Oliver Wendell Holmes when he taught anatomy at the Harvard Medical School in the 19th century used to begin his lecture on the skull by picking up each bone and describing its position: “The frontal bone borders on the parietal bone, the parietal bone borders on the occipital bone,” and so on, until he came to the sphenoid bone, a bone composed of many pieces that seem to border on everything and assume all shapes. He is supposed to have picked up the sphenoid and said in annoyance, “Gentlemen, curse the sphenoid bone!” No such uncharitable words would come from the student of Iran, but how often the primitive state of his science, like the anatomy of an earlier century, makes Iran seem the most complex and indefinable of all the bones in the greater body politic of the world.