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41796 results in Collections

Page 2072 of 2090

  • 14 - POPULATION

  • from PART 2 - THE PEOPLE
    • By J. Behnam, Social Research Institute, Tebrān
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 468-486

  • Summary

    According to the census taken in 1956, the total population of Iran was 18,944,821; it has increased since then at the rate of 2.4 to 2.5 per cent a year. The centre of the country is largely empty and life has been driven either towards the exterior or towards the interior of the mountains, to the points where there is an adequate water-supply. There are extraordinary variations in density: in the neighbourhood of Tehran, 44 inhabitants per sq km; on the shores of the Caspian, from 20 to 30. According to the 1956 census, the urban population constitutes 30.1 per cent of the total population, and the rural population (including seminomads) 69.9 per cent. In Iran, the marriage rate is generally higher among women than among men. Consanguinity in marriage is on the decline, as demonstrated in part by the growing number of marriages between Iranians and foreigners.

  • 5 - CLIMATE

  • from PART 1 - THE LAND
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 212-249

  • Summary

    Iran is unfortunate in having recorded no long-term climatic observations. Hence, a great deal of attention was focused on Iran's agricultural potentialities, the assessment of which required adequate knowledge of climatic conditions. The climate of Iran is influenced by many centres of high pressure as well as a number of low pressure centres. In a country like Iran having extensive flat deserts, highly complex mountain systems, topography is a major modifying factor and surface winds are greatly influenced by local topographical features. The country has five temperature zones, namely, the Caspian zone, Persian Gulf zone, Zagros zone, Alburz zone, and the interior zone. Over Iran, it can be said that precipitation decreases from north to south and from west to east, except where relief of the land upsets the regularity in this arrangement. The mean annual precipitation for the entire country is 400 mm.

  • 8 - VEGETATION

  • from PART 1 - THE LAND
    • By H. Bobek, Geography, University of Vienna
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 280-293

  • Summary

    Vegetal conditions in Iran were at their optimum during the third and second millennia BC. The regional changes in distribution and character of the country's natural vegetation cover stem from four factors: climatic situation; hytogeographical region; pronounced and varied topography of the plateau; and impact of human activity upon the vegetation. Many modes of interference have given rise to many forms of semi-natural vegetation, which may represent stages either in a process of destruction or of regeneration. All the relevant types of vegetation can be arranged according to their dependence: first, on atmospheric humidity (precipitation) or ground moisture; and second, on temperature as expressed in elevation or exposure. In the western part of the Iranian plateau there is only one area of a truly humid forest. The chapter also presents a discussion of the azonal vegetation types.

  • 2 - GEOLOGY

  • from PART 1 - THE LAND
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 111-185

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the geology of Iran, the information of which is somewhat uneven. The stratigraphical column in Iran contains samples of all the systems, from Pre-Cambrian to Quaternary; and from the beginning of the Palaeozoic onwards, diagnostic fossils are sometimes abundant. An introduction to the geomorphology of the country can be made by journeying across it from south-west to north-east. Starting then from the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab near Ābādān and crossing an occasionally flooded alluvial plain for seventy miles, never far from the meanders of the Karun river, one comes to a series of low isolated ridges of brown sandstone, the Ahvāz hills. The Zagros range skirts its south-western side for 800 miles and beyond the Zagros are the plains of Iraq or Mesopotamia, the growing delta of the Euphrates and Tigris, and the Persian Gulf. These elements forming the west of the region have features of structural history in common.

  • 10 - ZOOGEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF THE LIZARD FAUNA OF IRAN

  • from PART 1 - THE LAND
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 305-371

  • Summary

    The zoogeography of any region can be viewed from three perspectives, all of which are closely interrelated: descriptive, ecological, and historical. This chapter is based upon a comprehensive study of the systematics of the lizards of Iran. Southwest Asia has two major distributional components in its lizard fauna, one of which is the Iranian Plateau. The chapter first focuses on the distribution of species within the various physiographic regions of Iran including the Central Plateau, Sistan basin, Türkmen steppe, Zagors mountains. So little is known about the Iranian lizards in nature, and information about the physical environment so lacking in detail, that the chapter presents only general remarks can be made relative to the immediate factors determining present distributions. The significance of endemic species (or subspecies) from the standpoint of historical zoogeography is threefold, one of which is a narrowly restricted form may be relictual, occupying the remaining habitable area of a once much broader distribution.

  • 15 - MINERALS

  • from PART 3 - ECONOMIC LIFE
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 487-516

  • Summary

    Old mine-workings have long been known in many provinces of Iran. Traces of gold in alluvium or quartz veins have been recorded, and minerals yielding silver, lead, zinc, and copper are widely but sparingly distributed. This chapter presents a description of several minerals and metals along with their mine-locations in Iran such as coal, iron, copper, lead-zinc, chromite, bauxite, molybdenum, arsenic, antimony, fluorspar. Coal is an obvious alternative to charcoal, and for a considerable time coal has been dug in the mountains north of Tehrān. Iron ore deposits have been observed in many parts of the country, most of them between the southern slopes of the Alburz system and the Volcanic belt, especially somewhat north-east of the limits of the Volcanic belt. References to fluorspar are made in the record of some of the lead-zinc workings, such as the one at Mīkhās near Qazvin where quartz, calcite and fluor are vein minerals.

