Author: Shervin Farridnejad

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Events

Photography of the Persian Past

Persepolis in Qajar era, c. 1902. © Wikimedia

Exhibition: The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past

October 22, 2015- January 17, 2016
Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 11am-6pm, Friday 11am-8pm, Closed Monday and Tuesday

The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past explores a pivotal time in Iran, when the country was opening itself to the Western world. With over 150 photographic prints, a number of vintage photographic albums, and memorabilia that utilized formal portraiture of the shah, the exhibition shows how photographers—many of them engaged by Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848-1896), the longest reigning Shah of the Qajar Dynasty (1785-1925)—sought to create a portrait of the country for both foreigners and Iranians themselves. Most of the photographs in the exhibition have never been publicly displayed.

The Eye of the Shah includes unprecedented photographs of life in the royal court in Tehran, such as images of the last shahs of the Qajar Dynasty, their wives and children, and court entertainers. These are complemented by photographs of iconic ancient monuments and sites, such as Persepolis and Naqsh-e Rostam, capturing Iran’s expansive and rich historical past, which further promoted Iran and Iranian culture to the West. The photographers depicted the Iran of their day through images of modernization initiatives, such as the military, the railway, and the postal system, while the daily lives of Iranian people was revealed through photographs showing shopkeepers, street vendors, and field workers. Additionally, Eye of the Shah features pieces by two modern-day Iranian photographers, Bahman Jalali (1944-2010) and Shadi Ghadirian (b. 1974), who evoke and sometimes incorporate images of photography from the Qajar Dynasty, illustrating the continuing and powerful influence that Iranian photography of 19th and early 20th century photography has in the country’s contemporary art world.

The image is taken from ©Wikimedia Commons.

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Articles

Zoroastrian Embroidery

Parsi Zoroastrian Embroidery © UNESCO Parzor
Parsi Zoroastrian Embroidery © UNESCO Parzor

Cama, Shernaz. 2014. Parsi Embroidery: An Intercultural Amalgam. In Zhao Feng, Marie-Louise Nosch & Lotika Varadarajan (eds.), Global Textile Encounters, 263–274. (Ancient Textiles Series). Oxford: Oxbow Books.

From early history, textiles have woven together the tapestry of humanity. The Parsi Zoroastrians, now a tiny minority of under 65,000 individuals in India, have saved, in their cupboards and trunks, this proof of our world’s multicutural history. Cpmplex roots and routes lie behind what we call “Parsi Embroidery” today. The tradition grew  from Achaemenian Iran, travelled through the Silk Route into China and then came back with Indian and European influences, to its originators, the Parsi Zoroastrians of India.
Shernaz Cama is asociate professor at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, India.
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Books

Zoroastrian Law and Identity

Sharafi, Mitra. 2014. Law and identity in colonial South Asia: Parsi legal culture, 1772-1947. (Studies in Legal History). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India’s independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seems to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.

This book is based upon previously unexamined primary sources from archives rediscovered over the past decade: the Bombay High Court (Mumbai) and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (London) as well as takes case law seriously, while most work on South Asian legal history focuses on legislatio. It presents one of the first studies in South Asian legal history by a scholar trained both in law and in history.

See here the ToC of this book.

Mitra Sharafi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, with an affiliation appointment in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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Books

Corpus of Alanic Marginal Notes

Lubotsky, A. (2015). Alanic marginal notes in a Greek liturgical manuscript. Veröffentlichungen zur Iranistik 76. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
The book represents the first publication of the complete corpus of Alanic marginal notes in a 13th century Byzantine manuscript from the Library of the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. This manuscript is a Greek Old Testament lectionary, or Prophetologion, which at one point was owned and used by an Alanic priest who had learned to read and write Greek, but felt the need to identify the feasts in the margin of his manuscript, because he could not easily find them by skimming the text. For this purpose, he wrote an abbreviated heading of his own in the margin, next to the full heading of the manuscript. There are altogether 34 marginal notes in the manuscript (24 Alanic, 9 Greek, and 1 mixed). In this edition, every note is followed by the Greek heading, to which the note refers, its translation, and a black-and-white photograph. Then, a short outline of the liturgical context is provided, when necessary, followed by paleographic comments and an analysis of the meaning of the note and its linguistic structure. The edition of the notes ends with a discussion of the spelling conventions and the language of the notes and with an appendix on the Alanic text in Tzetzes’ Theogonia. The book is further provided with full-color photographs of all pages containing marginal notes.
See the Table of the Contents here.
Alexander Lubotsky is Professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University.
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Books

