Cyrus the Great was a celebrity of the ancient world, the founder of one of the first world empires in the ancient Near East, whose life and deeds were celebrated through the many stories told about him, then and for millennia.
This book offers an analysis of these stories, locating them within the rich storytelling cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East. Although there are few fixed points in Cyrus’ career, it is possible to see through these narratives the way his kingship developed so he became not just the instrument of the gods, but also their companion. Mitchell explores what these stories reveal about the different societies and cultures who engaged with the mythology surrounding Cyrus in order to examine their own conceptions of great men, leadership, kingship, and power. Such was his celebrity in antiquity that the stories about his kingship have remained influential over the course of two and a half thousand years into the modern era.
Pirart, Éric. 2023. Hiérogamie mazdéenne. Présentation, texte, traduction et commentaire des deux dernières Gāϑā et de leurs annexes (uniés 51, 52, 53 et 54 du Yasna) (Supplementa 2). Girona: Sociedad de estudios iranios y turanios (SEIT).
In a radical departure from the method of Jean Kellens, which is both intuitive and reserved, Éric Pirart, with Hiérogamie mazdéenne (Mazdean Hierogamy), revisits the last archaic texts of Zoroastrianism and their appendices (Yasna 51-54), while ensuring that nothing is left untranslated or without grammatical explanation and that the etymology of all the words is examined on the basis of systematic criteria. In these texts, contemporary with the prophet Zaraϑustra, he looks for the features that differentiate them from the rest of Zoroastrian literature.
Hashemi, Zahra, Mehrdad Malekzadeh & Ata Hasanpour. 2023. Sangtarashan, l’Âge du Fer au Pish Kuh du Luristan. Avec une étude “L’assemblage lithique de Sangtarashan” par Francesca Manclossi (Acta Iranica 62). Leuven: Peeters.
Le site archéologique de Sangtarashan est situé à l’ouest de l’Iran, dans la province du Luristan, au cœur de la chaîne montagneuse du Zagros. Découvert en 2002, il a fait l’objet de six campagnes de fouilles entre 2005 et 2011.
Dès les premières recherches, il est apparu que le site présentait des caractéristiques exceptionnelles. Au sein d’une structure circulaire en pierre, chevauchée par plusieurs autres constructions, les fouilles ont mis au jour plus de deux mille objets. Parmi eux, des centaines d’objets métalliques connus sous le nom de Bronzes du Luristan. Ces bronzes étaient enterrés par lot, insérés dans les murs ou éparpillés sur toute la surface du site.
L’étude architecturale et l’examen de la nature et de la distribution des objets conduisent à penser que le site de Sangtarashan serait un sanctuaire ayant connu deux phases d’occupation. Les dépôts de la première phase sont constitués d’armes et de vases enfouis dans le sol. Ceux de la seconde phase sont constitués d’objets isolés, de taille plus petite et de nature plus variée, déposés dans la maçonnerie des bâtiments. La première occupation daterait de l’Âge du Fer I-II, la seconde de l’Âge du Fer II-III (et peut-être même IV). L’hypothèse d’une fonction non cultuelle pendant la seconde phase n’est pas totalement écartée au regard de la prolongation des structures architecturales vers l’ouest et de la position des objets éparpillés sur toute la surface du site.
Avec Sorkhdom-i Lori, Sangtarashan est le deuxième sanctuaire de l’Âge du Fer de la région du Zagros central où les fidèles déposaient des objets dans le sol ou dans la maçonnerie des bâtiments. La richesse des objets métalliques découverts fait de Sangtarashan un site de référence pour l’étude des Bronzes du Luristan. L’analyse du matériel archéologique permet désormais de proposer une datation pour des objets jusqu’alors connus uniquement par des exemplaires issus de fouilles clandestines.
Potts, Daniel T. 2023. Aspects of kinship in ancient Iran (Iran and the Ancient World). Oakland, [California]: University of California Press.
Originally delivered as the Biennial Ehsan Yarshater Lectures, Aspects of Kinship in Ancient Iran is an exploration of kinship in the archaeological and historical record of Iran’s most ancient civilizations. D.T. Potts brings together history, archaeology, and social anthropology to provide an overview of what we can know about the kith and kinship ties in Iran, from prehistory to Elamite, Achaemenid, and Sasanian times. In so doing, he sheds light on the rich body of evidence that exists for kin relations in Iran, a topic that has too often been ignored in the study of the ancient world.
A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
This monograph comprises the final publication of a study supported by the British Institute of Persian Studies and undertaken by Seth Priestman and Derek Kennet at the University of Durham. The work presents and analyses an assemblage of just under 17,000 sherds of pottery and associated paper archives resulting from one of the largest and most comprehensive surveys ever undertaken on the historic archaeology of southern Iran. The survey was undertaken by Andrew George Williamson (1945–1975), a doctoral student at Oxford University between 1968 and 1971, at a time of great progress and rapid advance in the archaeological exploration of Iran.
