Article Information

Document Type : Research

Author

Omid Ghiasi

* PhD Graduate in Ancient History of Iran, Tehran University, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.30465/crtls.2026.52820.2957

Abstract

In her research, Saghi Gazerani has addressed the issues of Historiography in ancient Iran and questioned the dominant positivist approach. Focusing on the boundary between History and Literature, Gazerani has attempted to highlight the importance of texts such as the Shahnameh in understanding the History of ancient Iran, in contrast to material historical evidence such as archaeological and numismatic findings. By criticizing the relegation of the Shahnameh to the realm of Literature, she has attempted to show the existence of historical layers in narratives that are categorized as myths and legends. In addition to showing these layers, she emphasizes that her goal is to demonstrate the importance of texts in the "national history" genre in reading discourses of power and political legitimacy. However, her methodological contradictions prevent her from expanding her approach to the positivist reading, and by focusing on showing historical layers as fact in narratives of the national history genre, she herself enters the field that she has attempted to criticize. This article aims to focus on Gazerani 's methodology and show how this methodology opens up a possibility in the critique of the positivist reading of the understanding of ancient Iranian history, but ultimately leaves it unfinished.
Extended Abstrct
In her research, Saghi Gazerani has addressed the issues of historiography in ancient Iran and has called into question the dominant positivist approach. By focusing on the boundary between history and literature, Gazerani has sought to highlight the importance of texts such as the Shāhnāmeh in understanding the history of ancient Iran, as opposed to material historical evidence such as archaeological and numismatic findings.

Introduction
Criticizing the relegation of the Shāhnāmeh to the realm of literature, she has attempted to demonstrate the existence of historical layers within narratives classified as myth and legend. Beyond revealing these layers, she emphasizes that her aim is to underscore the significance of texts belonging to the genre of “national history” in reading discourses of power and political legitimacy. However, methodological contradictions in her work prevent her from fully developing her approach against positivist readings. By focusing on revealing historical layers as factual within narratives of the national history genre, she herself enters a domain that she has sought to critique.

Materials and Methods
From an ontological standpoint, Gazerani’s critique of realist ontology is directed toward the dominant positivist approach in the study of pre‑Islamic Iranian history. Within this prevailing approach, material evidence—such as coins—holds primary importance in comparison with literary/historical narratives found in textual sources. Coins are generally privileged on the grounds that they are believed to provide the researcher with unmediated information from the time of minting, information presumed to be free from the ideological interventions that characterize later written sources. In this view, a dualism of reality versus interpretation is implicitly assumed, whereby coins and other material traces, as embodiments of “reality,” are treated as untouched by interpretive interference. Accordingly, it can be said that Gazerani positions her critique at the opposite pole of scientific realist ontology—namely, within an idealist ontological framework.

Discussion and Result
From an epistemological perspective, she seeks to show an alternative horizon beyond reliance on brute facts. Yet by adopting a comparative approach, she gradually departs from the very path she initially set out on. That is, although Gazerani attempts to highlight the epistemic dimension of texts through perspectives such as political discourse, the temptation to demonstrate concrete historical events within ancient narrative/historical texts remains present in her analysis, keeping her methodology entangled with the positivist concern for truth and falsity. This article, by continuing the critical trajectory Gazerani initially opened, argues that explaining data in terms of their proximity to empirical reality is not the sole scientific meaning of history. Drawing on the significant example of the character Zāl in the Shahnameh, it is shown that Zāl should be considered a historical figure regardless of whether material evidence—such as coins or archaeological data—confirms his existence or not, and regardless of whether one can identify empirical layers within the events reported about him. He becomes historical because, within the broader continuity of ancient Iranian history, he occupies an essential place in articulating foundational cultural meanings for Iranians both in Ferdowsi’s time and in the present. On this basis, history is no longer centered solely on “what actually happened,” as in Ranke’s classical model. Rather, by shifting ontology from realism to idealism, interpretive‑constructivist, hermeneutical, and meaning‑oriented paradigms become available, illuminating new dimensions of ancient Iranian history. To further extend Gazerani’s initial trajectory, this study employs Paul Ricoeur’s methodology. Ricoeur, by distinguishing between memory and imagination, explains that they can be differentiated both by their practical intentionality and the objects they intend. The object of both is something absent; however, in the case of memory, this absence does not imply unreality or fabrication but a state of “having‑been.” In other words, as Aristotle had earlier noted, the intentional object of memory is an object “from the past.”