Ergativity in Old and Middle Iranian languages

Jügel, Thomas. 2015. Die Entwicklung der Ergativkonstruktion im Alt- und Mitteliranischen. Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung zu Kasus, Kongruenz und Satzbau (Iranica 21). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

Ergativity is a grammatical phenomenon that has been discussed controversially in linguistics in general and in the Iranian Studies in particular. The scientific debate is characterized by a lack of consideration of the Old and Middle Iranian data. In many cases, the selected examples, which their position in the respective language system is  still unclear, are associated with theory-driven assumptions about a hypothetical model of development, which is to be plausible, but not verifiable.

The present study provides a solution through the complete analyzing of the Avestan , Old Persian, Bactrian and Parthian documents as well as an extensive study of Middle Persian evidences (approximately 12,500 Middle Persian cases). In addition to the relevant ergativity aspects such case, congruence, word order,  and reflexivity both the development of syntactic structures (e.g. relative clauses) as well as the verbal and nominal system (e.g. the temporal aspect system or the function of enclitic personal pronouns) are discussed .

Results are illustrated with relevant evidences  (over 1,400 examples alone in the main part), whose validity is constantly checked and  based critically on detailed philological discussion. The material part also serves as a vademecum, which can be used in parallel with the reading of the main part, as well as a separate reference book that systematically illustrates the history of the object in ergative languages.

The volume presents the most exhaustive investigation on ergativity in within the Old and Middle Iranian languages.

The detaild Table of Content of this book and the English Summery are availabe.

Continue reading “Ergativity in Old and Middle Iranian languages”
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Articles

Zoroastrian Manuscripts in Russia

Kolesnikov, Aly Ivanovich. 2015. The Zoroastrian Manuscript in the Collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS (Short Reference and Structure). Written Monuments of the Orient 1(1). 38–47.

The article introduces unique Persian manuscripts in the collection of the IOM, RAS specially devoted to Zoroastrian matters. In short Zoroastrian scriptures composed in New Persian during the 12th–17th centuries, were not literal translations from the Pahlavi, but free interpretations of the old sources, adapted to the changing circumstances of life.

The artcile is available to download here.

Aly Ivanovich Kolesnikov is Leading Researcher at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences.

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Articles

Pahlavi Epistolary Formulae

Chunakova, Olga Mikhailovna. 2015. Pahlavi Epistolary Formulae. Written Monuments of the Orient 1(1). 32–37.

The paper focuses on the Pahlavi text dealing with the correct way to write letters published in: JAMASP-ASANA (ed.) 1913, 132–140. The text contains a series of formulae to be used in letters to various persons. The reading and interpretation of the formulae were translated differently by previous scholars. The key to the understanding of these formulae is the opposition of two terms—xwadāy and bandag—meaning the addressee and the sender of a letter. The constructions with an attribute compound and its synonym, and a determinative compound and its synonym following these two terms refer to the addressee and the sender respectively.

The artcile is available to download here.

Olga Mikhailovna Chunakova is Head of the Section of Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences.

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Books

From Babylonian to Old Persian Cuneiform

Bergerhausen, Johannes. 2014. Digitale Keilschrift | Digital cuneiform. Mainz: Schmidt.
For three millennia, cuneiform was the dominant writing system in the ancient eastern world. More than half a million cuneiform tablets are still in existence. They are stored in museums and collections, some of them have never been translated.  Ever since the rediscovery of these ancient cultures in the 19th century, the pictographic characters of the world’s oldest script have fascinated researchers and fans alike. Today, the shapes seem surprisingly modern and thrill not just archaeologists and scholars, but typographers, textile designers and tattooists, too.This book presents a typographical journey through time in book form – a key to the ancient cultures or the earliest form of type hype with 544 pages with all known cuneiform characters from Mesopotamian to Babylonian to Ancient Persian, with numerals and punctuation, type tables and background information as well as access to the digital cuneiform font.

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Books

Vandidād-e Jahānbaxši

ms. 4161
Fol. 2r, Vidēvdād manuscript ms. 4161 (Vandidad-e Jahānbaxši), Tehran University © Avestan Digital Archive

Cantera, A., & Mazdapour, K. (Eds). (2015). The Liturgical Widēwdād manuscript ms. 4161 (Vandidad-e Jahānbaxši). Salamanca; Tehran: Sociedad de Estudios Iranios y Turanios.

