanish text, p.
98 of the Eng. tr.), who stopped there on 6th July 1404. He found the
place pleasant and well provided with all kinds of products. There was
a royal residence (posada), where the ambassador was lodged, and
at least two further important buildings, one of which was occupied by
Timur’s son-in-law. The Timurid palace was situated, according to
Clavijo, two miles (about 8 kilometers) from Ray, which had been
abandoned at the time (agora deshabitada). We must point out that Yāqut, two centuries earlier, placed Tehran one farsaḵ from
Ray. This discordance between the two texts is highly significant. Even
if estimates of distance were merely approximate, it appears evident
that the Timurid palace had been built at the northern end of Tehran. From
this period on, there was a tendency to move the city northwards,
towards pure and fresh waters coming down the mountains, this being a
constant historical development of the city, continuing to the present
and explaining the major features of its social geography (see below).
The Timurids, like most Turks, were particularly fond of cool air and
an abundance of running waters, and thus started a trend that survives
to the present.
The exact site of the Timurid city within the present town
can indeed be easily reconstituted (figure 2, on the Berezin [q.v.]
map), in terms of the establishment of certain emāmzādas (q.v.)
and cemeteries existing at this period. These were the most ancient
monuments of the present city, and had certainly been built at the
extreme limits of this Timurid town (Adle, pp. 32-33). The
south-eastern limits of Tehran were approximately marked by the dome (boqʿa) of
Emāmzāda Sayyed Esmāʿil (Mostafavi, pp. 15, 446-47; Karimān, pp.
140-44), which had been built before the date of 886/1481 which appears
on a wooden door within the mausoleum. This is the oldest date attested
in Tehran and still existing in situ (in the Čāla-meydān
quarter). In this same extant quarter, the Emāmzāda Yaḥyā (Mostafavi,
pp. 16-22; Karimān, pp. 144-48), which had certainly existed before the
year 628/1231 (a funerary plaque in ceramic bearing this date was still
in place as late as 1939) determined the north-western limit of the
city. North-west of it was the Timurid palace, established on the
present-day site of the Golestān palace (q.v.), within the enclosure of
the future arg (q.v.) of the capital. Towards the
southwest, the limit of the town did not reach as far as the Emāmzāda
Sayyed Naṣr-al-Din (Mostafavi, pp. 16-22; Karimān, pp. 144-48), which
was built in the 15th century (in any case before 993/1583), but was
situated south-west of the Emāmzāda Zayd built before 902/1497 within
what is presently the bazaar quarter. This Timurid city could thus have
had an area of about one square kilometer.
Tehran had thus in the Timurid period acquired one of the
essential attributes of urban status. It was, at least for temporary
periods, an abode for princes, enjoyed by great personalities and the
sovereign himself when he was in the country, certainly preferring it
to Varāmin, which was much farther away from the mountains. But it was
as yet a very incomplete picture. Clavijo pointed out that it was not
fortified. He does not mention a central bazaar being organized, and it
is certain that this was built later on. It evidently must have had at
least a few commercial streets in various quarters. A decisive episode
took place under the Safavids when Shah Ṭahmāsp I endowed it in
981/1554 with a central bazaar and surrounded it with a wall
(Amin-Aḥmad Rāzi, Haft eqlim, quoted by Adle, p. 25; other sources in Minorsky, “Teheran,” EI1.)
The bazaar was of the most basic type, linear in its formation with
rows of shops next to each other, behind which there gradually arose a
number of warehouses (according to the definition of Wirth, 1974-5), a
form that could still be observed in the early 19th century (see
below). When Herbert visited the city in 1627, only one sector was as
yet covered. The wall is well known, for it remained in place until the
19th century and is shown on the earliest plans of the city. It had a
ditch along it, and 114 towers (matching the number of the verses in
the Koran). These could be still clearly distinguished on the plan of
1858, and only four gates at the origin. A fifth was added in the 18th
century by the Afghans, north of the arg, to allow them, as tradition
had it, to slip away more easily in the case of a rebellion (Moghtader,
p. 20, according to Ḏokāʾ).
What was the reason for this initiative taken by Shah
Ṭahmāsp? The cause for the interest shown by the Safavids in this city
has been sought in the fact that one of their ancestors, Sayyid Ḥamza,
was buried at Ray near the mausoleum of Šāh ʿAbd-al-ʿAzim (sources in
Minorsky, EI1); or else in the fact that Tehran had certainly
for a long time been an active center of Shiʾism, as was indeed almost
the entire province of Ray at least until 1340, so that the most
ancient Islamic monuments preserved in the city are indeed Shiʿite
(Adle, p. 29). But these factors, which may have played a part, are
evidently not sufficient. We must above all resort to the historical
circumstances of the period. Shah Ṭahmāsp’s building of the wall took
place for good historical reasons at the height of the Safavid war
against the Ottomans. Being threatened by the latter, he had to move
his capital from Tabriz, which was too exposed to the enemy, to Qazvin,
where he remained for the rest of his reign. Thus his attention was
drawn to the Tehran region, which, some 150 kilometers east of Qazvin,
could potentially provide his forces with a convenient fall back. It
was certainly in connection with this establishment of the capital at
Qazvin that the important operation of Tehran’s urbanism was
undertaken. It must indeed be observed that the task was obviously
excessive and disproportionate considering the real needs of the
existing small town. The enclosure, measured outside of the ditch, was about 8 kilometers long (a mistaken eastern source quoted by Minorsky EI1, and again reproduced by Moghtader, 1992, p. 39, quotes a length of one farsakò),
corresponding with a surface of about 4.5 sq. km (another misleading
quote to the contrary by 19th century European visitors mentioned the
surface to be 7.5 sq. km. [Olivier, III, p. 50], and later 8 sq. km
[Berezin], the latter still repeated by Moghtader, 1992, p. 41; cf.
