Richard Nelson Frye

Richard Nelson Frye and Roman Ghirshman , 1966, in Schusch , Iran

Richard Nelson Frye (born January 10, 1920 in Birmingham, Alabama , † March 27, 2014 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American orientalist and historian .

Career

After graduating from the University of Illinois with a bachelor's degree , Frye received his master's degree in 1940 and Ph.D. at Harvard University . He taught from 1948 to 1990 as a professor of oriental and Iranian studies at Harvard, where he founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies . In 1958 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Frye, who was also interested in cultural history and philosophy, also taught as a visiting professor in Frankfurt am Main (1958/59), Hamburg (1968/69) and in Shiraz . Frye was considered one of the best experts in the history of Iran and showed that ancient Iran also survived in its Islamic successor states (see for example Persia , 1962).

Fonts (selection)

• The Heritage of Persia. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1962 (in German: Persia. Until the onset of Islam. Kindler, Zurich 1962).
• Bukhara. The Medieval Achievement. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OK 1965.
• The Golden Age of Persia. The Arabs in the East. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1975, ISBN 0-297-76871-9 .
• The Heritage of Central Asia. From Antiquity to the Turkish expansion. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton NJ 1996, ISBN 1-55876-111-X .
• The History of ancient Iran (= Handbook of Ancient Studies . Dept. 3: Ancient Orient, Greek History, Roman History. Vol. 7). Beck, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-406-09397-3 .
• Greater Iran. A 20th-century odyssey. Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa CA 2005, ISBN 1-56859-177-2 .

Frye also wrote several articles for the Encyclopædia Iranica and was the editor of the fourth volume of the Cambridge History of Iran .

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard Nelson Frye in the catalog of the German National Library
• Harvard University website