  • 4 - THE ORIGIN OF THE ZAGROS DEFILES

  • from PART 1 - THE LAND
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 195-211

  • Summary

    While the westward-flowing streams of the Zagros mountains provide some of the world's most impressive canyon scenery, they also present an extremely perplexing problem of drainage genesis. Seldom are drainage anomalies as pronounced as they are among the great petrified waves of the Zagros. The disharmony between the drainage and the deformational pattern in the Zagros is manifested in the profound gorges, or tangs, which breach range after range in the youngest portion of the mountain system. The vast majority of the drainage anomalies and the most spectacular tangs in the Zagros are found in the zone of powerful but simple folding along the south-western (outer) margin of the highland. The drainage anomaly in the central Zagros may be resolved into two distinct problems: the courses of the trunk streams, and the behaviour of their tributaries, large and small. Each of these appears to be an independent development.

  • 12 - EARLY MAN IN IRAN

  • from PART 2 - THE PEOPLE
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 393-408

  • Summary

    There is no fossil evidence from the Middle East as a whole, let alone Iran, for anything but the most limited traces of very early human occupations. Even this limited evidence is sufficient to prove that Palaeolithic man lived in many parts of Iran, ranging from Lake Rezāʾiyeh (Urumiyeh) in the north-west to Shiraz in the south-west, to the south-eastern littoral of the Caspian and eastward into southern Khurāsān. The cave of Bīsitūn, located some thirty miles east of Kirmānshāh, has provided evidence of one ulna fragment and one human incisor tooth, in association with a highly developed Mousterian industry. The skull discovered in a cave in Teshik Tash distinctly resembles that of a western Neanderthaler, though it is morphologically more modern than those of most, if not all, the western Neanderthalers, particularly because it has a higher cranial vault.

  • 18 - AGRICULTURE

  • from PART 3 - ECONOMIC LIFE
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 565-598

  • Summary

    In spite of being the sixth largest petroleum producer in the world Iran still derives between 23 and 30 per cent of her gross national income from agricultural farming. However, the resources used and usable for agriculture are severely limited. The areal extent of land available for agricultural production cannot be increased by any significant amount although the regional balance may well be altered. Indeed the present cultivated area is largely the product of an extensive approach to land use. Rice, grown on some 330,000 hectares, is the only staple food product of which there is an exportable surplus. Added to paucity of land resources and rural poverty there is also ignorance; some 85 per cent of the total population is illiterate. Climatic, ecological and hydrological conditions in the regions of seasonal water surplus impose stringent controls on the use of such water in the deficit zones.

  • 16 - INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITIES

  • from PART 3 - ECONOMIC LIFE
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 517-551

  • Summary

    Exploitation of resources, especially petroleum, dominates the Iranian industrial economy. Today, Ᾱbādān is the world's largest refinery, with a capacity of 5 00,000 b/d. Other mining and processing activities are far less important in the economy of Iran than the petroleum industry. This could in some limited degree be the result of the available geological surveys. One of the major obstacles to Iran's economic development has been the shortage of cheap electric power. As on 1961, demand was twice of the generating and distributing capacity. The next modern industry to develop after petroleum was the processing of food and other agricultural products. By 1959, sugar production exceeded 83,000 tons. Following the growth of industries based upon, and located on or near, mineral and agricultural resources, there have developed other industries, whose location is determined primarily by the availability of local markets. Traditional arts and crafts were no longer significant in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  • 20 - PASTORALISM, NOMADISM AND THE SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF IRAN

  • from PART 3 - ECONOMIC LIFE
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 611-683

  • Summary

    Iran shares with so many others a rapid sequence of social changes and hence has to cope with the passing of traditional society, and the creation of a new society. In view of the ecological conditions existing in much of the country, the nomadic-pastoral way of life is an admirable human response over extensive areas, and that there can be in these parts no other equally satisfactory economic activity, and associated tribal social organization. With the introduction of a costly irrigation scheme, pastoralism must give way to a regular and continuous form of land utilization such as agriculture or intensive animal husbandry. A significant element of the social scene in Iran today is the urban group. New urban dwellers just arrived from the countryside provide many heterogeneous elements for urban society, and it is often reported that a certain uneasiness, symptomatic of difficulties of adjustment, exists among the newcomers.

  • 6 - SOILS

  • from PART 1 - THE LAND
  • Edited by W. B. Fisher
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 October 1968, pp 250-263

  • Summary

    From the point of view of soil-study, Iran can be divided into the following main geological units, from south to north: the platform of Arabia; folded zone; Iranides; central plain; Alburz ranges; and Caspian littoral. This chapter gives a description of the several mapping units, one of which is the soil of the plains and valleys, which includes sand dunes, which are common in most of the arid regions of Iran. Solonchaks and solonetz soils are the saline and alkaline soils of the arid, semi-arid and dry subhumid regions of Iran. A great part of Iran is a plateau about 3,000 ft or more above mean sea-level, containing several types of plateau soils such as grey and red desert soils, Sierozem soil. Palygorskite has been found in the foothills near Dar-i-Khazīneh, in the Kārūn delta in Khūzistān, and in Kirmān.

Page 2072 of 2090