Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Category: Books

  • Silk, Slaves, and Stupas

    Whitfield, Susan. 2018. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road. University of California Press.

    Following her bestselling Life Along the Silk Road, Susan Whitfield widens her exploration of the great cultural highway with a new captivating portrait focusing on material things. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas tells the stories of ten very different objects, considering their interaction with the peoples and cultures of the Silk Road—those who made them, carried them, received them, used them, sold them, worshipped them, and, in more recent times, bought them, conserved them, and curated them. From a delicate pair of earrings from a steppe tomb to a massive stupa deep in Central Asia, a hoard of Kushan coins stored in an Ethiopian monastery to a Hellenistic glass bowl from a southern Chinese tomb, and a fragment of Byzantine silk wrapping the bones of a French saint to a Bactrian ewer depicting episodes from the Trojan War, these objects show us something of the cultural diversity and interaction along these trading routes of Afro-Eurasia.

    Exploring the labor, tools, materials, and rituals behind these various objects, Whitfield infuses her narrative with delightful details as the objects journey through time, space, and meaning. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas is a lively, visual, and tangible way to understand the Silk Road and the cultural, economic, and technical changes of the late antique and medieval worlds.

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  • Eastern Manicheism as Reflected in its Book and Manuscript Culture

    Özertural, Zekine & Gökhan Silfeler (eds.). 2018. Der östliche Manichäismus im Spiegel seiner Buch- und Schriftkultur. Vorträge des Göttinger Symposiums vom 11./12. März 2015 (Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Neue Folge 47). Berlin: De Gruyter.

    This volume examines the gnostic-syncretic religion of Eastern Manicheism in China, Iran, and Turkish central Asia. After a scholarly introduction to the religious theory of Manicheism, the essays probe questions of its transmission and cultural interactions with Latin, Coptic, and Arabic Manicheism.

  • Civilization of Iran: Past, Present, Future

    Callieri, Pierfrancesco & Adriano Valerio Rossi (eds.). 2018. Civiltà dell’Iran: passato, presente, futuro (atti del Convegno Internazionale Roma, 22-23 febbraio 2013); (Il novissimo Ramusio 6). Roma: Scienze e lettere.
    This book is a collection of papers presented at the international conference “Civiltà dell’Iran: passato, presente, futuro” took place in 2013 at Sapienza Università di Roma and Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale ‘Giuseppe Tucci’.

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  • Zoroastrian and Iranian Studies from Ravenna

    Panaino, Antonio, Andrea Piras & Paolo Ognibene (eds.). 2018. Studi iranici ravennati II (Indo-Iranica et Orientalia). Milano: Mimesis Edizioni.
    This Conference Proceedings volume contains 15  contributions which were presented at the second international conference of Iranian Studies in Ravenna, Italy.
    Table of Contents:
    • Amir Ahmadi: “An Indo-Iranian Initiation-Based Masculine Society?“
    • Fabio Eugenio Betti: “Tradizione classica e cultura sudarabica. Osservazioni sulla statua bronzea di Lady Bar’at”
    • Stefano Buscherini: “Chess and geometric progressions: a link between Dante and the Persian tradition”
    • Davlatkhoja Dovudi: “Nachodki bucharchudatskich, sasanidskich i omejjadskich monet v Tadžikistane i istorija ich izučenija”
    • Anna Michieletto: “La comunità diasporica curda del Monte Amiata: rapporto con le origini e col territorio”
    • Paolo Ognibene: “Studi sull’epos dei Narti. Il ruolo dell’elemento magico nella struttura fantastica del racconto”
    • Martina Palladino: “Alcuni spunti di riflessione sui Maga Brāhmana”
    • Antonio Panaino: “Vecchie e Nuove Considerazioni sul Millenarismo iranico-mesopotamico ed il Chiliasmo giudaico-cristiano”
    • Andrea Piras: “Spandyād’s lance and message. Some Remarks about the Imagery of Shooting Weapons”
    • Céline Redard: “La tentation de Zarathuštra”
    • Micol Scrignoli: “duruj-, drauga-, draujana-: dallo studio delle valenze semantiche attestate all’individuazione della triade iranica nella lingua antico persiana”
    • Galina N. Vol’naja: “K voprosu ob iranskich vlijanijach na Central’nom i Severo-Vostočnom Kavkaze (na primere bronzovych pticevidnych prjažek «tipa Isti-Su»)“
    • Antonio Panaino: “The Souls of women in the Zoroastrian Afterlife”
    • Paolo Delaini: “Conoscenze mediche sulla fisiologia della gravidanza nel mondo iranico di età tardoantica”
    • Andrea Gariboldi: “La dottrina di Mazdak tra influssi “occidentali” e religioni orientali“

  • The Military History of the Third Century Iran

    Syvänne, Ilkka & Katarzyna Maksymiuk. 2018. The Military History of the Third Century Iran. Siedlce: Scientific Publishing House of Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities.

    The book The Military History of the Third Century Iran is the result of several years of collaboration between the authors who undertake daily research on the history of pre-Islamic Iran. The present work is primarily addressed to students of history who acquire their first experiences in exploring the history of the Near East. We hope that it will help readers with a fascinating topic and will encourage them to continue their studies on ancient military.

