Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Author: Yazdan Safaee

  • Dabir (vol. 12)

    Dabir (vol. 12)

    Volume 12 of Dabir (2025) is now available both online and in print, featuring two issues:

    • Salman Aliyari Babolghani: The Imperfect with the t-Type Prefix in New Iranian and Its Connection to the Old Iranian Augmented Imperfect Optative
    • Majid Daneshgar: Reading Ismāʿīlī Islam in Aceh: Shāh Shams Sabziwārī’s Poems Copied in the 15th-Century Indonesia
    • Meysam Mohammadi: Middle Persian, Early New Persian and Fahlawī Quotations in Tārīx-e Qom
    • Salman Aliyari Babolghani: The Verb ‘to Become’ and Its Significance in Western Iranian Historical Dialectology: the Case of Persian and Lori
    • Majid Daneshgar: An Unknown Malay-Javanese Booklet Belonging to Thomas Erpenius: Early Days of the Shaṭṭārī Prayers in Indonesia
    • Pouria Shokri and Ahmad Salehi Kakhki: The Morphology and Classification of Tiles from the Ilkhanid Era until the Timurid Invasion, with Emphasis on Techniques, Forms, and Glazes
    • Hossein Sheikh: Review of Zamāna wa Zindagi-ye wa Kārnāma-ye Mollā Huseyin Wāˁiz-i Kāšifi, written by Mostafa Gohari-ye Fakhrabad
    • Sun Wujun[孫 武軍] and Chen Fan[陳 帆]: Review of Zhonggu Xianjiao Dongchuan Jiqi Huahua Yanjiu 中古祆教東傳及其華化研究 [Studies on the Spread of Zoroastrianism in Medieval China], written by Zhang, Xiaogui [張小貴]
  • Anabasis, vols. 14-15

    Anabasis, vols. 14-15

    Volumes 14-15 (2023-2024) of Anabasis. Studia Classica et Orientalia, edited by Marek Jan Olbrycht, is out now. Several papers and reviews of the issue relate to ancient Iran:

    • Michał Podrazik: Cyrus the Younger in Syria and Mesopotamia, Abrokomas, and the Great King’s Defensive Strategy (401 BC)
    • Heckel: Alexander and the Amazon Queen
    • Harry Falk: Zariaspa and the “Kunduz” Hoards
    • Karlheinz Kessler: More about Nwt/Nōd and Adiabene
    • Andreas Luther: Artabanos und die Meder
    • Marek Jan Olbrycht: Parthian Weapons and Military Equipment: Some Remarks
    • Review Articles / Reviews:
    • Marek Jan Olbrycht: Recent Perspectives on Parthian History: Research Approaches and Methodological Concerns
    • Jeffrey D. Lerner: Seleucid History: New Perspectives and Current Challenges
    • Sabine Müller: [Review of] Marek Jan Olbrycht, Early Arsakid Parthia (ca. 250-165 B.C.) At the Crossroads of Iranian, Hellenistic, and Central Asian History, Leiden / Boston: Brill 2021 (Mnemosyne Supplements 440)
    • Lang Xu: [Review of] Juping Yang (ed.), Ancient Civilizations and the Silk Road, Beijing: China Social Science Press, 2021

  • The Late Babylonian worship scene at Persepolis

    Garrison, Mark B. 2025. The Late Babylonian worship scene at Persepolis. In: Benjamin Sass & Laura Battini (eds.), Mortals, Deities and Divine Symbols: Rethinking Ancient Images from the Levant to Mesopotamia. Studies Offered to Tallay Ornan (Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology 12), 477-536. Bicester: Archaeopress.

    This analysis concerns several types of worship scenes found in the glyptic imagery preserved as impressions on clay administrative tablets from Persepolis. This important body of data is known today as the Persepolis Fortification Archive, dating to the middle-late years of the reign of Darius I (ruled 522/521–486 BCE). The principal scene, a worshipper who stands before divine symbols that rest on pillared pedestals, here called the Late Babylonian worship scene, is well-known, often characterized as the most distinctive of the glyptic landscape in the Late Babylonian period. At Persepolis, the Late Babylonian worship scene occurs on a large number of seals and exhibits a rich iconographic repertoire; indeed, the evidence from Persepolis is as numerous and varied as from any Babylonian archive. The seals from Persepolis raise numerous issues regarding the chronology and iconographic and stylistic development of the scene in the Late Babylonian archives. These Persepolitan seals present a particularly interesting case study in the complexities of cultural interaction between Iran and Babylonia in the middle of the 1st millennium BCE.