The ms. 4161 belonged to the Jahānbaxši family and was purchased by the Avestan Digital Archive in 2012. Since then it is hosted in the Central Library of the Tehran University as a long-term loan. It contains the longest version of the Yasna ceremony, which consists of the Yasna with the Wisperad and Widēwdād intercalations together with instructions in Middle Persian for the right performance of the ritual. An exclusive feature of this manuscript is that it includes on the margin and written by a second hand the description of the contents of the Widēwdād that appear in the eighth book of the Dēnkard.
We have chosen this manuscript for the first volume of the series because of its importance for the Avestan textual criticism. Most of the known Avestan manuscripts produced in Iran were written by members of the learned family of Marzbān Frēdōn or were copied from manuscripts produced within this family. Ms. 4161 does not belong to this group, although it was written only some years after the oldest preserved manuscripts of the Marzbān family. It is closer to a very famous manuscript hosted in the Cama Oriental Institute, the ms. 4020 (Mf2), and other manuscripts discovered recently. But, whereas Mf2 is an Indian copy of an Iranian original sent to India, ms. 4161 is the only manuscript of this group that was still produced in Iran and is therefore not affected by the influence of the Indian environment.
The book contains one English preface written in English by Katayoun Mazdapour and two introductions: one in Persian, by Katayoun Mazdāpour and one in English by Alberto Cantera. In these introductions, it is dealt with different aspects of the history of the manuscript and its position among other Avestan manuscripts of the same class. The main section of the book is the high-quality colour facsimile of the 268 folios of the manuscript with indexing in the margins.
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Journal Online resources

Newly launched peer-reviewed journal for Iranian Studies

Image: Detail from "Youth reading", Persian miniature by Reza Abbasi (1565-1635), ca. 1625-26, Isfahan. © The Trustees of the British Museum, ME 1920.0917.02
Image: Detail from “Youth reading”, Persian miniature by Reza Abbasi (1565-1635), ca. 1625-26, Isfahan. © The Trustees of the British Museum, ME 1920.0917.02

DABIR: Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review, 2015, Vol 1, No. 1.

The first issue of the Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review (DABIR) has been published and is available from the official website of DABIR.

The Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review (DABIR) is an open access, peer-reviewed online open access journal published by the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. DABIR aims to quickly and efficiently publish brief notes and reviews relating to the pre-modern world in contact with Iran and Persianate cultures. The journal accepts submissions on art history, archaeology, history, linguistics, literature, manuscript studies, numismatics, philology and religion, from Jaxartes to the Mediterranean and from the Sumerian period through to the Safavid era (3500 BCE-1500 CE). Work dealing with later periods can be considered on request.

Table of Contents:
Articles

  1. Saber Amiri Pariyan: “A re-examination of two terms in the Elamite version of the Behistun inscription”
  2. Touraj Daryaee: “Alexander and the Arsacids in the manuscript MU29”
  3. Shervin Farridnejad: “Take care of the xrafstars! A note on Nēr. 7.5″
  4. Leonardo Gregoratti: “The kings of Parthia and Persia: Some considerations on the ‘Iranic’ identity in the Parthian Empire”
  5. Götz König: “Brief comments on the so-called Xorde Avesta (1)”
  6. Ali Mousavi: “Some thoughts on the rock-reliefs of ancient Iran”
  7. Khodadad Rezakhani: “A note on the Alkhan coin type 39 and its legend”
  8. Shai Secunda: “Relieving monthly sexual needs: On Pahlavi daštān-māh wizārdan“
  9. Arash Zeini: “Preliminary observations on word order correspondence in the Zand”

Reviews

  1. Sajad Amiri Bavandpoor: “Review of Smith, Kyle. 2014. The Martyrdom and History of Blessed Simeon bar Sabba’e”
  2. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: “Review of Mayor, Adrienne. 2014. The Amazons. Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World”
  3. Yazdan Safaee: “Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd & James Robson. 2010. CTESIAS’ History of Persia: Tales of the Orient”

Special Issue

  1. Bruce Lincoln “Of dirt, diet, and religious others”

 

DABIR

Editor-in-Chief: Touraj Daryaee (University of California, Irvine)
Editors: Parsa Daneshmand (Oxford University) and Arash Zeini (University of St Andrews)
Book Review Editor: Shervin Farridnejad (Freie Universität Berlin)