The Ancient India and Iran Trust was founded in 1978, and occupies a unique position in the UK. It is the only independent charity concerned with the study of early India, Iran & Central Asia, promoting both scholarly research & popular interest in the area. [1] It has a library of over 25,000 volumes and it organises a range of activities including conferences, public lectures and visiting fellowships. The primary interest of the Trust has been in prehistory, archaeology, art history and ancient languages, but this often extends to more modern topics and other disciplines.
The idea of the Ancient India & Iran Trust came to the Founding Trustees (Dr Raymond Allchin, Dr Bridget Allchin, Sir Harold Bailey, Dr Jan van Lohuizen, and Professor Hanne van Lohuizen-de Leeuw) [1] when they became aware that the Indian sub-continent, together with Iran, Afghanistan & parts of Central Asia, was the 'neglected quarter' of the world in terms of British cultural life. Britain had had a close association with India in particular for over three centuries and had unrivalled resources for the study of its culture, art and history, in the India Office Library, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and much more. And yet, in the wake of South Asian independence, there were very few institutions, teaching posts or funds devoted to the promotion of popular or scholarly interest in any of these regions. The Trust was therefore set up to provide a focal point where scholars and members of the public with interests in the cultures of the ancient Indian and Iranian worlds could meet and discuss matters of common interest and use its unique library.
Today, the Trust runs a regular series of public lectures, visiting fellowship programmes and a bursary scheme for people wishing to come and use its library and other resources in Cambridge. It also organises and hosts conferences, high-profile lectures and occasional exhibitions, and has produced some publications. In addition, it created and funded the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan in the 1980s and has provided a base for external research projects such as the AHRC funded Manichean Dictionary Project (1999–2005) and Bactrian Chronology Project (2004-7). In 2005 the Trust was voted runner up in the Arts, Culture and Heritage category of the Charity Awards.
The Trust is based in a large Victorian house at 23 Brooklands Avenue, Cambridge. The house was purchased by the five Founding Trustees in 1981 and became the repositories of their specialised libraries. It was also the home until his death at the age of 96 of the first Chair, the distinguished scholar and linguist, Sir Harold Bailey.
The Trust has appointed a number of Honorary Fellows:
Gāndhārī was an Indo-Aryan Prakrit language found mainly in texts dated between the 3rd century BCE and 4th century CE in the region of Gandhāra, located in the northwestern Indian subcontinent. The language was heavily used by the former Buddhist cultures of Central Asia and has been found as far away as eastern China, in inscriptions at Luoyang and Anyang.
Dame Linda Jane Colley is an expert on British, imperial and global history from 1700. She is currently Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University and a long-term fellow in history at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. She previously held chairs at Yale University and at the London School of Economics. Her work frequently approaches the past from inter-disciplinary perspectives.
Richard Nelson Frye was an American scholar of Iranian and Central Asian studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University. His professional areas of interest were Iranian philology and the history of Iran and Central Asia before 1000 CE.
David Roy Shackleton Bailey was a British scholar of Latin literature who spent his academic life teaching at the University of Cambridge, the University of Michigan, and Harvard. He is best known for his work on Horace, and Cicero, especially his commentaries and translations of Cicero's letters.
New College London (1850–1980) was founded as a Congregationalist college in 1850.
James Robert Russell is a scholar and professor in Ancient Near Eastern, Iranian and Armenian Studies. He has published extensively in journals, and has written several books.
Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti is an Indian archaeologist, Professor Emeritus of South Asian Archaeology at Cambridge University, and a Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University. He is known for his studies on the early use of iron in India and the archaeology of Eastern India.
Laxmi Mall Singhvi was an Indian jurist, parliamentarian, scholar, writer and diplomat. He was, after V. K. Krishna Menon, the second-longest-serving High Commissioner for India in the United Kingdom (1991–97). He was conferred with a Padma Bhushan in 1998.
Frank Raymond Allchin, FBA was a British archaeologist and Indologist. He and his wife, Bridget Allchin, formed one of the most influential British partnerships in the post-Independence study of South Asian archaeology. Producing a large body of scholarship ranging from archaeological excavations, ethnoarchaeology as well as epigraphy and linguistics, the Allchins made their work and that of others accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. Seminal works include The Birth of Indian Civilisation (1968), which was later superseded by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisation in India and Pakistan (1982) and The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (1995).
David Edwin Pingree was an American historian of mathematics in the ancient world. He was a University Professor and Professor of History of Mathematics and Classics at Brown University.
Sir Harold Walter Bailey,, who published as H. W. Bailey, was an English scholar of Khotanese, Sanskrit, and the comparative study of Iranian languages.
Awadh Kishore Narain was an Indian historian, numismatist and archaeologist, who published and lectured extensively on the subjects related to South and Central Asia. He was well known for his book, The Indo-Greeks, published by Clarendon Press in 1957, in which he discussed the thesis of British historian Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn.
Bridget Allchin was an archaeologist who specialised in South Asian archaeology. She published books, some co-authored with her husband, Raymond Allchin (1923–2010).
Upinder Singh is an Indian historian who is a professor of History and Dean of Faculty at Ashoka University. She is the former head of the History Department at the University of Delhi. She is also the recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the category of Social Sciences (History).
William Norman Brown was an American Indologist and Sanskritist who established the first academic department of South Asian Studies in North America and organized the American Oriental Society in 1926. He was the Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania for most of his academic career. He was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1960. He is considered the founder of the field of South Asian Studies, which he pioneered in his career over four decades at the University of Pennsylvania, where he helped to found the Department of Oriental Studies (1931), and later single-handedly founded the Department of South Asia Regional Studies (1948). These departments are now survived by the departments of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and South Asia Studies. Brown also founded the American Institute of Indian Studies, which was located in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1946.
James Russell Raven LittD FBA FSA is a British scholar specialising in the history of the book. His published works include The English Novel 1770–1829 (2000), What is the History of the Book? (2018) and The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (2020). As of 2024, he was Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Essex, a Life Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a Professor in the Humanities at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
The Leon Levy Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation based in New York City. It was created in 2004 from the estate of Leon Levy, a Wall Street investor and philanthropist.
The Iran Heritage Foundation (IHF) is a United Kingdom–registered charity was founded in 1995 in London. The mission is to promote and preserve the history, languages and cultures of Iran and the Persianate world, covering all periods of Iranian civilization from ancient to modern.
Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie is an American historian of science known especially for her work on the history of women in science. She taught at Oklahoma Baptist University before becoming curator of the History of Science Collections and professor at the University of Oklahoma. She is currently Curator Emeritus, History of Science Collections and Professor Emeritus, Department of the History of Science at the university.
Johanna Engelberta van Lohuizen-de Leeuw was a Dutch archaeologist and art historian, specializing in South and Southeast Asia. Fluent in Sanskrit, she contributed important research to the study of antiquities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as in Thailand and Indonesia. Along with Raymond and Bridget Allchin, Harold Bailey, and her husband Jan van Lohuizen, she founded the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge in 1978 to support historical and archaeological research in those regions, which later became a center of academic research in the field.