1In three very detailed and ambitious chapters, The Persian Revival takes supposedly known episodes in Iranian art and architectural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and makes them unknown to every Iranian. Grigor is quite right that “the accepted wisdom” has been that “it [the Persian Rivaval] was all Reza Shah’s idea” (p. 1). By revising this accepted wisdom, The Persian Revival would make every Iranian stop and look again the next time they visit buildings such as Baq-e Afifabad add Shapuri House in Shiraz, the Takyeh Moaven al-Molk in Kermanshah, the Anjoman Adaran fire temple, Amushirvan Dadgar High School, and the police headquarters and Iranian Parliament building in Tehran. By the end of the book, these buildings do not appear familiar anymore. Rather, they illustrate centuries of negotiation, travelogues, competition, empire-building, and anti-colonial ideals. They tell the story of an art and architectural revival which consisted of “a big jigsaw puzzle with countless pieces that each Artisan of the style picked, copied and assembled at will” (p. 137).

3The book’s first chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the book where the focus turns to architecture. Grigor packs a large amount of information into the book’s first chapter but her goal is a clear one: she aims to show how the decline of the Ottoman and the Safavid Empires turned the attention of Europeans to ancient Asia and of Persianate scholars and artists to Europe. While the former were in search of ancient Persia, the latter sought to re-evaluate the place of Iran in new conceptions of universal history. Two points stood out to me: the first concerns Reza Shah Pahlavi’s 1934 decision to change his country’s name from Persia to Iran. Grigor demonstrates that this “symbolic shift” in the history of twentieth-century Iran has been ascribed falsely to the King’s chauvinism, for the matter “had been raised and fervently contended” four decades earlier by Europe’s art historians who quarrelled over the Orient-or-Rome dispute (p. 7). The second is Grigor's examination of many publications by European Orientalists, linguists, archaeologists, and architectural historians, including James Fergusson, Banister Fletcher, and Auguste Choisy. Many of these publications are translated into Farsi; they can be found in various libraries across Iran and are familiar to historians of Iranian art and architecture. But Grigor offers a fresh reading of these works as “the public sphere of ideological discourses that led to the construction of revivalistic architecture” (p. 39). She provides a comprehensive account of the “linguistic-racial theories on ‘Oriental Aryans’” that generated this visual culture before showing how it evolved into a canon of architectural history with Persepolis set at the beginning of Western civilisation by the end of the nineteenth century.

4One European figure that might not be known to many readers is Viennese art historian Josef Strzygowski. The occupant of the very first chair of non-Western art history, Strzygowski advocated for a fuller understanding of art history through an “eastward look”. Between 1889 and 1895, he travelled to Russian-ruled Armenia, Egypt, the newly independent Bulgaria, the western Ottoman Empire, and Russia. He conducted extensive fieldwork and published a series of works during this period. These works argued for “local genius” in favour of “a Hellenistic origin for late antique art, including Sassanian and Byzantine art” (p. 55-6). Strzygowski’s name was forgotten soon after his death. Still, his claims, although sometimes wrong and racially laden, defined “not only the parameters of Iran’s subsequent political culture but also the conception of Iran as a modern nation-state, presented to the (Western) world as ethnoculturally homogeneous and pure and thus equal, if not superior” (p. 67).

5The second and third chapters show how the two brands of Persian Revival were evolving “simultaneously and codependently” on the western coast of the Indian subcontinent and in the major cities of Qajar and Pahlavi Iran. If Europeans wrote about ancient Iran and produced a rich visual culture, the Parsi of India and Iranian historians and diplomats played a pivotal role in its flourishing. Here Grigor demonstrates how, like the Gothic Revival, the Persian Revival in architecture found its root in literature while discussing the connections between Parsis and Zoroastrians and between Parsis and influential Iranian nationalists and historians. These connections are known to many historians, but how Parsis strengthened and extended their connections with Iran with the support of British diplomacy and Bombay intelligentsia is the point that makes Grigor’s contribution significant. She traces the path of such figures as Manekji Limji Hataria, who travelled in Iran for forty years after landing in the port of Bushehr in 1854. His mission was to “improve the legal, infrastructural, and sociopolitical conditions of Iran’s Zoroastrians” (p. 69). Hataria and his supporters, including the Amelioration Society and Rising Star of Western Asia, not only relied on British support but also co-opted British theories on architecture by searching for “pure forms,” hoping to revise architecture but also Iran itself. He was behind the concept and commission of two books that formed a “blueprint for the decorative program of the Iranian brand of revivalism:” Nameh-ye Khosravan and the commission of Asar Ajam.

