Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Author: Arash Zeini

  • Religion in the Achaemenid Persian Empire

    Edelman, Diana, Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley &  Philippe Guillaume (eds.). 2016. Religion in the Achaemenid Persian Empire (Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 17). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

    The Achaemenid Persian imperial rulers have long been held to have exercised a policy of religious tolerance within their widespread provinces and among their dependencies. The fourteen articles in this volume explore aspects of the dynamic interaction between the imperial and the local levels that impacted primarily on local religious practices. Some of the articles deal with emerging forms of Judaism under Achaemenid hegemony, others with Achaemenid religion, royal ideology, and political policy toward religion. Others discuss aspects of Phoenician religion and changes to Egyptian religious practice while another addresses the presence of mixed religious practices in Phrygia, as indicated by seal imagery. Together, they indicate that tolerance was part of political expediency rather than a universal policy derived from religious conviction.

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  • Women in the Ancient Near East

    Stol, Marten. 2016. Women in the Ancient Near East. De Gruyter.

    Women in the Ancient Near East offers a lucid account of the daily life of women in Mesopotamia from the third millennium BCE until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The book systematically presents the lives of women emerging from the available cuneiform material and discusses modern scholarly opinion. Stol’s book is the first full-scale treatment of the history of women in the Ancient Near East.

    Marten Stol is a professor at the Free University, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

    This is an open access publication. The volume is available from the above link.

  • Itineraries on the edges of Iran

    Pellò, Stefano (ed.). 2016. Borders: Itineraries on the edges of Iran (Eurasiatica 5). Edizioni Ca’ Foscari.

    This collection of essays, which is presented here as the fifth issue of a recently reborn project significantly called Eurasiatica, was first imagined as a Venetian safīna (or better safiné), proudly invoking the truly cosmopolitan world of connections of a faded Adriatic koine extending to the Bosphorus. It now stands as the first volume of this new Eurasiatica entirely devoted to the vast territories of Iranian culture, which we aim at understanding in the widest sense possible – extending without interruption over the layered spaces of Ērān ud Anērān, to play with a sometimes abused Middle Persian expression – and of course including what is now usually called in English the ‘Persianate’, in an open chronological perspective.

    This fascinating volume is available as a PDF from the above link.

  • Priscian: Answers to King Khosroes of Persia

    Huby, Pamela, Sten Ebbesen, David Langslow, Donald Russell, Carlos Steel & Malcolm Wilson (eds.). 2016. Priscian: Answers to King Khosroes of Persia (Ancient Commentators on Aristotle 1). London. Bloomsbury Academic.

    Priscian of Lydia was one of the Athenian philosophers who took refuge in 531 AD with King Khosroes I of Persia, after the Christian Emperor Justinian stopped the teaching of the pagan Neoplatonist school in Athens. This was one of the earliest examples of the sixth-century diffusion of the philosophy of the commentators to other cultures.

    Tantalisingly, Priscian fully recorded in Greek the answers provided by the Athenian philosophers to the king’s questions on philosophy and science. But these answers survive only in a later Latin translation which understood both the Greek and the subject matter very poorly. Our translators have often had to reconstruct from the Latin what the Greek would have been, in order to recover the original sense.

    The answers start with subjects close to the Athenians’ hearts: the human soul, on which Priscian was an expert, and sleep and visions. But their interest may have diminished when the king sought their expertise on matters of physical science: the seasons, celestial zones, medical effects of heat and cold, the tides, displacement of the four elements, the effect of regions on living things, why only reptiles are poisonous, and winds. At any rate, in 532 AD, they moved on from the palace, but still under Khosroes’ protection. This is the first translation of the record they left into English or any modern language.

    This English translation is accompanied by an introduction and comprehensive commentary notes, which clarify and discuss the meaning and implications of the original philosophy. Part of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, the edition makes this philosophical work accessible to a modern readership and includes additional scholarly apparatus such as a bibliography, glossary of translated terms and a subject index.

     

  • The making of Turan

    Payne, Richard. 2016. The making of Turan: The fall and transformation of the Iranian east in late antiquity. Journal of Late Antiquity 9(1). 4–41.

