Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Category: Books

  • Scent, Colour and Glitter in the Ancient World

    Scent, Colour and Glitter in the Ancient World

    Soudavar Farmanfarmaian, Fatema. 2025. Scent, colour and glitter in the ancient world: A comparative history of aromatics, cosmetics and adornment, from the Mediterranean to the China Seas. London: I.B. Tauris.

    Aromatics, cosmetics and personal adornment have had a major role in the evolution of human society, particularly in the cradles of civilization between the Nile and the Indus.

    Far from being concerned with the frivolities of vain pursuits, their study touches on religion, cosmology, rituals and magic, life and the afterlife, sexuality and procreation, artistic expression, technology, craftsmanship, aesthetics, administrative structures, long­-distance trade and cross-cultural exchanges – in sum, all the essentials that underpin human civilization.

    This richly illustrated book provides a history of luxury items from the Neolithic period to late Antiquity. Egyptian and Mesopotamian cosmetics are discussed first, along with the vast region between the Nile and the Indus, with the Iranian plateau at its core. Through the latter, the book ventures westwards to the Greco-Roman world and eastwards to the Indian subcontinent and China. The differing focus of each chapter gives a fuller picture of the global role of aromatics, cosmetics and jewellery within a broader civilizational framework that includes archaeological discoveries that have come to light in the last six decades.

    Description
  • Le livre de Yōišta Friiāna

    Le livre de Yōišta Friiāna

    Pirart, Éric. 2025. Le livre de Yōišta Friiāna. Introduction, édition, traduction et commentaire (Publications d’Études Indo-Iraniennes 5). Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg.

    Yōišta Friiāna est un héros mythologique présent dans toutes les strates de la littérature zoroastrienne ancienne et médiévale, l’archaïque Uštauuaitī Gāθā, deux Yašt de l’Avesta récent, le Dēnkard et d’autres livres pehlevis. Sa confrontation avec un démon, contée dans le petit livre pehlevi qui porte son nom, rappelle fortement le mythe grec d’Œdipe et de la Sphinx.

    Résumé
  • 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]
  • 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.

  • Sasanian Law in its Social Context

    Sasanian Law in its Social Context

    Macuch, Maria. 2025. Sasanian law in its social context (Iranica 34). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

    Sasanian law has remained largely an unknown entity outside the specific field of Iranian Studies due to the immense difficulties involved in understanding the relevant legal sources. Sasanian Law in its Social Context by Maria Macuch is the first attempt to reconstruct the legal system of Sasanian Iran (224–651 CE), systematically and in detail, covering all areas of law as far as they can be reconstructed on the basis of the available material.
    Macuch focuses mainly on Middle Persian sources and original documents in the Pahlavi cursive script, but also makes extensive use of other significant legal texts mentioning Sasanian law, including the Babylonian Talmud, Syriac, Arabic and New Persian sources. Besides describing the basic institutions in all legal fields, the work aims to understand fundamental legal concepts reconstructed from the dispersed, often fragmentary and enigmatic material, and to explain the main functions of the vast network of intertwined legal constructions in the field of family and property law. It is argued that this specific complex of characteristic institutions, unique to the Sasanian legal system, only makes sense within the framework of a strictly hierarchical social system that granted considerable privileges to its aristocratic and religious elite. The significant impact of Sasanian law on other legal systems is discussed throughout the work and specifically in the last chapter. Numerous Middle Persian texts with new editions and translations by the author are assembled in the appendices. Pahlavian legal terms and phrases are clarified in the glossary.

  • Like dust on the Silk Road

    Like dust on the Silk Road

    Bernard, Chams Benoît. 2025. Like dust on the Silk Road: On the earliest Iranian and BMAC loanwords in Tocharian (Leiden Studies in Indo-European 27). Leiden: Brill.

    This volume is open access. Follow the link above.

    “How did the Tocharians reach China?” “Who did they meet on the way?” are some of the most intriguing questions in Indo-European studies. This book is zooming in on a specific part of the question: on their way to China, Tocharians were in contact with an Iranian people living in the south Siberian Steppes, and with a people related to the Oxus Civilization (BMAC). This Iranian people spoke a specific language, called here “Old Steppe Iranian”. They gave Tocharians many words, such as mañiye ‘servant’, etswe ‘burden-carrying horse’ or ‘mule’, pāke ‘portion, share’. The BMAC-related people gave the Tocharians other words such as etre ‘hero’ and kercapo ‘donkey’. This book reconstructs features of the language of both these peoples, and examines how they influenced the Tocharians. Based on the latest archaeological findings, it also suggests a reconstruction of the chronology and the way the Tocharians followed before entering the Tarim Basin.

  • 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).

