An official map of northern Persia, published by the Survey of India at its field office in Dehradun. It not only shows most of modern day Iran — the whole country north of Shooshtar and Birjand — but also parts of Iraq (including Baghdad), Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and the Caucasus.
Colonel Sidney Burrard was Surveyor General of India when the map was published and it was his decision, in 1912, to produce ‘Degree Sheet’ surveys of Iraq and Persia, made to a scale of 1 inch to 4 miles. These extremely detailed maps improved on the extant British cartography of those countries and were surely executed in an effort to maintain control over newly discovered oil reserves in south-western Persia. Small scale maps, such as Northern Persia, would have been used alongside the degree sheets when a regional overview was required.
As the present map focuses on the north of the country it would have been highly useful toward the close of the First World War when British forces travelled up through Persia in order to replace the departing Tsarist armies.
The Southern Asia Series ran from 1912 to 1945, extending from Northern Persia and the Gulf of Aden to Vladivostok and Papua New Guinea. Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham and the British Library all hold multiple sheets from the series, but Reading is the only UK institution to list the Northern Persia sheet separately. OCLC locates just two further holdings at the University of Chicago and the CECMC (Paris).