  • Sasanian Iran in the context of Late Anitquity

    Daryaee, Touraj (ed.). 2018. Sasanian Iran in the context of Late Anitquity: The Bahari lecture series at the Oxford University (Ancient Iran Series VI). Irvine: Jordan Center for Persian Studies.
    The essays in this volume discuss various aspects of the Sasanian Empire, presented on the occasion of the inauguration of the Bahari Chair in Sasanian Studies at Oxford University in 2014.
    • Michael Alram: “The Numismatic Legacy of the Sasanians in the East”
    • Matthew P. Canepa and Johnathan W. Hardy: “Persian Palace Architecture, Garden Design and Digital Archaeology”
    • Touraj Daryaee: “The Tripartite Sasanian Vision of the World”
    • Antonio Panaino: “Books without Ritual – Ritual without Books”
    • Giusto Traina: “The Rise of the Sasanians”
    • Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina: “A Father, a Daughter, and a Son-in-Law in Zoroastrian Hermeneutics”
    • Arash Zeini: “The King in the Mirror of the Zand“

  • Zoroastrian Mythology: Cows and Bulls in Ancient Iran

    Pirart, Eric. 2018. Mythologie zoroastrienne: vaches et taureaux en Iran. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan.
    Éric Pirart rassemble ici les données de l’eschatologie générale mazdéenne. La rigueur philologique et la mythologie comparée sont les deux outils mis en oeuvre dans l’approche de la tradition zoroastrienne qui est fragmentaire. L’examen des mythes grecs qui mettent en scène un taureau fournit-il ainsi quelques clés dans l’interprétation de textes iraniens singulièrement lapidaires. Vaches et taureaux, chez les peuples conducteurs de troupeaux, étaient au centre de l’imaginaire et de la métaphysique.

  • Plutarch and the Persica

    Almagor, Eran. 2018. Plutarch and the Persica.  Edinburgh University Press.

    This book addresses two historical mysteries. The first is the content and character of the fourth century BCE Greek works on the Persian Achaemenid Empire treatises called the Persica. The second is the method of work of the second century CE biographer Plutarch of Chaeronea (CE 45-120) who used these works to compose his biographies, in particular the Life of the Persian king Artaxerxes.

    By dealing with both issues simultaneously, Almagor proposes a new way of approaching the two entangled problems, and offers a better understanding of both the portrayal of ancient Persia in the lost Persica works and the manner of their reception and adaptation nearly five hundred years later. Intended for both scholars and students of the Achaemenid Empire and Greek imperial literature, this book bridges the two worlds and two important branches of scholarship.

    Key features

    • Builds a picture of the character and structure of the lost Persica works by Ctesias of Cnidus, Deinon of Colophon, Heracleides of Cyme

    • Shows how Plutarch used the Persica works in his Lives with a specific focus on Artaxerxes

    • Considers the depiction of famous figures such as Alexander the Great and Themistocles in Plutarch’s works

  • A Unified Gospel with Exegetical Comments in Classical Persian

    Hassanabadi, Mahmoud, Carina Jahani & Robert Crellin (eds.). 2018. A Unified Gospel in Persian: An old variant of the Gospels along with exegetical comments by Yahyā Ibn Ayvaz-e Tabrīzī-ye Armanī (Studia Iranica Upsaliensia 33). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.

    Today we are accustomed to thinking of the Bible as a single entity, i.e. as ‘the Bible’, a well-defined corpus containing a set number of books. In late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, however, the situation was much more fluid. This fluidity showed itself not only in the fact that parts of the Bible would often circulate independently, but also in that Bible texts were often known in vernacular languages both in direct translations, but also in interlinear glosses and poetic paraphrases. It is in this context that the Unified Gospel is to be seen. Unifications of the gospel texts are often called Diatessaron (through the four), and, although this name has not been used for the Persian text presented in this book, it can still be seen as belonging to the Diatessaron tradition.

    The Unified Gospel presented here was compiled in Persian by a certain Armenian who calls himself Yahyā Ibn Ayvaz-e Tabrīzī-ye Armanī. The actual time of the compilation cannot be determined from the existing manuscripts. The main manuscript for this edition is kept in the National Library and Archives of Iran. It was finalized on 9 Rajab 1111 A.H. (corresponding to 31 Dec. 1699) by a scribe named Khusraw, son of Bahrām. Other manuscripts, which are introduced in detail in the Persian introduction, have also been taken into account in this edition. In addition to the actual Gospel texts, there are numerous exegetical comments by the compiler, which are of great value for a deeper understanding of how the text was interpreted in former times. The language also shows certain archaic features, both in the vocabulary and the syntax, which indicate that the original work most likely dates to pre-Safavid times.

    It is not entirely clear for whom this Unified Gospel in Persian was produced. The compiler finds that the people of his time had turned away from God and instead sought worldly affairs, spending their time reading stories and poems full of deceit and darkness instead of reading the Gospel. The Gospel was not available to them in Persian, a language of which they had better knowledge than the languages into which the Gospels had already been translated. This was the reason why the compiler/translator undertook the work which resulted in the present manuscript, which is particularly valuable due to the large number of comments to the Bible text added by the compiler.

  • The Aggada of the Bavli

    The Aggada of the Bavli

    Herman, Geoffrey & Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (eds.). 2018. The Aggada of the Bavli and its cultural world (Brown Judaic Studies 362). Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies.

    The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), the great compilation of Jewish law edited in the late Sasanian era (sixth–seventh century CE), also incorporates a great deal of aggada, that is, nonlegal material, including interpretations of the Bible, stories, folk sayings, and prayers. The Talmud’s aggadic traditions often echo conversations with the surrounding cultures of the Persians, Eastern Christians, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, and the ancient Babylonians, and others. The essays in this volume analyze Bavli aggada to reveal this rich engagement of the Talmud with its cultural world.