The monograph provides new archaeological evidence on the long-term development of settlement in Southern Iran, in particular the coastal region, from the Sasanian period to around the 17th century. The work provides new insights into regional settlement patterns and changing ceramic distribution, trade and use. A large amount of primary data is presented covering an extensive area from Minab to Bushehr along the coast and inland as far as Sirjan. This includes information on a number of previously undocumented archaeological sites, as well as a detailed description and analysis of the ceramic finds, which underpin the settlement evidence and provide a wider source of reference.
By collecting carefully controlled archaeological evidence related to the size, distribution and period of occupation of urban and rural settlements distributed across southern Iran, Williamson aimed to reconstruct the broader historical development of the region. Due to his early death the work was never completed. The key aims of the authors of this volume were to do justice to Williamson’s remarkable vision and efforts on the one hand, and at the same time to bring this important new evidence to ongoing discussions about the development of southern Iran through the Sasanian and Islamic periods.
In this volume, Alexander Nagel investigates the use of polychromy in the art and architecture of ancient Iran. Focusing on Persepolis, he explores the topic within the context of the modern historiography of Achaemenid art and the scientific investigation of a range of works and monuments in Iran and in museums around the world. Nagel’s study contextualizes scholarly efforts to retrieve aspects of ancient polychromies in Western Asia and interrogates current debates about the contemporary use of color in the architecture and sculpture in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Bringing a multi-disciplinary perspective to the topic, Nagel also highlights the important role of theory, methodology, and conservation studies in the process of reconstructing polychromy in ancient monuments. A celebration of the work of painters, artisans, craftsmen and -women of Iran’s past, his volume suggests frameworks through which historical and contemporary research play a dynamic role in the reconstruction of ancient technological knowledge.
Colleagues, students and friends of Francis Joannès pay tribute in articles exploring the Achaemenid and Greco-Macedonian empires through cuneiform sources, as well as other topics reflecting his extensive and varied career.
Certain papers interest scholars and students of ancient Iranian history:
Yoko Watai: Repenser les qualificatifs de l’argent sous le règne de Darius
Matthew W. Stolper: From the Persepolis Fortification Archive: Treasury Staff Rations from Baratkama
Pierre Briant: D’un empire l’autre – de Darius à Alexandre(Quelques réflexions sur la transition)
Julien Monerie: « Ils consommèrent de la nourriture à l’intérieur ». Activités religieuses des représentants de l’autorité royale en Babylonie hellénistique et parthe
The Seleucid Empire presided over one of the most pivotal and creative periods of Iranian history, a fact that has often been elided or misunderstood in both ancient and modern historiography. Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History examines the Seleucid Empire within the context of ancient Iranian history from an interdisciplinary standpoint and seeks to integrate it more fully into the history of Iranian empires. It brings together a wide variety of perspectives, including landscape archaeology, art history, cuneiform studies, as well as political, economic, maritime and religious history. This volume presents the contributions of the conference on the same topic organized by the editors of this volume, which took place on February 24th–25th 2020 at the University of California Irvine (Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Iranian Studies), the third in the series of the “Payravi Conferences on Ancient Iranian History”.
This work contains the first systematic investigation of the linguistic contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in the Tarim Basin, in today’s Xīnjiāng Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China. The main part of the book is devoted to determining a corpus of reliable Khotanese and Tumshuqese loanwords in Tocharian: new borrowing etymologies are proposed, and some old correspondences are rejected. The discussion of the individual loanwords often involves a fresh examination of the text passages where they occur, and, in some cases, it offers lexical insights regarding a variety of neighbouring languages (Chinese, Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Gāndhārī and Old Uyghur). A detailed phonological, morphological, and semantic analysis of the corpus follows, with a view to determine the phonological correspondences, the relative chronology of the loanwords and possible historical scenarios of cultural exchange. One of the results of this investigation is that the influence of Khotanese and Tumshuqese on Tocharian was much more extensive than previously thought and it spanned over almost two millennia, from the early Iron Age until the extinction of the four languages at the end of the first millennium CE.
Since the early 1990s, about two thousand Idumean Aramaic ostraca have found their way onto the antiquities market and are now scattered across a number of museums, libraries, and private collections. This fifth and final volume of the Textbook of Aramaic Ostraca from Idumea completes the work of bringing these ostraca together in a single publication.
Volumes 1–4 published some 1,600 ostraca that gave us insight into agriculture, economics, politics, onomastics, and scribal practices from fourth/third-century BCE Idumea and Judah. The ostraca in volume 5 come from the same milieu, but the information they provide is entirely new and different. This volume presents 485 ostraca, including 99 land descriptions, 168 uncertain texts, and 218 assorted remains, scribal exercises, and forgeries, along with useful indexes and tables and a comparative list of entries. The land descriptions—which record local landmarks, ownership boundaries, and land registration—provide rich complementary material to the rest of the Idumean ostraca. The “uncertain texts” are fragmentary, in poor condition, or contain other abnormalities. As the TAO corpus becomes better understood and as imaging techniques improve, these texts will help to fill gaps in knowledge. The final section includes the remains of scribal practices and forgeries, important because they help to show the authenticity of the other two thousand pieces.
A unique collection of documentary sources for fourth/third-century BCE Idumea—and, by extension, Judah—this multivolume work will be a powerful resource for those interested in onomastics and social and economic history.