  • Manichaeism and Church History

    Manichaeism and Church History

    Toft, Lasse Løvlund, Mattias Sommer Bostrup & René Falkenberg (eds.). 2025. On the Matter. Studies on Manichaeism and Church History Presented to Nils Arne Pedersen at Sixty-Five (Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum – Analecta Manichaica 4). Turnhout: Brepols Publishers.

    The anthology consists of twenty-nine studies on Manichaean texts in Coptic, Syriac, Chinese, and Iranian languages, as well as on broader Church History including texts from the Nag Hammadi Codices, Coptic and Syriac heresiology and Early Modern religious polemics. Of interest to all scholars of Manichaeism and Late Antique and Medieval Eastern Christianity, and to scholars working on the phenomenon of heresiology and doctrinal polemics within the churches at large. The anthology is a Festschrift for Nils Arne Pedersen at Aarhus University.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Manichaean Texts, Imagery, and Terminology

    • Jean-Daniel Dubois, About the Use of the Term Pistos in Coptic Manichaean Writings
    • Iain Gardner, Who Was Salmaios and What Was His Lament?
    • Jason BeDuhn, Rethinking Manichaean Asceticism
    • Samuel N.C. Lieu, Database of Manichaean Texts – Past, Present, and Future
    • Claudia Leurini, Secret Messages: Traces of Cryptography in the Middle Persian Manichaean Hymns to the Church
    • Iris Colditz, Eine Parabel in einer Homilie Manis in parthischer Sprache
    • Yutaka Yoshida, Middle Iranian Fragments in Sogdian Script from the St. Petersburg Collection – The Fourth Section of the Manichaean Daily Prayers in Parthian and Some Other Middle Iranian Texts
    • Nicholas Sims-Williams, On the Sources of the Manichaean Sogdian Religious Terminology
    • Enrico Morano, A Manichaean Middle Persian Text on the Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Beginning of Mani’s Church (M788)
    • Gunner Mikkelsen, Pearl Imagery in a Chinese Manichaean Hymn
    • John Møller Larsen, Ligatures in the Syriac Manichaean Texts from Kellis
    • Erica C.D. Hunter, Hunting Manichaean Syriac Incantation Bowls
    • Sebastian P. Brock, Imagery Shared and Imagery Avoided: The Manichaean Psalms and Syriac Religious Poetry

    Nag Hammadi, the Bible, and Early Heterodoxy

    • Einar Thomassen, Manichaeans and Gnostics on the Creation of Humanity
    • Hugo Lundhaug, A Luminous Soul in the Likeness of God: Dispensing with the Psychic God in Paul’s Prayer for Revelation in Nag Hammadi Codex I
    • Anders Klostergaard Petersen, The Gospel of Truth as Fully-Fledged Christ Religion
    • Peter Nagel (†), Das Gleichnis vom viererlei Acker in den synoptischen Evangelien und im Thomasevangelium (Logion 9)
    • Mogens Müller, Traces of Marcion in the New Testament?

    Eastern Orthodoxies in Formation

    • Jan Dochhorn, Acherusischer See und Paradies im Zauberpapyrus London, Brit. Libr. Or. 5987, l. 13–24
    • Lasse Løvlund Toft, Virgin Mary as a Heavenly Power in Egypt: Doctrinal Polemics and Theological Diversity in Coptic and Copto-Arabic Homiletic Apocrypha on the God-bearer
    • David G.K. Taylor, Eschatological Rivers of Fire and Purgatorial Purification in Sixth-Century Syriac Texts
    • Flavia Ruani, Le catalogue d’hérésies de Jacques bar Šakko (XIIIe s.) :Livre des trésors II. De l’Incarnation du Verbe, ch. 1
    • Paul-Hubert Poirier (†), Une traduction latine inédite du Contra Manichaeos de Titus de Bostra
    • Henning Lehmann, Eusebius of Emesa Interpreting Exod. 3:14f: Some Remarks on Recent Eusebius Studies

    Churches, and Theologies in Early Modern and Modern Northern Europe

    • Per Ingesman, ‘In Principio Erat Error, Et Error Erat Apud Lutherum’: Paulus Helie on Luther and His Adherents in the Danish Reformation
    • Rasmus H.C. Dreyer, Between Danish and German: A First-Generation Danish Reformer as Lutheran Superintendent (1541–1561)
    • Carsten Bach-Nielsen, Theme and Variations: Lazarus and the Rich Man. Iconography of a New Testament narrative in an age of Reform, c. 1500–1640
    • Kim Arne Pedersen, Grundtvig, the Greeks, and Heresy
    • Mattias Sommer Bostrup, The Life and Afterlives of Bishop Fredrik Nielsen (1846–1907): Social Functions of Church History at the Fin de Siècle