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History of Sogdian Merchants

histoire-des-marchands-sogdiens-9782857570608_0de la Vaissière, Etienne. 2016. Histoire des marchands sogdiens. Troisième édition révisée. (Institut des hautes études chinoises (Collège de France) 32).
The Sogdian Traders were the main go-between of Central Asia from the fifth to the eighth century. From their towns of Samarkand, Bukhara, or Tashkent, their diaspora is attested by texts, inscriptions or archaeology in all the major countries of Asia (India, China, Iran, Turkish Steppe, but also Byzantium). This survey for the first time brings together all the data on their trade, from the beginning, a small-scale trade in the first century BC up to its end in the tenth century. It should interest all the specialists of Ancient and Medieval Asia (including specialists of Sinology, Islamic Studies, Iranology, Turkology and Indology) but also specialists of Medieval Economic History.
This volume is the third revised edition of the orginal published in 2002 and translated into english in 2005 by James Ward.
Étienne de la Vaissière (PhD 1999) in History, is Assistant Professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. His courses and research are devoted to the economic and social history of medieval Central Asia.
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Greek Views of India and the Parthian Empire

207_111Wiesehöfer, Josef, Horst Brinkhaus & Reinhold Bichler. 2016. Megasthenes und seine Zeit. Akten der Internationalen Tagung „Megasthenes, Apollodoros and Isidoros. Greek Views of India and the Parthian Empire“. Kiel,27. –30.6. 2 012. . Vol. 1. (Classica et Orientalia 13). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
The volume comprises a collection of the articles,  presented initially at the conference “Images of the Orient: Megasthenes, Apollodorus of Artemita and Isidore of Charax”, held from 27.06. until 30.06.2012 at the Institute for Classical Archaeology of the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel (Germany). The contributions of this volume deal with Megasthenes, the Greek ethnographer and explorer in the Hellenistic period, as a central object of study. He became an ambassador of Seleucus I Nicator of the Seleucid dynasty possibly to Chandragupta Maurya in Pataliputra, India and played an important role on the transition of the Greek notions of India as semi-mythical Wonderland and the geographical remit of great gods and heroes (Semiramis, Hercules, Dionysus, etc.) towards a verifiable plave with native traditions; however without a complete relinquishing the old topical descriptive and explanatory patterns . Megasthenes reports, is among the earliest well-known Western accounts of India.
Table of Contents:
  • Josef Wiesehöfer; Horst Brinkhaus: “Megasthenes und Indien im Fokus althistorischer Forschung”
  • Reinhold Bichler: “Herrschaft und politische Organisation im älteren Indien-Bild der Griechen und in der klassischen Alexander-Historie”
  • Horst Brinkhaus: “Zum aktuellen Stand der Arthaśāstra
    -Forschung: Kann Kauṭilya noch als Kronzeuge für Megasthenes gelten?”
  • Veronica Bucciantini: “Megastene e la ‘Reiseliteratur’:
    resoconti di viaggio tra descrizione, memoria e rappresentazione”
  • Bruno Jacobs: “Megasthenes’ Beschreibung von Palibothra und
    die Anfänge der Steinarchitektur unter der Maurya-Dynastie”
  • Sushma Jansari; Richard Ricot“: Megasthenes and the  ‘Astomoi’:  a case study into ethnography and paradoxography”
  • Grant Parker: “Roman Megasthenes: towards a reception history”
  • Daniel T. Potts: “Cultural, economic and political relations between Mesopotamia,  the Gulf region and India before Alexander”
  • Duane W. Roller: “Megasthenes: His Life and Work”
  • Robert Rollinger: “Megasthenes, mental maps and Seleucid royal ideology: the western fringes of the world or how Ancient Near Eastern empires conceptualized world dominion”
  • Kai Ruffing: “Die Ausbildung des literarischen Indienbildes bis Megasthenes”
  • Oskar von Hinüber: “Aśoka und die Griechen”
  • Josef Wiesehöfer: “Seleucids and Mauryas”
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Samarkand: The Center of the World

Compareti 2016Compareti, Matteo. 2016. Samarkand: The center of the world. Proposals for the identification of the Afrasyab paintings (Sasanika Series 5). Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers.

In antiquity Samarkand was the capital of the Persian province of Sogdiana. Its language, culture, and “Zoroastrian” religion closely approximated those of the Persians. Following its conquest by Alexander, its strategic position and fertile soil made Sogdiana a coveted prize for Late Antique invaders of Central Asia. Around 660 CE — at the dawn of Arab invasion — local king Varkhuman promoted the execution of a unique painted program in one of his private rooms. Each wall was dedicated to a specific population: the north wall, the Chinese; the west, the Sogdians themselves; the east, the Indians and possibly the Turks. The south wall is probably the continuation of the scene on the west wall. In Chinese written sources, some support for this concept of the “division of the world” can be found. Accidentally discovered during Soviet times, the room was named “Hall of the Ambassadors” due to the representations of different peoples. However, many aspects of its painted program remain obscure. This study offers new ideas for better identifications of the rituals celebrated by the people on the different walls during precise moments of the year.

