مطالب

Natural events and disasters always have a devastating impact on human settlements and incur economic and social effects on societies by destroying buildings and infrastructures. One of these destructive phenomenons is landslide that could damage communities, meadows and forests, communication lines, and monuments extensively in many parts of the globe, especially in mountainous countries such as Iran. Some information is currently available about the morphological cause and effects of some apparent cases. However, the destructive effects of this phenomenon on ancient settlements have not adequately been mentioned. This study examines an ancient landslide by combining data from two seasons of archaeological excavations of Tepe Mehr Ali, located in Fars province, and related interdisciplinary studies. The results of the excavations, geological evidence and morphology of the site indicate that the southern slope of the mound (about 35 degrees) to Balangan River, represent a landslide event leading to the abandonment of this site for some time during settlement periods.

In this article, a contrastive analysis of reformists and fundamentalists’ press texts, related to nuclear talks has been performed in specific periods of time, before and after the last round of nuclear talks between Islamic Republic of Iran and the 5+1 group, especially the United States’ related texts in Iran’s Persian newspapers as representatives of the two opposite discourses, from the perspective of the Critical Discourse Analysis approach by using socio-semantic features of Van Leeuwen’s model (2008). This study goes beyond the structural description of the discourse practices and examines the ways through which a system and structure make possible a special type of action. To do so, discursive texts of the two Iranian Persian publications belonging to two rival groups: E’temad as the representative of reformists and Keyhan, the fundamentalists’ representative, have been analyzed, both qualitatively and quantitatively. In response to the research questions (How is the linguistic realization of the discursive structures performed in the given texts? And are Socio-Semantic features determined by power relations?)The result shows that the opposite ideologies dominating the minds of journalists of the two political groups are reflected in the texts and statistical analysis of the corpus also states that the Socio-Semantic features are determined by different ideologies, related to power relations. In other words, language and discourse at underlying levels are laden with ideology, power relations and dominance, and at surface levels, with discursive features and structures.

The royal institution in ancient Iran involved implications such as race, splendor, and personality. Ahura Mazda brokerage, construction and development, border protection, justice, and religiosity were the functions of royal institution and developed according to the requirements of the time. However, with the arrival of Islam, the royal institution was initially rejected and discouraged; but after a while, it prevailed on the Arab tribal teachings and became the supreme prototype of governance pattern. Investigation of Iranian rulers after Islam and even during Arab caliphs on whether or not the requirements of the royal institution were responsible for its functions (referred to the duties of caliph or Islamic rulers) indicates the importance of these elements in that period. In some texts of the Islamic period including the letter of Tahir to his son Abdullah, we can find the reflection of the aforementioned royal functions; but due to a change in some of the requirements and functions, the book Siyâsat-Nàma of Nizam al-Mulk is the first text of the Islamic period that has focused on them fully and comprehensively. With emphasis on the central role of the king and the royal institution functions, Nizam al-Mulk tried to change the Seljuk tribal government into the one with Iranian governance pattern. Taking into account an analytical approach, this paper tries to investigate the functions and requirements of the royal institution that is the center of Iranian governance pattern in Siyâsat-Nàma and effort of Nizam al-Mulk for changing Seljuk tribe's attitude.