Fifteen newly discovered Arabic documents from Nadershah Afshar

The decrees left from the previous kings are important and reliable sources in political and social studies. A significant number of royal edicts from the Afsharid period to the time of the early Qajarid kings have been preserved in the Library of the Islamic Assembly. Though very valuable, they have not received proper attention. Amongst them are the fifteen decrees in Arabic from Nader Shah addressed to the chiefs of Arab tribes in south Iran; they represent an evidence of the kind of Nader Shah’s communications with the Arab tribes and his policies concerning the southwest frontiers of Iran. In this article, after giving some introductory information about Iran’s situation around the time of Nader’s coming to power, a number of the particularities of the edicts in terms of form and content are described, and then a re-reading of the documents is presented.