Document Type : Research Article

Authors

• Erfan Ebrahimi ¹
• Maryam Dadkhah Tehrani ²

¹ Master's student in dramatic literature, University of Tehran,

² Assistance professor of performing arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

At the end of the Qajar era and with the subsidence of constitutionalist sentiments and the weakness of the central government, the history of ancient Iran was more and more noticed by artists. After Reza Khan came to power and increased archeological exploration in different parts of Iran, many intellectuals of that time found the solution to the problems of Iranian society in referring to Iran's brilliant past. Especially with the dominance of nationalist thoughts in Iran, these readings of history went in a certain direction. One of these people was Gregory Yeghikian, who tried to reconstruct ancient Iran by writing two historical plays. Yeghikian shows the fall of the great Achaemenid Empire in the play War of the East and the West and the weakening of the central government of Iran at that time and the causes of this fall and the occupation of Iran by Alexander the Great. However, at the same time, parts of northwestern Iran were occupied by Russian and Ottoman forces during the First World War. In this article, we are trying to explain why the history of ancient Iran was important in that era by introducing the Yeghikian, and by analyzing the play of the War of the East and the West, we will examine how pre-Islamic Iran was reflected in the first Pahlavi era, based on the approach of Fairclough 's critical discourse analysis.

Keywords

• Historicism
• first Pahlavi
• critical discourse analysis
• The Eastern and The Western war
• Gregory Yeghikian

Main Subjects

• socialhistory and art