Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

  • Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran

    Zoroastrianism: modern Zoroastrian priest tending a temple fire. Image © Encyclopædia Britannica

    Sheffield, Daniel. 2015. Review of Monica Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011). International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) 47(4). 833–835.

    Pious Citizens trace ideas of “true” and “rational” religion in Western India and Iran between the years 1830 and 1940. Her story begins in the city of Bombay, where in the early 19th century traditional networks of Parsi authority were disrupted by the rise of merchant capital in the metropole and emigration away from older centers of communal hierarchy. This forms the backdrop for the beginning of the Zoroastrian reform movement, in which religious and social reform were linked.

  • The life of Serapion in Sogdian

    Sims-Williams, Nicholas (ed.). 2015. The life of Serapion and other Christian Sogdian texts from the manuscripts E25 and E26. (Berliner Turfantexte 35). Turnhout: Brepols.
    The Sogdian texts published in this volume are of interest and importance in various ways. The Life of Serapion is particularly significant from a linguistic point of view, being a close translation of a known Syriac text, so that its rare words and unusual grammatical forms can be interpreted with confidence. The Life of John of Dailam, on the other hand, differs substantially from the surviving Syriac versions and preserves details unrecorded elsewhere concerning the history of western Iran in the early Islamic period. A text on omens represents an extremely ancient, pre-Christian survival, with clear parallels not only in Syriac but even in Babylonian omen texts, while a refutation of Manichaeism sheds light on the attitude of the Christian community in the Turfan oasis towards their Manichaean neighbours. All these texts are provided with translation and detailed commentary, and the volume concludes with grammatical notes, complete glossary, bibliography, index of words discussed, and eleven plates. This work will be of interest to specialists in Iranian languages, mediaeval Iran and Central Asia, Syriac literature and the history of the “Church of the East”.

  • Sanskrit in Persianate India

    Sanskrit and Persian—both as languages and cultural systems—overlapped in time and space for several centuries on the precolonial subcontinent. But only more recently have scholars investigated points of intersection and exchange between these two linguistic and intellectual traditions. Scholars of Indo-Persian have recently devoted substantial attention to various sorts of Sanskrit-Persian encounters, such as the translation of Sanskrit works into Persian and multilingual patronage ties. In this conference, we aim to highlight and spur thinking about similar cross-cultural interactions between members of the Sanskrit and Persian traditions from the vantage point of Sanskrit literary culture.

    The last few decades have witnessed a surge in scholarly attention to Sanskrit during the medieval and early modern periods. Within this wider area of interest, many scholars have begun to ask questions about how Sanskrit thinkers conceptualized Persian, the only viable rival to Sanskrit as a transregional idiom, and exchanges between the two traditions. Sanskrit-focused scholarship sheds light on intellectual, social and literary aspects of medieval and early modern India and is thus crucial for understanding these complex periods. Sanskrit texts also provide tools for analyzing the larger categories that we use for precolonial Indian literature, including the popular but problematic idea of “Indo-Persian” as a distinct literary and cultural realm. Yet such scholarship is still in its infancy and struggles for attention among a wider audience. This conference will highlight fresh, dynamic research and consider future avenues, both individually and collectively, for emphasizing Sanskrit materials in the exciting, but currently Persian-dominated, study of medieval and early modern India. We aim to give coherence and visibility to an emerging, vibrant subfield of South Asian studies, especially the crucial place of Sanskrit materials and Sanskritists within that subfield.

    For more information see Papers and Abstracts. (more…)

  • Research on Yaghnobi

    Benkato, Adam. 2015. Review article: Recent work in Yaghnobi Studies. Iran and the Caucasus 19. 283–294.

    This review article discusses various issues raised by the two reports of the Italian missions to the Yaghnob Valley in Tajikistan. It aims to provide a critical review of the publications,  which present a broad variety of new research on the Yaghnobi people, as well as a more general discussion of the methodology involved in studying this group.

  • Biblical and Christian Sogdian texts

    Sims-Williams, Nicholas, Martin Schwartz & William J. Pittard (eds.). 2014. Biblical and other Christian Sogdian texts from the Turfan collection. (Berliner Turfantexte 32). Turnhout: Brepols.
    This volume in the series Berliner Turfantexte contains the edition, with translation and detailed commentary, of a series of important Christian texts in Sogdian, most of them previously unpublished. The emphasis is on Biblical texts translated into Sogdian from the Syriac Peshitta version: a Psalter in Sogdian script, fragments of Gospel lectionaries, and a double-folio from a lectionary of the Pauline Epistles. Other texts edited in the volume include a retelling of the story of Daniel, a text on the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, and the “Wisdom of Ahiqar”, all of them in recensions which differ significantly from any known Syriac version. Two analytical glossaries, one for the Psalter and other texts in Sogdian script and one for the texts in Syriac script, cover not only the works edited in this book but also a number of Christian Sogdian texts published by the author in scattered articles over the last twenty years or so. The volume concludes with a bibliography, an index of words discussed in the commentary, and seventeen plates. This work will be of interest to specialists in Iranian languages, mediaeval Central Asia, Biblical studies, Syriac literature, and the history of the “Church of the East”.

