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The Historiography of Persian Architecture

Gharipour, Mohammad (ed.). 2015. The Historiography of Persian Architecture. (Iranian Studies 29). New York, NY: Routledge.

Historiography is the study of the methodology of writing history, the development of the discipline of history, and the changing interpretations of historical events in the works of individual historians. Exploring the historiography of Persian art and architecture requires a closer look at a diverse range of sources, including chronicles, historical accounts, travelogues, and material evidence coming from archaeological excavations.

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Religion, History and Art of Ancient Iran

Farridnejad et al. Faszination Iran — Cover 2015Farridnejad, Shervin, Anke Joisten-Pruschke & Rika Gyselen (eds.). 2015. Faszination Iran. Beiträge zur Religion, Geschichte und Kunst des Alten Iran. Gedenkschrift für Klaus Schippmann. (Göttinger Orientforschungen. III. Reihe: Iranica, Neue Folge 13). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag.

This Memorial Volume is dedicated to one of the most prolific and renowned scholars in the field of Ancient Iranian Archaeology and History, the late Professor Klaus Schippmann (1924-2010), who held the chair of “Near Eastern Archaeology with special reference to Iran” at Georg-August University of Göttingen until his retirement in 1990.

The volume consists of eleven papers, written by some of the foremost scholars in the field of Iranian Studies as well as some of his lifetime friends and colleagues. The articles are essentially concerned with different aspects of Ancient Iranian Art, Archaeology, History, Numismatics and Religion, reflecting the scholarly interests of Klaus Schippmann. The volume is accompanied also by parts of his unpublished private diary (1959) from his Nachlass, reflecting his ideas, visions and memories of his excavations as well as one report of his last trip to his favourable archaeological site of taḫt-e soleymān (Iran), written by his personal tour leader. The book is illustrated by numerous plates.

This volume could be of interest for scholars and students of Ancient Iranian Art, Archaeology, History, Religion and other neighbour disciplines.

Table of Contents (PDF):
  • In Memoriam Klaus Schippmann
  • Anke Joisten-Pruschke: „Ich muss irgendwie sehen, dass es für mich einen Weg gibt Archäologie zu studieren“ – Klaus Schippmanns Tagebuch einer Reise in den Vorderen Orient (1959)
  • Oric Basirov: “Proselytisation” and “Exposure of the Dead”:
    Two Christian Calumnies Commonly raised against the Sasanians
  • Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis: “Observations on some coins of Persis”
  • Touraj Daryaee: “The Xwarrah and the Sēnmurv: Zoroastrian Iconography on Seventh Century Copper Coinage“
  • Shervin Farridnejad: “Das zoroastrische mār-nāme „Schlangenbuch“. Zur zoroastrischen Volksreligion und Ophiomantik”
  • Rika Gyselen: “Some Thoughts on Sasanian mgwh-Seals”
  • Bruno Jacobs: “Zur bildlichen Repräsentation iranischer Eliten
    im achämenidenzeitlichen Kleinasien”
  • Anke Joisten-Pruschke: “Feudalismus im Sasanidenreich?”
  • Wolfram Kleiss: “Hochterrassen – Zikkurati – Stufenpyramiden”
  • Karin Mosig-Walburg: “Herrscherpropaganda der Nachfolger Shapurs I. (Ohrmazd I. – Narse) – Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von König und Adel im Sasanidenreich in der zweiten Hälfte des 3. Jh. n. Chr.”
  • Michael Shenkar: “Aspects of Iconography of Ahura Mazdā: Origins and Significance”
  • Dieter Weber: “Spätsasanidische Preislisten im frühislamischen Iran”
  • Hartmut Niemann: “Der Kreis schließt sich – Klaus Schippmanns letzte Reise zum ‘Takht’ “
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History of the Iranian Architecture