    Contemporaneously with the fall and transformation of the Roman West, the Iranian Empire yielded its East to Hun—and later Turk—conquerors. This article traces the development of post-Iranian regimes through the dynamic interplay of nomadic and sedentary political institutions in the fourth through early seventh centuries. The conquerors adopted Iranian institutions, integrated the Iranian aristocracy, and presented themselves as the legitimate heirs of the kings of kings in a manner reminiscent of post-Roman rulers. At the same time, however, the Huns and the Turks retained the superior military resources of nomadic imperialism, included the Ira-nian East in trans-Eurasian networks, and distinguished themselves as rul-ing ethno-classes tied to the steppe. The resulting hybrid political culture came to be known as Turan.

    The article is also available from the authors’s academia.edu page here.

  • Conference Program | societyforiranianstudies.org

    The eleventh biennal conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies will take place in Vienna from 2 to 5 August 2016.

    For more information on the conference, see this link. And here is the conference programme.

  • DABIR – Vol. 1, Issue 2

    The latest issue of DABIR has been published and is available here: Issue 02 – Dabir Journal.

    The Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review (DABIR) is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal published by the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine.

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  • Dadabhai Naoroji’s correspondence

    Mehrotra, Sri Ram & Dinyar Patel (eds.). 2016. Dadabhai Naoroji. Oxford University Press.

    Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), popularly known as the ‘Grand Old Man of India, was a Parsi intellectual, educator, and early Indian political thinker. The first Indian to publicly demand ‘Swaraj’ for India from the Congress platform in 1906, he was thrice president of the Indian National Congress and the first Indian to be elected to the British House of Commons. This volume brings together for the first time a substantial collection of private papers, including handwritten notes and personal letters, of Dadabhai Naoroji from the National Archives of India. Divided into twenty-two sections, the volume chronicles Naoroji’s interactions with political leaders, scholars, friends, and acquaintances from A.O. Hume, one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, to the well-known historian R.C. Dutt to Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the famous Indian political leader whom Naoroji mentored. The volume includes a detailed Introduction which sets the context for Dadabhai Naoroji’s life and work.

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  • The Bible as a Judeo-Persian Epic

    Moreen 2016Moreen, Vera Basch. 2016. The Bible as a Judeo-Persian epic: An illustrated manuscript of ʿImrānī’s Fatḥ-Nāma. Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East.
    Shervin Farridnejad writes:
    ʿImrānī, one of the great Judeo-Persian poets, was probably born in Isfahan in 1454 and died in Kashan after 1536. Inspired by Shāhīn, the other great JP poet, ʿImrānī’s works concentrate on the post-Mosaic era from Joshua to the period of David and Solomon. Among his 12 poetic works, Fatḥ-Nāma “The Book of the Conquest” is his first and remains one of his important works.  He began the composition that comprises approximately ten thousand couplets in 1474. The content of this masnavī (narrative poem in rhyming couplets) deals with the legend of the conquest of the Holy Land by Joshua as well as events from  Joshua to the reign of Solomon.

  • Defining All-Israel in Chronicles : Multi-Levelled Identity Negotiation in Late Persian-Period Yehud

    Jonker, Louis. C. 2016. Defining All-Israel in Chronicles : Multi-Levelled Identity Negotiation in Late Persian-Period Yehud. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 106. Tübingen. Mohr Siebeck.

     

    In this book, Louis C. Jonker considers more sophisticated and nuanced models for applying the heuristic lens of “identity” in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible book of Chronicles. Not only does he investigate the potential and limitations of different sociological models for this purpose, but the author also provides a more nuanced analysis of the socio-historical context of origin of late Persian-period biblical literature by distinguishing between four levels of socio-historic existence in this period. It is shown that varying power relations were in operation on these different levels which contributed to a multi-levelled process of identity negotiation. Louis C. Jonker shows the value of the chosen methodological approach in his analysis of Chronicles, but also suggests that it holds potential for the investigation of other Hebrew Bible corpora.

    Louis C. Jonker Born 1962; BA, HonsBA, MA, BTh, LicTheol and DTh from University of Stellenbosch; since 2010 Professor in Old Testament at the University of Stellenbosch; Congress Secretary of the 2016 meeting of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (IOSOT).

     

    Table of Contents.