Conclusion
The dimension that Gazerani touches upon—had it been further developed hermeneutically—could have opened a new horizon for the study of ancient Iranian history by distinguishing between history as factual reality and history as the remembrance of the past. Ricoeur’s phenomenological and hermeneutic approach could have expanded Gazerani’s methodology to a point where, without collapsing into postmodern conceptions of history, it would nonetheless move beyond positivism and reveal a different domain of inquiry for researchers of ancient Iranian history.

Keywords

Ancient Iran

History

Methodology

Saghi Gazerani

Positivism

Subjects

History

Below, G. V. 1928. “Wie Es Eigentlich Gewesen.” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 20 (3/4): 452–460.

Carr, E. H. 2017. What Is History? Translated by Hassan Kamshad. 7th ed. Tehran: Kharazmi.

Clark, Elizabeth A. 2018. History, Text, Theory: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Translated by Hashem Aghajari. Tehran: Morvarid.

Collingwood, R. G. 2012. The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History. Translated by Abdorreza Salarbehzadi. 2nd ed. Tehran: Ney.

Ferdowsi. 2017. Shahnameh. Edited by Jalal Khaleghi-Motlagh. 4 vols. (in 2 parts). 2nd ed. Tehran: Sokhan.

Gazerani, Saghi. 2018. The Narratives of the House of Rostam and Iranian Historiography. Translated by Sima Soltani. 1st ed. Tehran: Markaz.

———. 2019a. Zahhāk: History Emerging from Myth. Translated by Sima Soltani. 1st ed. Tehran: Markaz.

———. 2019b. Ārash Kamāngir: The Missing Story of Ārash in the Shahnameh. Translated by Sima Soltani. 1st ed. Tehran: Markaz.

———. 2020. Kush Pīl-dandān: The Making of an Anti‑hero. Translated by Sima Soltani. 1st ed. Tehran: Markaz.

Ghiasi, Neda, and Amir Maziar. 2022. “The Constructive Role of Imagination in History from the Perspective of Paul Ricoeur.” Falsafeh 1 (38): 117–132.

Grondin, John. 2014. Hermeneutics. Translated by Mohammadreza Abolghasemi. 1st ed. Tehran: Mahi.

Hatami, Amir Hossein, and Meysam Akbarzadeh. 2024. “Positivist Horizons in Iranian–Islamic Historiography.” Epistemological Studies 13 (27): 127–149.

Hazrati, Hassan. 2018. Research Methods in Historiography. 2nd ed., 1st printing. Qom: Logos.

Hughes‑Warrington, Marnie. 2010. Fifty Key Thinkers on History. Translated by Mohammadreza Badi‘i. 2nd ed. Tehran: Amir Kabir.

Husserl, Edmund. 1976. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie.

Kuyāji, Jahangir. 2009. Foundations of Myth and Epic in Iran. Edited by Jalil Dustkhah. 3rd ed. Tehran: Agah.

Little, Daniel. 2009. Explanation in the Social Sciences: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science. Translated by Abdolkarim Soroush. 5th ed. Tehran: Serat.

Matlub‑Kari, Esmail. 2024. Sasanian Numismatics: A Linguistic Approach to Historical Analysis. 1st ed. Tehran: Negah‑e Mo‘āser.

Meisami, Julie S. 2021. “History as Literature.” In Persian Historiography in Late Antique Iran, edited by Charles Melville, 61–112. Tehran: Negarestan‑e Andisheh.

Molaei‑Tavani, Alireza.. 2011. An Introduction to Research Method in History. 4th ed. Tehran: Ney.

Mo‘eini‑‘Alamdari, Jahangir. 2008. “A Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Ancient Iranian History.” National Studies 9 (36): 3–19.

Mohammadpour, Ahmad. 2018. Method in Method: On the Construction of Knowledge in the Human Sciences. 1st ed. Qom: Logos.

Pellauer, David. 2023. Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed. Translated by Neda Ghiyasi. Tehran: Qoqnoos.

Rashidian, Abdolkarim. 2015. Husserl in the Context of His Works. 4th ed. Tehran: Ney.

Rezakhani, Khodadad. 2017. East Iran in Late Antiquity: ReOrienting the Sasanians. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative, Volume III. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2006. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Rosen, Baron W. 2003. On the Arabic Translations of the Khwadāy‑nāmag. Persian translation by Mohsen Shoja‘i; introduction and Arabic translation by Ali Bahramiyan. Supplement no. 15 of Name‑ye Farhangestan. Tehran.

Sangari, Esmail, and Alireza Karbasi. 2016. “Historiography in Ancient Iran: Its Nature and Method in Light of Various Approaches to the Concept of History.” History of Islam and Iran 26 (30/120): 167–218.

White, Hayden. 1975. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth‑Century Europe. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.