Ahrens, p. 46). Even when taking account of the dispersion of the
houses within the gardens, and the lack of density in this kind of
settlement, the surface area was enormous for a population not
exceeding 15,000 to 20,000 (Herbert, p. 214, in 1627, was to attribute
3,000 houses to the city). The enclosure of Shah Ṭahmāsp could in fact
shelter more than 100,000 people, and this was indeed the case in the
19th century, a time when (see below) the intra muros framework
marked out in the 16th century still included a large number of empty
and non-built-up spaces. There was indeed room enough to establish a
powerful army, with all its equipments and supplies, and it was from
this point of view that the operation could be understood.
The disproportion between the closed surface of walls and
the population was all the more striking due to the fact that the city
seemed to have more or less stagnated during the following two
centuries. Amin-Aḥmad Rāzi, himself a native of Ray, praised the
incomparable abundance of its gardens and canals, as well as the charm
of Šemirān, in his Haft eqlim, written in 1028/1619. In 1618,
Pietro Della Valle (Italian text, 1843, I, pp. 702-703; Fr. tr., III,
pp. 435-36) described it as a “large city” (città grande), more
spacious than Cascian (Kāšān), “which, however, was neither populated
nor inhabited, because all that could be seen were large gardens (grandissimi giardini)
with all sorts of fruits.” The city kept its aspect of an “inhabited
garden” with innumerable canals crossing it and big plane trees shading
its streets, as well as the čenārestān (“park of plane trees”)
surrounding the royal residence. The city was evidently a regional
administrative center. It was the home of a beglerbegi (q.v.), a provincial governor (gran capo di provincia), whose authority extended as far as Firuz-kuh. But there were “neither buildings (fabbrica)
nor any other noteworthy things.” And the Safavids had built no grand
mosques or any new prestigious edifices there. All their attention was
turned towards the kind of grandiose urbanism that was being developed
in Isfahan. Chardin (q.v.) merely mentioned Tehran by the way,
describing it as a “small town.”
Despite the lack of interest shown by Shah ʿAbbās and
apparently also by his successors in the city–whatever the cause may
have been (the excessive indulgence in fruit as mentioned above, or the
fact reported by Pietro Della Valle, that the town had never welcomed
him in the way he had wished)–he nevertheless had a new residence built
there (the Čahār bāḡ). He sometimes stopped in Tehran when he
traveled north, and the texts mention it on various occasions. Shah
Soleymān (1667-97) had an imperial secretariat (divān-ḵāna) built in the čenarestān,
where Shah Solṭān Ḥosayn received the Ottoman ambassador in 1720
(Ḏokāʾ, p. 3 and 18; Douri effendi, 1810, p. 4; cf. Moghtader, p. 40,
who mentions the date 1722). But Tehran was certainly no more than a
modest provincial town. In the 18th century, it certainly suffered a
great deal from the siege by the Afghans and the unrests that followed
as a result.
Bibliography :
Charyar Adle, “Le jardin habité, ou Téhéran des origins aux Safavides,” in Adle and Hourcade, eds., Téhéran (see below), pp. 15-37. Charyar Adle and Bernard Hourcade, Téhéran, capital bicentenaire,
Paris and Tehran, 1992. John S. Gurney, “The Transformation of Tehran
in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Adle and Hourcade, eds., Téhéran (see above), pp. 51-71. Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels into Divers Parts of Africa and Asia the Great, 3rd ed., London, 1665. Ahmad Kasravi, Kārvand-e Kasravi, ed. Yaḥyā Ḏokāʾ, Tehran, 1973. pp. 273-83. Vladimir Minorsky, “Teheran,” EI¹ IV, pp. 713-20. Mohammad-Réza Moghtader, “Téhéran dans ses murailles (1553-1930),” in Adle and Hourcade, eds., Téhéran, pp. 39-49. Ker Porter, Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia …, 2 vols., London 1821-22, I, pp. 306-8. Abu Yaḥyā Zakariyaʾ b. Moḥammad Qazvini, Aṯār al-belād wa aḵbār al-ʿebād, ed. F. Wüstenfeld, 2 vols, Gottingen, 1848-49, I, Die Denkmäler der Länder, p. 228.
(XAVIER DE PLANHOL)
September 27, 2004 |