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The Trustees and Director of the Iran Heritage Foundation
are sad to record the death of Professor Ehsan Yarshater on 1st
September in California at the age of 98. He was in every sense the grand old
man of Iranian studies, and made a massive contribution to this subject. He was
born in Hamedan and studied at the University of Tehran and the School of
Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. He went to Columbia
University in 1958 and was appointed Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian
Studies in 1961. He followed this up by founding the Centre for Iranian Studies
(now the Ehsan Yarshater Centre for Iranian Studies) at Columbia in 1968. During
his long and distinguished career many honours and prizes came his way, and
amongst his many publications are volumes on Persian poetry, Persian
literature, and Persian dialects. He also edited volume 3 of the Cambridge
History of Iran covering the Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods. His great
monument, however, will be Encyclopaedia
Iranica, of which he was the founding editor, and IHF is proud to have been
a supporter of this tremendous initiative. Covering all aspects of Iranian
studies, the Encyclopaedia is an invaluable resource for the study of Iranian
history and cultural heritage. It is gratifying that the on-line version of the
Encyclopaedia is almost complete, while the printed volumes now number 15 and
have reached the letter K. In addition
to this magisterial work he was also the consulting editor for a number of
other series, underlining his reputation as the greatest scholar in his time of
Iranian studies. He will be much missed, but his life’s work will be an example
and an inspiration for future generations of researchers. Ehsan Yarshater was
no cloistered scholar, however, and recognised the importance of making
information accessible to everybody, and that is exactly what Encyclopaedia Iranica does.
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