ABSTRACT
An exciting part of my small library is a modest collection of documents of
Qajar Iran (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) I bought some ten years ago
from a dealer in second-hand books. Having apparently come from the
abandoned records of a notary public’s office of the time, and belonging mostly
to the Kashan and Qazvin regions, the collection contains almost all kinds of
documents drawn up to record transactions, endorse legal deeds and actions, or
settle disputes arising among people as to their social rights and responsibilities.
Much of the collection consists of documents endorsing a marriage or a rural
land transaction. Still, the diversity of subjects in this collection allows
arrangement of the documents into some twenty-five categories, with the aim of
examining and studying each topic separately.1 This is a brief introduction on the
Iranian irrigation and related documents in my collection.
