A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies
Gardner, Iain. 2026. The Letters of Mani. A Lost Scripture of the Late Antique World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Includes new English translations of all the available texts concerning Mani’s Letters
- Utilizes the latest research to recover all that can be known about one of the scriptures of Manichaeism
- A holistic and interdisciplinary approach
- Features much new or little-known material
Maghsoudlou, Arvin. 2025. A Palace Built into a Mountain: Exploring the Modes of Audience Interaction and Reception at the Great Ayvan of Taq-e Bustan in Late Antiquity. Ancient West & East 24: 43-67.
This study revisits the structure, imagery and scale of the Great Ayvan of Taq-e Bustan, employing a phenomenological approach to explore how it interacted with its potential Late Antique audiences. It argues that the monument departed from traditional Sasanian rock reliefs by blending features of landscape reliefs and palatial architecture into a hybrid programme, effectively engaging a diverse audience. The paper analyses how viewer interaction varied with proximity to the ayvan, with a particular focus on the complex and multisensory experience afforded to those granted access inside.
Holliday, Shabnam J. (ed.). 2026. Sovereignty in Iran: Challenges to Eurocentrism from Ancient Iran to the Islamic Republic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
(more…)This book is a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary collaborative project examining sovereignties as a plural concept through the case of Iran. In so doing it challenges Eurocentric assumptions in the Humanities and Social Sciences and covers sovereignty from ancient Iran to the Islamic Republic including the Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
Part One explores sovereignty in ancient Iran by looking at the Elamites through a theoretical lens, the Achaemenids, and the Parthians and Sasanians. Part Two explores how territory relates to sovereignty alongside other dynamics in the Safavid, Second World War, Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods. Part Three then focuses on competing and co-existing sovereignties in the southern Persian Gulf at the beginning of the twentieth century in Kurdistan and its relationships with Iranian governments during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. A non-Eurocentric framework requires the reader to think about co-existing and competing sovereignties with an ‘Area Studies’ lens. This approach moves beyond periodised understandings of history and not only contributes to better understanding Eurocentrism but also enables a greater appreciation of contexts, complexities and agencies.
Heindio Uesugi has done it again. Under the supervisory editorship of Adam Alvah Catt, Uesugi has now published an addendum to the second part of his Old Avestan dictionary: a translation and glossed version of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti.
Uesugi, Heindio (ed.). 2026. Old Avestan dictionary. Addendum to Part II: Text and translation: Yasna Haptaŋhāiti. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
For more context on these publications, I recommend the blogs in Language Hat and Language Log.
This is the draft version of the annotated new translation of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti (YH) along with that of Yasna 42. We have prepared this translation as an addendum to Part II. We hope to further improve it (along with the corrigenda) when time permits, taking into consideration any feedback we may receive.
From the ‘Short Introduction’
Although arguably less contentious than the Gāthās, the YH is of course not without its share of difficulties. Even where there is general consensus on the basic meaning, the view on the intended nuance, implications, and significance can vary, at times considerably.
Sims-Williams, Nicholas. 2026. Two unpublished Bactrian documents in the al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait. Bulletin of SOAS FirstView. 1–8.
Bactrian, the principal written language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, was little known until the early 1990s, when more than 150 contracts, economic documents and letters, together with a few Buddhist texts, were acquired by collectors. Most of these were published by Nicholas Sims-Williams between 2001 and 2012 in three volumes entitled Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan. The present article presents two additional documents which have come to light more recently, a receipt for a sum of ten dirhams and a letter from an otherwise unknown ruler of Rōb, modern Rui in the Hindukush mountains. The text and translation of the documents are accompanied by a discussion of their linguistic and historical significance.
Abstract
The latest volume of East and West contains several interesting articles, some of which deal with aspects of (ancient) Iran.
Pashootanizadeh, Azadeh. 2026. The Sasanian Silk Road: Socioeconomic structures of the Zoroastrian silk trade. TEXTILE. 1–14.
(more…)This study examines the cultural economy of silk during the Sasanian period and its influence on the cultural landscape of fire temples. The prosperity of the Silk Road expanded professions and social groups associated with the silk trade, allowing the Sasanian period to be divided into two phases. In the first phase, three fire temples—Adur Gushnasp, Adur Farnbag, and Adur Burzen-Mihr—were constructed for distinct social classes at key locations along the Silk Road, forming the vertices of a triangle in central Iran with the Neyasar Fire Temple at its center. In the second phase, whose beginning is uncertain, the Neyasar Fire Temple was designated for a newly emerged intermediary administrative class responsible for managing financial records and taxes related to the silk trade. The construction of caravanserais and government forts around Neyasar reflects the diverse social and economic activities associated with silk commerce. Based on fieldwork, document analysis, archaeological evidence, and specialized silk-related terminology, this study analyzes the relationship between fire temples, social strata, and the cultural economy of silk. The findings suggest that fire temples functioned not only as religious centers but also as key nodes within the socio-economic networks of the Sasanian Silk Road.
Abstract
The first issue of Studia Iranica 53 is out. Here is the table of contents:
Stolper, Matthew W. 2025. The Chronological Boundaries of the Persepolis Fortification Archive. In Petra Goedegebuure & Joost Hazenbos (eds.), Ḫattannaš: A Festschrift in Honor of Theo van den Hout, 387-415. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
The Festschrift offered to Theo van den Hout contains several important and stimulating studies. The entire volume is available in open access via the hyperlink above. Among its contributions, an article by Matthew Stolper is particularly noteworthy, as it addresses a subject at the very core of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The study presents an edition of several texts from the Persepolis Fortification Archive which, despite their fragmentary condition, shed new light on the chronological boundaries of the Archive.
King, Rhyne & Alice Collett. 2026. The Idea of “India” and “Gandāra” in the Earliest Iranian and Greek Sources. Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia 146 (2): 241-262.
Hinduš, the Old Persian name for a region of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BCE), ultimately underlies the English word India. The history of the word Hinduš and its cognates has attracted considerable research, yet the precise referent of Hinduš in its Achaemenid context remains imperfectly understood. Achaemenid sources often group Hinduš together with the neighboring region of Gandāra, and analyzing the two regions together is key to understanding them. In this article we reassess the earliest appearances of Hinduš, Gandāra, and their cognates in the Iranian and Greek sources. We first demonstrate that Achaemenid knowledge of South Asia was vague, and although imperial administrators broadly located Hinduš in the lower Indus and Gandāra in the upper Indus, they did not use these toponyms entirely consistently. Next, we turn to the Classical Greek sources. The Greeks recognized Gandāra as a far eastern region of the Achaemenid Empire, but they expanded the idea of Hinduš, as Indikḗ, into a fantastical land on the edge of the world.