Reviews

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism , Janet Afary, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, xxi + 448 pp., Bibliography, Index.

Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope & Phyllis Ackerman , Jay Gluck and Noel Siver, eds., Ashiya, Japan: SoPA and Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 1996, xxii + 658 pp., illustrations, Bibliography, Index.

Syria and Iran: Rivalry and Cooperation , Hussein J. Agha and Ahmad S. Khalidi, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995, xii + 126 pp.

Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution , Nikki R. Keddie, New York: New York University Press, 1995, ix + 303 pp.

Études safavides , Jean Calmard, ed., Bibliothèque Iranienne 39, Paris and Téhéran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1993, xiv + 389 pp., 58 plates.

Women and Fundamentalism: Islam and Christianity , Shahin Gerami, Women's History and Culture, Vol. 9, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996, xiii + 178 pp.

The Persian Revolution , Edward G. Browne, Abbas Amanat, ed., New Edition, Washington: Mage Publishers, 1995, Ixiv + 470 pp., Introduction, correspondence, reviews.

Iran After the Revolution: Crisis of an Islamic State, Saeed Rahnema and Sohrab Behdad, eds., London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 1995, xii + 292 pp., Index.

Mediaeval Isma^cili History and Thought ,Farhad Daftary, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, xviii + 331 pp.

A Journey to Persia: Jean Chardin's Portrait of a Seventeenth‐Century Empire , R.W. Ferrier, ed., London and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996, 256 pp., illustrations.

George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy ,James A. Bill, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Shi^ca Islam: From Religion to Revolution , Heinz Halm, translated by Allison Brown, Princeton, New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997, 176 pp.

Iran and the Former Soviet South , Edmund Herzig, London: Royal Institute for Foreign Affairs, 1995.

Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran , Darius M. Rejali, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994, xviii + 289 pp.     

Russia’s Seat at the Table: A Place Denied or a Place Delayed?

Equivocation by Western governments about the place of Russia in Europe in the context of the enlargement of NATO and the EU leaves a critical issue unresolved. In effect, Russia has been excluded from the Euro-American ambit. Russia's present weakness has enabled its own reservations about these developments to be sidelined; but an economically rejuvenated Russia could pose a threat of dominance in eastern and central Europe every bit as substantial as the military dominance of former times. A way needs to be found to incorporate Russia into a modified European system to avoid its retreating into a potentially dangerous isolation.     

Spatial-Domain Chaos in Landscapes

It has been speculated that deterministic chaos may be responsible for the spatial complexity commonly observed in biophysical landscapes. However, deterministic chaos is a temporally defined concept and has been rigorously investigated only in the temporal domain. It is shown here, using a simple hillslope regolith cover model as an example, that temporal chaos in the presence of even minor spatial anisotropy will result in a spatially chaotic pattern. It is also shown that behavior of spatially chaotic landscape systems can be deduced, at least in theory, from spatial patterns of a single landscape component or variable. Because stochastic complexity is likely to exist in landscapes in addition to any deterministic complexity, detecting and analyzing chaotic behavior in landscapes is difficult. Progress in efforts to examine chaos in the spatial domain and to isolate deterministic and stochastic complexity may be the key to developing a theory of landscape evolution that can reconcile the simultaneous presence of apparently random, irregular variability and orderly, regular patterns.     

Other ways to examine the finances behind the birth of Classical Greece

Although the birth of Classical Greece is often attributed to the constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes (508/507 BCE), the achievement of an economically minded government under the Peisistratid tyrant Hippias (527–510 BCE) potentially paved the way by advancing Athenian silver for exportation in international trade. It is proposed here that new silver technology, which initiated the transition from acquiring silver from ‘dry’ silver ores to silver-bearing lead ores, was introduced to Greece during the time of the Peisistratids (561–510 BCE). Massive exploitation of silver-bearing lead ores at Laurion in Attica, which later financed the construction of a war navy, appears evident in the lead pollution records of Greenland ice, lead isotopic analyses of sixth-century BCE Attic silver coins and late Iron Age Levantine hacksilver, and is reflected in the numbers of lead votive figurines at sanctuaries in Sparta. Against the backdrop of the threat of war with Persia and an imminent Spartan invasion which resulted in the overthrow of Hippias (510 BCE), it is considered that a political transition occurred because Greece was both geologically and politically disposed to adopt this labour-intensive silver technology which helped to initiate, fund and protect the radical social experiment that became known as Classical Greece.     

Notes on Contributors

Biography

Notes on Contributors