Kleiss, Wolfram. 2015. Geschichte der Architektur Irans. (Archäologie in Iran und Turan 15). Berlin: Reimer.
“6000 years Iranian architecture”! The  history  of  the  architecture  of  Iran  is  such  a comprehensive topic, that when taking it into regard a certain restriction must be made to examples  found  within  the  present-day national  borders  as  well  as  within  the  timespan  from  the 6th century B.C. until 1979. The architectural examples  presented  here  were  always  contingent on different topographic and climatic conditions in addition to diverse cultural influences. Rock architecture and mosques – bazaars, baths and palaces, as well as modern public buildings and housing: Wolfram Kleiss characterizes in this volume the architectural history of Iran from the 4th millennium BC to the present day.
For more information:

Table of Contents, German Summary and Reading Sample

English Summary

Persian Summary

About the author:
Wolfram Kleiss is the retired first Director of the German Archaeological Institute (Tehran Branch). Numerous publications, among others on Caravanserais and dovecotes in Iran.
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The Avestan hymn to ‘Justice’

Goldman, Leon. 2015. Rašn Yašt: The Avestan hymn to ‘Justice’ (Beiträge zur Iranistik 39). Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.

This book contains a critical edition of the Avestan language composition known as the Rašn Yašt, or ‘Hymn to Justice’. The text is accompanied by an English translation, philological commentary and glossary. In addition, the main themes of the Rašn Yašt are taken up for detailed discussion, covering the Zoroastrian deity Rašnu, ancient Iranian cosmography, and the use of ordeal rituals in pre-Islamic Iran.

Preface
Table of Contents
Sample

About the Author: Dr. Leon Goldman was born in 1981 in London, England. Having obtained a B.A. (Hons.) degree from the University of Queensland (Australia) in 2004, with a particular focus on Indian religions and Sanskrit, he returned to London to pursue an M.A. in Iranian and Zoroastrian studies at SOAS. In 2012, he was awarded a Ph.D. from SOAS for his doctoral thesis entitled: Rašn Yašt. The Avestan Hymn to ‘Justice’. Text, Translation and Commentary. From 2012 to 2015, he held the post of British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS with a project devoted to the Sanskrit version of the Zoroastrian Yasna liturgy.

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Persian Literature from the Constitutional Period to Reza Shah

Seyed-Gohrab, Ali-Asghar (ed.). 2015. Literature of the early twentieth century: From the constitutional period to Reza Shah. (A History of Persian Literature XI). London: Tauris.
The eleventh volume in this groundbreaking series pays special attention to politically engaged poetry, written during a turbulent period which saw the Constitutional Revolution in Iran as well as the rise to power of Reza Shah and his attempts to implement reform. Throughout this time, poets began to turn their attention towards the country’s ordinary people, rather than concentrate on its elites.  This volume also examines the prose fiction of the period, which saw the rise of the novel and the short story. Additionally, Persian satire began to grow in importance, especially with the increased popularity of poets and novelists such as Iraj Mirza and Sadeq Hedayat. This wide-ranging volume is an invaluable companion for anyone who wants to understand how the Persian literary scene changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, reflecting the social and political contexts in which this literature was created.
About the Editor:
A.A. (Asghar) Seyed-Gohrab is associate professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at Leiden University.
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Assessing Biblical and Classical Sources for the Reconstruction of Persian Influence, History and Culture

Fitzpatrick-McKinley, A. (ed.). (2015). Assessing Biblical and Classical Sources for the Reconstruction of Persian Influence, History and Culture. Classica et Orientalia 10. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

 

This volume brings together the views of biblical scholars, Achaemenid historians and classicists in relation to the problems of reconstructing the history of the Persian empire. It addresses the ways in which scholars of each of these disciplines have struggled with the complexity and limitations of the ancient sources. Some of the essays in this volume discuss issues surrounding the identification of authorial biases and evaluate what – if anything – remains as possible ‘historical’ evidence, while others examine the scholarly consensus on the question of Persian policy on the religion and laws of its subjects. What unites the essays in this volume is the commitment of their authors to recognise the difficulties with the sources and to constantly engage in new appraisals of them in dialogue with scholars in their own fields, but also in dialogue with scholars in related fields.

