Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Month: June 2022

  • Centaurs and Gandharves

    Janda, Michael. 2022. Kentauren und Gandharven. Verlag Thomas Kubo UG.

    How the idea of half-man, half-horse creatures came into the world has puzzled poets, scholars and writers since antiquity. With the connection of Centaurs and Gandharves by Adalbert Kuhn some 170 years ago, these enigmatic mythical figures became a cross-cultural object of study for the first time. Michael Janda’s latest study is devoted to proving their historical-genetic relationship and analysing both names.

    The path of investigation combines philology and linguistics with the history of religion and archaeoastronomy and leads from the earliest evidence from Greek and Indo-Iranian, and finally to the firmament. Along this path, Janda is able to take up numerous problems that would initially remain contradictory when viewed in isolation from specifically Greek, Avestan or Vedic philology, but which become immediately comprehensible within the mythical world conception of the Indo-Europeans.

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  • The Rise of Persia and the First Greco-Persian Wars

    Kambouris, Manousos E. 2022. The Rise of Persia and the First Greco-Persian Wars: The Expansion of the Achaemenid Empire and the Battle of Marathon. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military.

    Manousos Kambouris revisits the epic events of the first Greco-Persian War and the Persian invasion of Greece. He gives excellent detail on the Persian perspective and sets the war in the context of the rise of Achaemenid Persia as the superpower of the day and the expansion of their empire into Europe. After relating the earlier Persian campaigns in Europe the author shows how the Ionian Revolt, by the Greeks of Asia Minor already under Persian rule, was instrumental. Darius I, the Persian King of Kings ordered the invasion of Greece ostensibly to punish the Greeks, and more specifically the Athenians, for their support of the Revolt and to contain further insurgencies but in truth to achieve god-ordained world dominance.

    Describing the invasion in great detail, the author analyses the king’s immense (even if occasionally exaggerated) army, considering its composition and logistical constraints. The campaign leading to Marathon and the decisive battle itself are then clearly narrated. Manousos Kambouris’ meticulous research brings fresh insights to this timeless tale of defiance of the odds and victory for the underdog.

  • Ancient Indo-European Languages between Linguistics and Philology

    Bianconi, Michele, Marta Capano, Domenica Romagno & Francesco Rovai (eds.). 2022. Ancient Indo-European Languages between Linguistics and Philology: Contact, Variation, and Reconstruction (Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics, 18). Leiden: Brill.

    Studying the Indo-European languages means having a privileged viewpoint on diachronic language change, because of their relative wealth of documentation, which spans over more than three millennia with almost no interruption, and their cultural position that they have enjoyed in human history.

    The chapters in this volume investigate case-studies in several ancient Indo-European languages (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite, Luwian, Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Persian, Armenian, Albanian) through the lenses of contact, variation, and reconstruction, in an interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary way. This reveals at the same time the multiplicity and the unity of our discipline(s), both by showing what kind of results the adoption of modern theories on “old” material can yield, and by underlining the centrality and complexity of the text in any research related to ancient languages.

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  • Comparison and Gradation in Indo-European

    Keydana, Götz, Wolfgang Hock & Paul Widmer (eds.). 2021. Comparison and Gradation in Indo-European (The Mouton Handbooks of Indo-European Typology, 1). Berlin: De Gruyter.

    The ability to compare is fundamental to human cognition. Expressing various types of comparison is thus essential to any language. The present volume presents detailed grammatical descriptions of how comparison and gradation are expressed in ancient Indo-European languages. The detailed chapters devoted to the individual languages go far beyond standard handbook knowledge. Each chapter is structured the same way to facilitate cross-reference and (typological) comparison. The data are presented in a top-down fashion and in a format easily accessible to the linguistic community.

    The topics covered are similatives, equatives, comparatives, superlatives, elatives, and excessives. Each type of comparison is illustrated with glossed examples of all its attested grammatical realizations.
    The book is an indispensable tool for typologists, historical linguists, and students of the syntax and morphosyntax of comparison.