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Social Biographies of the Ancient World

The latest issue of Journal of Ancient History (volume 12, issue 2) is a special issue: Social Biographies of the Ancient World with Jason M. Silverman as guest editor. Below is the list of articles:

  • Jason M. Silverman, Alex Aissaoui, Rotem Avneri Meir, Jutta Jokiranta, Nina Nikki, Adrianne Spunaugle, Joanna Töyräänvuori, Caroline Wallis, Melanie Wasmuth: Social Biographies of the Ancient World. Studying Ahatabu, Jonathan, and Babatha through a Bourdieusian Approach: Towards a New Historiographical Habitus
  • Adrianne Spunaugle: Ancient Near Eastern Field Theory: Adapting Bourdieu for Social Biographies of the Ancient World
  • Jason M. Silverman, Joanna Töyräänvuori, Melanie Wasmuth: Ahatabu and her Stela (ÄM 7707): Funerary Habitus in Achaemenid Egypt
  • Rotem Avneri Meir, Jutta Jokiranta, Adrianne Spunaugle: Functional Differentiation in 1 Maccabees: Exploring Second Century BCE Judean Society Through the Character of Jonathan Apphus
  • Caroline Wallis, Alex Aissaoui, Nina Nikki: Falling Out with the In-Laws. Understanding the Babatha Archive with Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory and Theory of Practice.
  • Emanuel Pfoh: Ancient Individuals and Bourdieu in Context: A Historical Anthropological Response
  • Olga Zeveleva: A Sociological Response: Challenging the Modernity-centrism of Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Approach
  • Helen Dixon: A Levantine Archaeological Response: Thinking with Bourdieu though Limited Data and Explicit Assumptions
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Books

The Medieval Persian Gulf

Ulrich, Brian. 2023. The Medieval Persian Gulf. Leeds: Arc-Humanities.

The Persian Gulf today is home to multiple cosmopolitan urban hubs of globalization. This did not start with the discovery of oil. This book tells of the Gulf from the rise of Islam until the coming of the Portuguese, when port cities such as Siraf, Sohar, and Hormuz were entrepots for trading pearls, horses, spices, and other products across much of Asia and eastern Africa. Indeed, products traded there became a key part of the material culture of medieval Islamic civilization, and the Gulf region itself was a crucial membrane between the Middle East and the world of the broader Indian Ocean. The book also highlights the long-term presence of communities of South Asian and African ancestry, as well as patterns of religious change among Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims that belie the image of a region long polarized between Arabs and Persians and Sunnis and Shi’ites.

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Cosmos, society, religion

Maurer, Moritz. 2024. Kosmos, Gesellschaft, Religion: Zoroastrische und manichäische Sozialordnungsdiskurse in der langen Spätantike (Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 80). Berlin: De Gruyter.

For over 400 years, the Sasanian Empire was one of late antiquity’s most powerful empires. Zoroastrian religious specialists came up with a system to order its complex society. By looking at numerous primary sources, this volume reconstructs that process in the context of Sasanian social and economic history and examines its afterlife in Zoroastrian texts.

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Books

Herodotus: Book III

Longley, Georgina. 2024. Herodotus: Book III. London: Bloomsbury.

This accessible edition for students presents Herodotus as one of the most fascinating and colourful authors from the ancient world. Book III of Herodotus’ nine-book work is one of the richest in its exploration of themes, such as the practices and customs of different peoples and the nature of political power, issues still much debated today.

This commentary illuminates the geographical and even anthropological scope of Herodotus’ history, and enables students to confidently tackle the text in the original Greek. Bringing together a full introduction, text, commentary and translation, Longley makes Herodotus accessible to students of ancient Greek. This guide shows us why Herodotus is still considered the ‘Father of History’.


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Mannea and beyond

Naseri, Reza, Mehrdad Malekzadeh, Andrea Cesaretti & Roberto Dan. 2024. Mannea and beyond: A study of Iron Age and later pottery from Zanjan in the National Museum of Iran. Antilia.

The volume Mannea and Beyond: A Study of Iron Age and Later Pottery from Zanjan in the National Museum of Iran presents a systematic analysis of a ceramic assemblage from Zanjan, stored in Iran’s National Museum. Due to the lack of archaeological context—these artefacts were retrieved through illegal excavations—the study focuses on typology, preservation, and precise comparisons with neighbouring sites. The assemblage is heterogeneous, largely from the Iron Age with some medieval pieces, with several items linked to the Mannaean culture, enriching our understanding of this relatively obscure cultural horizon. The excellent preservation suggests that the materials may originate from a necropolis with unknown position.

