SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The beginning of this study was finding a set of unseen documents from the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the establishment and activity of the "Dezful Bridge Company", which was established during the First World War and was transferred to the Iranian government in 1923. Despite the scattered and sometimes false narrative information about this company, no detailed and comprehensive information has been available so far. The study of the newly found documents clarified the need to investigate the condition of the Sassanid bridge before the establishment of "Dezful Bridge Company" and was the beginning of a vast campaign to collect historical documents from different archives of the world, some of which were not even properly classified in the archives. The first part of this book briefly deals with the problem of the historiography of Dezful Bridge to show that there is very little reliable information about the ancient and medieval history of the bridge. Then, the two main parts of this book specifically rely on extensive document research and try to contribute to the new historiography of the Sassanid Dezful Bridge and present a relatively clear picture of the condition of this bridge in the period from the middle of the 18th century to 1923.