This book surveys the history of Christians and Jews in Iran from the era of the pre-Islamic Sassanian empire, and of the Zoroastrians from the Moslem conquest, down to the Afghan invasion of the country in 1722–3. Aptin Khanbaghi successfully highlights the way in which the fortunes of these groups varied over time and from one community to another, and the contribution made by the representatives of such minorities to Iranian culture as a whole. One would have welcomed on occasions a more penetrating analysis of the impulses behind particular rulers' treatment of their non-Moslem subjects, as also a more detailed description of the scientific, medical and philosophical works composed or translated by Christian or Jewish scholars, which are sometimes merely listed (for example, pp. 48–50). In the fulfilment of this ambitious project, embracing as it does some fifteen centuries, Khanbaghi has quarried an impressive corpus of material in a range of languages. A lengthy appendix comprises some extremely useful extracts from primary sources. But the bibliography is in places slightly dated, and there are some striking omissions: the Armenian Gilanentz's report on the events of 1722, for instance, and Jean Dauvillier's extensive work on the Nestorian Church. Khanbaghi could also have been better served by his publishers: there are several typos, a few proper names are spelled inconsistently, words or phrases are occasionally elided and the failure to italicise long vowels in book titles gives the bibliography a distinctly odd appearance.