Excavating Zarathustra: Ernst Herzfeld's Archaeological History of Iran

This article analyzes the work of the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) and its influence on the writing of Iranian national history in the 1920s and 1930s. Herzfeld's life and work illuminates the relationship between Germany and Iran and between orientalist scholarship and nationalist history in the first half of the twentieth century. Through the method of what he called “archaeological history,” Herzfeld wrote an interdisciplinary history of Iran and its Aryan foundations that contested the assumptions of decades of European orientalist scholarship.