Matteo Compareti (PhD 2005) is Guitty Azarpay Distinguished Visitor in the History of the Arts of Iran and Central Asia at the University of California, Berkeley. He studied at the University of Venice “Ca’ Foscari” in the faculty of oriental studies in 1999 and took hid PhD from the University of Naples “L‘Orientale,” working on the Silk Road in 2005. His interest is on the iconography of Mazdean divinities in Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia, especially Sasanian and Sogdian art.

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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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The Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary

Barbati 2016Barbati, Chiara. 2016. The Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5 in Context (Veröffentlichungen Zur Iranistik 81). Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

On the basis of a thorough philological-linguistic study, the book aims primarily at reintegrating the complex whole of the various phenomena that have contributed to creating what in modern scholarship runs under the name of Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5, a set of manuscript fragments preserved in the Turfan Collection in Berlin. The study applies a precise methodology that puts various disciplinary approaches on the same level in order to relate and interconnect textual, material and historical-cultural aspects. Specific codicological characteristics are considered in correlation with the broader manuscript tradition to which the fragments belong. The discussion of the Gospel lectionary leads to reflections on the transmission, reception and development of a specific body of religious knowledge, namely that of the Church of the East. The exploration of linguistic phenomena takes also into consideration the processes at work in the missionary history of the Church of the East in Central Asia between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the Oasis of Turfan in present-day Xinjiang, China. The book therefore addresses Iranologists as well as students of Eastern Christianity and of manuscript cultures.

Chiara Barbati (PhD 2009) is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Iranian studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).  She specializes in Ancient and Middle Iranian languages. Her main fields of research are Sogdian language and literature with particular regard to the Christian Sogdian texts in relation to its Syriac sources, history of eastern Christianity through primary sources (Syriac) as well as secondary sources (Sogdian, Middle Persian, New Persian), paleography and codicology of pre-Islamic Iranian manuscripts and Iranian dialectology from an historical point of view.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi

Barthel, Peter & George van Kooten (eds.). 2015. The star of Bethlehem and the Magi. Interdisciplinary perspectives from experts on the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman world, and modern astronomy (Themes in Biblical Narrative 19). Leiden: Brill.

This book is the fruit of the first ever interdisciplinary international scientific conference on Matthew’s story of the Star of Bethlehem and the Magi, held in 2014 at the University of Groningen, and attended by world-leading specialists in all relevant fields: modern astronomy, the ancient near-eastern and Greco-Roman worlds, the history of science, and religion. The scholarly discussions and the exchange of the interdisciplinary views proved to be immensely fruitful and resulted in the present book. Its twenty chapters describe the various aspects of The Star: the history of its interpretation, ancient near-eastern astronomy and astrology and the Magi, astrology in the Greco-Roman and the Jewish worlds, and the early Christian world – at a generally accessible level. An epilogue summarizes the fact-fiction balance of the most famous star which has ever shone.

Table of contents

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Achaemenids and Greeks

omslagDahlén, Ashk (ed.). 2016. Antikens Persien. Umeå: H:ström Text & Kultur.

The  Achaemenian Empire was the first of the Persian Empires to become an important political and economic power in the ancient world for more than two hundred years. It transformed the entire area from the Greek islands in the west to Central Asia in the east to a continuous trading with efficient infrastructure and monetary economics. However Greco-Persian Wars, also often called the Persian Wars were a series of conflicts between the Achaemenid Empire of Persia and Greek city-states that started in 499 BC and lasted until 449 BC. , and as long overshadowed the western image of the Ancient Persia.

This volume is the first introduction to the Achaemenid Empire in Swedish. It is dedicated to Swedish archeologist, professor Carl Nylander and is a tribute to his pioneering work in the field of early Achaemenid archeology.

“Antikens Persien” covers a range of interrelated topics such as political history, multiculturalism, architecture, language, and literature. Its aim is provide a general introduction to ancient Persia for Swedish readers and also to highlight the diverse and flourishing interactions between Persians and Greeks in various fields.

Table of Contents:

  • Förord
  • Lennart Lind: “Persien och Grekland”
  • Johan Mårtelius: “Arkitektur och konst”
  • Bo Utas: “Språk och litteratur”
  • Ashk Dahlén: “Kosmopolitism och mångkultur”
  • Vidare läsning
  • Appendix: Bilder

About the Editor:

Ashk Dahlén (PhD 2002) is Associate Professor in Iranian Languages at Uppsala University and founding president of the Scandinavian Society for Iranian Studies. Among his research interests are classical Persian literature, Iranian cultural history, mythology, religions, and historical continuities between ancient and medieval Iran.