I am happy to inaugurate with this volume on the ethno-demography of the Armenian Highlands a new Brill Series, the Iran and the Caucasus Monographs (ICM), conceived as kind of a supplement to the journal Iran and the Caucasus, whose quarter-century anniversary was celebrated recently with its 25th volume published in 2021.

The idea for such a Series as an extension of Iran and the Caucasus has crystallised over the years with the growing weight and recognition of the journal as one of the leading scholarly periodicals in Oriental Studies. Iran and the Caucasus has become gradually a nexus of different academic trends, not only in the sphere of Irano-Caucasica, but also in many other related fields, acquiring the status of a multidisciplinary forum for almost all the fields of humanities—from history, archæology, ethnography, and linguistics to history of religions, art history, and political and security issues. In this way, it has contributed significantly to the development and promotion of a vast area of knowledge on a geographic expanse stretching from the Caucasus and the Near East to Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, and even further eastwards to China and the Far East.

Certainly, the scope of a journal is constrained by page limits and other concerns imposed upon a periodical publication, which have restricted the ever-growing stream of scholarship driven by Iran and the Caucasus. Therefore, the need for an additional organ closely tied with the journal has direly been felt, indeed.

The objective of the ICM is thus to institutionalise the publication of large-format scholarly materials and monographic works by distinguished academics from all over the world who have contributed to Iran and the Caucasus during its almost three decades of existence.

Emerging, therefore, as an auxiliary arm of the journal, the ICM is fully inspired by its alter ego, being based on the same principles, covering the same spectrum of scholarly topics, and following the same system of peer-review and strict academic requirements and standards.

The first volume of this Series presents the English translation—with meticulous research, commentaries, and respective apparatus—of a travel account by an Armenian intellectual of the nineteenth century. This sophisticated composition, written in a non-standard variety of Western Armenian with a visible admixture of Eastern Armenian language realia, embodies a veritable treasure-trove of highly-important and, in many aspects, unique corpus of valuable data on the ethno-demography of the “virgin woodland” of Anatolia, Dersim, inhabited by the Zazas, a hitherto less-studied Iranian ethnicity, as well as by Armenians, the autochthonous population of the land exterminated later during the Armenian Genocide. The lively depiction of the places of habitation with their exact topography, vivid description of landscape, mountains and rivers, having in most cases a cultic value in folk imagination of the population of Dersim, and the flora and fauna of the area, flavoured with informative conversations with locals in their dialects, provide a deep insight into the social and cultural life, popular beliefs, habits, and manners of the people living in this highland at the end of the nineteenth century. I am grateful to my friend Prof. Jost Gippert, who initiated the English translation of this remarkable monument and carefully supervised the work.

Finally, I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Brill for promoting and supporting the ICM and, especially, to Dr. Abdurraouf Oueslati, for his devotion and enthusiasm in facilitating the burdensome process of the project’s realisation. And, last by not least, I appreciate greatly the readiness of my friends and colleagues, prominent scholars, who agreed to act as members of the Academic Council of the Series, thus imbuing it with scholarly rigour and value.

Garnik S. Asatrian

1 May 2023, Yerevan