Source: Reza Naseri’s social media page.

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Books

Mani’s Living Gospel and the Ewangelyōnīg Hymns

Shokri-Foumeshi, Mohammad (ed.). 2025. Mani’s Living Gospel and the Ewangelyōnīg hymns. Edition, reconstruction and commentary with a codicological and textual approach based on Manichaean Turfan fragments in the Berlin Collection (Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum. Series Iranica 3). Turnhout: Brepols.

This work deals with the manuscript fragments of Maniʼs Living Gospel and the Ewangeliōnīg Hymns of his followers in the eastern Manichaean churches. The author identifies new fragments and improves the previous reconstructions. In this context, he analyzes all the Manichaean and non-Manichaean documents. This book is designed to enlarge our understanding of the Turfan texts by presenting new texts and interpretations.

Summary

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
 
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Aim, Plan, and Strategy
1.2 Material and Content of the Living Gospel and Ewangelyōnīg Hymns
1.3 Outline of This Study
1.4 History of Prior Research

Continue reading “Mani’s Living Gospel and the Ewangelyōnīg Hymns”
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Journal

Indogermanische Forschungen

The recent issue of Indogermanische Forschungen (129/2024) contains several interesting papers.

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Books

Elite Mortuary Culture at Susa

Wicks, Yasmina. 2024. Elite Mortuary Culture at Susa: An Analysis of Early Middle Bronze Age Clay Coffin Burials. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

A crucial task of archaeological research today is to comprehend and critically interpret the rich legacy data from early excavations of ancient Near Eastern settlement sites. Yasmina Wicks targets the problematic and rarely consulted early 20th century records of excavations by French delegations at the UNESCO World Heritage-listed site of Susa in today’s southwest Iran. By scrutinizing published and unpublished documentation, she generates a new dataset of over 250 never-before-studied clay coffin burials to reveal a mortuary practice that began to flourish in the city at around 2000 BCE. These coffins were not used as upright-set containers but were instead overturned to provide a covering for the body, a distinctive method attested also at contemporary settlements in neighboring southern Mesopotamia.

The study begins with a discussion of the possibilities and constraints of using the legacy data, and then proceeds to an analysis of the typology, chronology, site distribution, and frequency of the coffins. Next it examines their rich and varied grave good assemblages, and the mortuary rites and demographic profile associated with their use. Finally, it reflects on the broader significance of the overturned clay coffin practice, concluding that it can be seen as a key signature of Susa’s bicultural society, offering a new perspective on Elamite and Mesopotamian cultural connectivity when the city left the political embrace of Mesopotamia’s Ur III dynasts at the end of the Early Bronze Age and became the lowland seat of the Elamite rulers from the Zagros Mountains. The mortuary behavior associated with the coffins, initially characterized by an unprecedented consumption of wealth, emerges as a response to new socio-political and socio-economic conditions both locally and across the Near East in the pivotal early years of the Middle Bronze Age.

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Zoroastrianism in India and Iran

Buhler, Alexandra. Zoroastrianism in India and Iran: Persians, Parsis and the flowering of political identity. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

This book examines the Zoroastrian community in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi period beyond the borders of Iran to trace this Parsi-Persian relationship. A major theme is the increase in philanthropy directed to the Zoroastrians of Iran by the Parsis and the involvement of the British in encouraging Parsi feelings of patriotism towards Iran. The book shows that not only were Parsis affected by events taking place in Iran, they also contributed to the broader change in attitudes towards Zoroastrians in that country.

Description

Buhler’s book will be launched at an event in SOAS. For more information, see this link.

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Books

The King’s Road

On the occasion of the book’s paperback edition, which has just been published:

Wen, Xin. 2023. The king’s road: Diplomacy and the remaking of the Silk Road. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The King’s Road offers a new interpretation of the history of the Silk Road, emphasizing its importance as a diplomatic route, rather than a commercial one. Tracing the arduous journeys of diplomatic envoys, Xin Wen presents a rich social history of long-distance travel that played out in deserts, post stations, palaces, and polo fields. The book tells the story of the everyday lives of diplomatic travelers on the Silk Road—what they ate and drank, the gifts they carried, and the animals that accompanied them—and how they navigated a complex web of geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. It also describes the risks and dangers envoys faced along the way—from financial catastrophe to robbery and murder.

Overview