6Other actors were Nader Shah Afshar, Karim Khan Zand, and Aqa Mohammad Khan Qajar. Their role in the Persian Revival might surprise many readers. Here Grigor reveals the importance of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and rock-cut images in such buildings as Kalat-e Naderi and the Arg and Karim Khan’s Baq-e Vakil in rural and provisional settings as missing links in the history of the Persian Revival. While they were “later seen as an anomaly — we might even say a royal caprice — in Iran’s modern art history,” they encouraged the development of the Persian Revival. Grigor notes that “Hataria’s knowledge production was grafted onto [this] existing revivalist momentum” (p. 163), thus foregrounding the invention of the Persian Revival in Bombay as filtered through Iran while highlighting that the Iranian brand of the Persian Revival was not born in Tehran; instead, it began in Kalat-e Naderi, was born in architecture in Shiraz, and migrated to Tehran where it became “the official style of the Urbimat” (p. 181).

7Grigor also describes each building designed in the Persian Revival in the second and third chapters, identifying variations such as Pediment and talar types. The book’s subtitle, “imperialism of the copy,” acquires meaning through these descriptions. We learn that Parsis drew on Western sources; Iran’s Zoroastrians copied buildings built in the Persian Revival in Bombay, reversing “the hierarchy of the copy and the original” (p. 127); and Qajar and Pahlavi Kings and aristocrats looked to Bombay and Western sources, copying and affixing them into Muslim architectural forms. The Persian Revival was the architecture of “copies of copies.” Turning full circle to Reza Shah Pahlavi's reign in the book’s final pages, Grigor refers to many familiar names, including Godard, Mohsen Forughi, Pope, and Nikolai Markov. It is clear by this stage that they were not inventors of the Persian Revival, but their role was not a small one. They copied and grafted directly from archaeological sites and “secured the Persian Revival with the state affiliation it had lacked since its invention in 1830s Bombay” (p. 197).

8Grigor is careful to note that not all Parsis were in favour of the Persian Revival, nor was the Persian Revival favoured in the design of every building in Bombay. Parsis also designed buildings in Classical and Gothic Revival Styles. Thus, they occupied an in-between identity, neither British nor Indian, in effect both British and Indian. They were simultaneously at the centre and the margin, through which they could advocate for reform in Iran while shifting the terms of colonial taste. Grigor also carefully shows that Parisis’ goal was distinct from Qajar and Pahlavi kings. Parsis developed the Persian Revival Style to insert themselves “into the taxonomies of universal histories as Aryan Persians, heir to the foundational civilisation of Cyrus and Darius.” Qajar and Pahlavi kings saw the Persian revival as a by-product of complex processes of “modernisation” and “nation-building” (p. 137) and as a “counter narrative to Europe’s cultural expansion” (p. 188).

9Throughout the book, Grigor floods the reader with a wealth of information, but she does not fail to surprise them, raising their curiosity and thus keeping them engaged. The conclusion is no different, where she argues that “the aesthetic judgement of the Persian Revival must hover in the domain of the discursive.” We must ask about the role of these buildings rather than their look. I would like to extend Grigor’s statement that “after Karim Khan Zand and Fath Ali Shah, we will never see the ancient in the same light,” by adding that we will never see Baq-e Afifabad, Shapuri House, the Takyeh Moaven al-Molk, the Anjoman Adaran fire temple and many other buildings in the same light, nor can we write a global art and architectural history in the same way after reading The Persian Revival. Grigor does not present the reader with just a revised history but rather with a subtly-researched book that successfully combines diverse literature inviting architectural historians to rethink the global turn in architectural history with Iran. Thus, besides art and architectural historians of Iran, students and scholars interested in the global history of architecture will find this book most useful.