In 1958, professor Ehsan Yarshater began teaching at Columbia University in New York. He was part of a generation of Iranian academics who sought training in the West.
He was always concerned about the difficulty of finding comprehensive, accurate and precise sources on Iran’s ancient civilization — let alone find them in English.
“I had this ideal in my mind,” Yarshater tells NPR, “that there would be an encyclopedia which would respond to all possible legitimate questions about Iran and its history and its civilization.”