  • Roman ‘Soldatenkaiser’ on the Triumphal Rock Reliefs of Shāpūr I

    Shavarebi, Ehsan. 2015. Roman ‘Soldatenkaiser’ on the Triumphal Rock Reliefs of Shāpūr I – A Reassessment. HISTORIA I ŚWIAT 4, 47-63.

    Five rock reliefs surviving in Persis/Fārs province in southern Iran represent the victories of Shāpūr I (241–272 AD), the second Sasanian King of Kings (Šāhānšāh), over the Roman Empire. The three Roman Emperors depicted on these reliefs have traditionally been identified as Gordian III (238–244), Philip I – known as ‘the Arab’ – (244–249) and Valerian I (253–260). From the 1960s onward, new interpretations are presented. In the most recent of these, Uranius Antoninus (253/254) is recognised on three of Shāpūr’s triumphal reliefs. The present paper aims to re-examine these new hypotheses by considering numismatic materials, including a unique gold coin of Shāpūr which bears an image of the same topic accompanying a legend on its reverse.

  • Central Asia and the Persianate World

    Peacock, Andrew C. S. & D. G. Tor (eds.). 2015. Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate world: Iranian tradition and Islamic civilisation. (I.B.Tauris & BIPS Persian Studies Series 7). London: I.B.Tauris.

    From the political dissolution of the Abbasid Caliphate in the mid-ninth century to the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Persianate dynasties of Islamic Central Asia constituted the political and military stronghold of Sunni Islam. It was in this region, historically known as Khurasan and Transoxiana, that many of the important religious and cultural developments of Islamic civilisation took place.

    The region first gave rise to the Abbasid Revolution, provided the troops for its success, and supplied the military slaves and auxiliaries that led to its political dissolution. From the second part of the ninth century and for the ensuing 400 years, the Sunni Persianate dynasties formed the mainstay of Islamic military might over the Islamic heartland, from India to Egypt.

    The period was also characterised by the cultural dominance of the Persian-speaking court, bringing about the acceptance of classical Persian as the second primary Islamic language of high culture. It produced the writing of many of Islamic civilisation’s greatest works of poetry, philosophy, biography, history, belles-lettres and religion, in both Arabic and Persian. This volume explores the origins and nature of this cultural and political authority and sheds light on one of the most formative yet unexplored eras of Islamic history.

    About the Editors:

    A.C.S. Peacock is Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews.

    D.G. Tor is Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle Eastern History at the University of Notre Dame.

  • Sasanian glassware

    Sasanian glassSimpson, St John. 2015. Sasanian glassware from Mesopotamia, Gilan, and the Caucasus. Journal of Glass Studies 57. 77–96.

    This paper was presented at The Corning Museum of Glass in March 2014 as part of the symposium dedicated to the memory of the late David Whitehouse and entitled “A Life in Archaeology and Glass: Honoring David Whitehouse (1941-2013)”. It is now published in the Journal of Glass Studies (57), 2015. The subject is a first attempt to understand the role of Sasanian glass in the Caucasus and suggest this is the source of much of the imported Sasanian glass reportedly found in graves in north-west Iran.

  • Syriac into Middle Iranian

    Detail from the Manuscript Chaldean Cathedral of Mardin (CCM) 13, f. 120r

    Barbati, Chiara. 2015. Syriac into Middle Iranian: A Translation Studies Approach to Sogdian and Pahlavi Manuscripts within the Church of the East. Open Linguistics 1(1). 444–457.

    Based on a corpus coming from the Turfan oasis (in present-day Xinjiang, People’s Republic of China) and consisting of Christian Middle Iranian literature in several languages (Middle Persian, Syriac and Sogdian) and scripts (East Syriac, Pahlavi and secular Sogdian), the present paper is aimed at identifying and outlining the translation techniques for the transmission of religious knowledge, based on a literary tradition as well as on a manuscript tradition, from one context to another. The religious knowledge is that which belongs to the “Church of the East” and which is written in its official liturgical language, i.e. Syriac in East Syriac script. The general context is that of the missionary activities of the “Church of the East” along the Silk road between late Antiquity and early Middle Age. The particular context is that of the converted Iranian communities.
    About the Author:
    Chiara Barbati (PhD 2009) is a scholar of Ancient and Middle Iranian languages in the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (ÖAW).

  • A new look at the Roman Empire of the fourth century

    Dijkstra, Roald ,  Sanne van Poppel & Daniëlle Slootjes (eds.). 2015. East and West in the Roman Empire of the fourth century. An end to unity? Brill.

    East and West in the Roman Empire of the Fourth Century examines the (dis)unity of the Roman Empire in the fourth century from different angles, in order to offer a broad perspective on the topic and avoid an overvaluation of the political division of the empire in 395.
    After a methodological key-paper on the concepts of unity, the other contributors elaborate on these notions from various geo-political perspectives: the role of the army and taxation, geographical perspectives, the unity of the Church and the perception of the divisio regni of 364. Four case-studies follow, illuminating the role of concordia apostolorum, antique sports, eunuchs and the poet Prudentius on the late antique view of the Empire. Despite developments to the contrary, it appears that the Roman Empire remained (to be viewed as) a unity in all strata of society.

    (more…)