  • Reaching the Persian Gulf from the Kur River Basin

    Matin, Emad. 2025. Reaching the Persian Gulf from the Kur River Basin: Patterns of an Intermittent Connectivity. East and West 65 (1).

    The paper at hand explores the connectivity between Central Fars and the Persian Gulf over a long period of time from protohistory to the Early Islamic era. In doing so, it focuses on the three areas of the Kur River Basin, Dashtestan and the Bushehr Peninsula and reviews the rise and fall of settlements in these areas—within the limits of the existing bibliography. The paper thus demonstrates that these areas, i.e. the Highland, the Hinterland and the Coastline, had played a significant role in the aforesaid communication network for centuries. Furthermore, the pattern of this connectivity is reconstructed using archaeological and historical sources. The most innovative conclusion put forth is that for the first time it is possible to confirm the existence of intermittent connectivity with a very similar pattern among these areas, especially in the Elamite, Achaemenid and Sasanian eras.

  • Studies on Middle Babylonian texts from Haft-Tappe

    Studies on Middle Babylonian texts from Haft-Tappe

    Nikkhah Bahrami, Gita. 2025. Untersuchungen zu mittelbabylonischen Texten aus Haft-Tappe (dubsar 27). Münster: Zaphon.

    G. Nikkhah Bahrami’s study offers a comprehensive edition and cultural-historical and economic-historical investigation of the texts in Middle-Babylonian Akkadian found at Haft-Tappe in the province Khuzestan in southwestern Iran. Following a brief introduction (I.), paleography, syllabary, orthography, and other philological questions concerning the texts are discussed (II.). The third section (III. historical aspects) addresses the question of identifying Haft-Tappe with Kabnak, as well as questions related to the rulers documented at Haft-Tappe and their building activities. After discussing place names and terrain features (IV.), religious and cultic aspects (V.), the legal questions of those texts containing terminology reminiscent of legal contexts are examined (VI.). An overview of social aspects (VII.) addresses the titles of officials, occupational names, and the role of women in the texts from Haft-Tappe; another section examines administrative terminology, data formulas, and the names of administrative departments (VIII.). Following the overview of the various materials that are the focus of each text (IX.), the administrative texts are arranged in the edition (Part B) according to the following categories: metal, stone and glass, reed and wood, mineral substances, textiles, shoes, animal husbandry, foodstuffs, labor, and labor; followed by editions of “Stone Inscription III” and fragmentary texts. Extensive indexes of names and occupational titles, as well as a list of the specifically attested sign forms, supplement the monograph.

  • Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, and Spectacle on the Achaemenid Frontier

    Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, and Spectacle on the Achaemenid Frontier

    Hyland, John O. 2025. Persia’s Greek campaigns: Kingship, war, and spectacle on the Achaemenid frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Persia’s Greek Campaigns offers a bold reassessment of the wars between the Achaemenid Persian kings and the Greek city-states (c. 499–449 bce). These conflicts, and especially Xerxes’s invasion of Greece (480–479 bce), are remembered as foundational events in Greek history, but the “Persian version” remains neglected. The Persians left no campaign narratives to compare with the Greek accounts of Herodotus and Aeschylus—but their documents, artwork, and artifacts offer the foundations for a new interpretive study. Achaemenid royal inscriptions, seals and documents from Persepolis, and texts from earlier Near Eastern empires illuminate Persian worldviews and approaches to frontier warfare. Persia’s Greek campaigns did not emerge from policies of infinite expansion or “East-West” struggle, but drew on a long tradition of Near Eastern royal display through expeditions to distant frontiers. Such campaigns advertised a king’s heroic credentials, possession of divine favor, and achievement of universal power. Xerxes’s journey from Iran to Athens marked the pinnacle of this tradition, combining ideological spectacles with masterful logistical preparation. It achieved its principal goals through the seizure and burning of Athens, but its unexpected and embarrassing defeats at Salamis and Plataea undermined the intended image of royal grandeur. The resulting transition to an era of diplomatic consolidation marked a vital step in the evolution of history’s first “world empire.”

  • Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis

    Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis

    Raja, Rubina & Eivind Heldaas Seland. eds. 2025. Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis: Zooming in and Scaling up from the Evidence. Stuttgart: Steiner.

    The third century is often seen as a period of crisis in the Roman world, marked by political upheaval, violence, war, religious strife, hyperinflation, climatic instability, pandemics, and border incursions. These troubled times, however, coincided with the peak of Palmyra’s prosperity. They encompassed the Syrian city’s drift towards centralized rulership and short-lived political hegemony in the Near East, as well as its reach for imperial power and downfall in the years 270–272 CE.

    How can this discrepancy between metropolitan crisis and peripheral prosperity be explained? Along with experts on different aspects of Palmyra, this volume gathers contributions from leading scholars working with the Roman Empire, and with neighboring regions inside and beyond the imperial borders. Highlighting parallels, discrepancies, connections, and disconnections between developments in Palmyra and other parts of the world with which Palmyra interacted, the aim is a more critical, detailed, and nuanced understanding of the situation in the Roman Near East in the third century CE.

    Table of contents: click here.

  • The Achaemenid-Zoroastrian Background of the Burning Bush Pericope

    Barena, Gad. 2025. ʾAhyh ʾAšr ʾAhyh: The Achaemenid-Zoroastrian Background of the Burning Bush Pericope. Revista Pistis & Praxis 17(3), 384–402.

    Various types of impact, assimilation, and engagement of certain redactional layers of the Hebrew Bible with Achaemenid-era Zoroastrianism have long been noted by biblical scholars and by researchers of ancient Iranian cultic practices. Both disciplines, however, are facing similar challenges regarding the problem of the transmission history of their sacred texts, which is complex, perplexing, and vigorously debated. Thus, due caution must be taken when considering latent echoes of one tradition within the corpus of the other. The following article focuses on one particular, intricate, and very well-known biblical story often associated to various degrees with the so-called “P(riestly) source”—namely, the “Call of Moses” (CoM) in the initial portions of the famous scene at the “Burning Bush” on Mt. Horeb (here defined as Exod 2:23–3:15)—examined in relation to Achaemenid-era Zoroastrianism. I begin with an assessment of the relevant cultic elements that can be securely dated to that timeframe or to its later evolution—especially those that can be shown to have impacted Yahwists at the time. This preliminary study then serves as a foundation to examine the passage in question in a more systematic manner. The conclusion points to a deep familiarity and assimilation of Zoroastrian fire veneration practices by the Priestly author/redactor.

  • Near Eastern Archaeology (vol. 88)

    In two issues of volume 88 of Near Eastern Archaeology, several articles address topics in Iranian archaeology. The following list compiles all Iran-related contributions:

  • The Formation of the Sasanian Empire: Administration and Elites in Comparison with the Roman Empire

    The Formation of the Sasanian Empire: Administration and Elites in Comparison with the Roman Empire

    Purwins, Nils. 2025. Der Aufbau des Sasanidenreiches: Administration und Eliten im Vergleich zum Römischen Reich (Ancient Iran Series 18). Leiden: Brill.

    The work provides in two volumes the first comprehensive overall concept of the administrative and social structure of the Sasanian Empire (5th-7th century). In more than 1.000 contemporary leather documents, seals, ostraca, inscriptions and texts, which are brought together here for the first time, the subjects of the king of kings report in words and pictures on their lives in the various provinces of the empire, on the organisation of the military, civil and religious administration and on the circles of power at the court of their ruler. At the same time, this work offers the first systematic structural comparison with the Eastern Roman Empire, so that the organisations of two ancient empires are treated here with a wealth of supporting illustrations, diagrams and maps. The aim is nothing less than to answer the question of the extent to which Ērānšahr and the Imperium Romanum really were the “two eyes that illuminate the world from above”, as the Great King Husraw II is said to have once claimed (Theophylaktos).