For more information, see the Table of Contents of this volume.

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Zoroastrian Law and Identity

Sharafi, Mitra. 2014. Law and identity in colonial South Asia: Parsi legal culture, 1772-1947. (Studies in Legal History). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India’s independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seems to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.

This book is based upon previously unexamined primary sources from archives rediscovered over the past decade: the Bombay High Court (Mumbai) and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (London) as well as takes case law seriously, while most work on South Asian legal history focuses on legislatio. It presents one of the first studies in South Asian legal history by a scholar trained both in law and in history.

See here the ToC of this book.

Mitra Sharafi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, with an affiliation appointment in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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Corpus of Alanic Marginal Notes

Lubotsky, A. (2015). Alanic marginal notes in a Greek liturgical manuscript. Veröffentlichungen zur Iranistik 76. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
The book represents the first publication of the complete corpus of Alanic marginal notes in a 13th century Byzantine manuscript from the Library of the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. This manuscript is a Greek Old Testament lectionary, or Prophetologion, which at one point was owned and used by an Alanic priest who had learned to read and write Greek, but felt the need to identify the feasts in the margin of his manuscript, because he could not easily find them by skimming the text. For this purpose, he wrote an abbreviated heading of his own in the margin, next to the full heading of the manuscript. There are altogether 34 marginal notes in the manuscript (24 Alanic, 9 Greek, and 1 mixed). In this edition, every note is followed by the Greek heading, to which the note refers, its translation, and a black-and-white photograph. Then, a short outline of the liturgical context is provided, when necessary, followed by paleographic comments and an analysis of the meaning of the note and its linguistic structure. The edition of the notes ends with a discussion of the spelling conventions and the language of the notes and with an appendix on the Alanic text in Tzetzes’ Theogonia. The book is further provided with full-color photographs of all pages containing marginal notes.
See the Table of the Contents here.
Alexander Lubotsky is Professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University.
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Ergativity in Old and Middle Iranian languages

Jügel, Thomas. 2015. Die Entwicklung der Ergativkonstruktion im Alt- und Mitteliranischen. Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung zu Kasus, Kongruenz und Satzbau (Iranica 21). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

Ergativity is a grammatical phenomenon that has been discussed controversially in linguistics in general and in the Iranian Studies in particular. The scientific debate is characterized by a lack of consideration of the Old and Middle Iranian data. In many cases, the selected examples, which their position in the respective language system is  still unclear, are associated with theory-driven assumptions about a hypothetical model of development, which is to be plausible, but not verifiable.

The present study provides a solution through the complete analyzing of the Avestan , Old Persian, Bactrian and Parthian documents as well as an extensive study of Middle Persian evidences (approximately 12,500 Middle Persian cases). In addition to the relevant ergativity aspects such case, congruence, word order,  and reflexivity both the development of syntactic structures (e.g. relative clauses) as well as the verbal and nominal system (e.g. the temporal aspect system or the function of enclitic personal pronouns) are discussed .

Results are illustrated with relevant evidences  (over 1,400 examples alone in the main part), whose validity is constantly checked and  based critically on detailed philological discussion. The material part also serves as a vademecum, which can be used in parallel with the reading of the main part, as well as a separate reference book that systematically illustrates the history of the object in ergative languages.

The volume presents the most exhaustive investigation on ergativity in within the Old and Middle Iranian languages.

The detaild Table of Content of this book and the English Summery are availabe.

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Herodotus: Histories, Books 1-4

Herodotus: Histories, Books 1-4 (Herodoti Historiae: Libri I-IV), Edited by N. G. Wilson, 2015, Oxford Classical Texts.

New edition of 1902 original text, last revised in 1927
Accompanied by extensive commentary volume, Herodotea
New to this edition

Features extensively revised apparatus criticus
Incorporates new findings and research, including the readings of over 80 papyri and two medieval manuscripts
In this new edition of Herodotus’ Histories, Nigel Wilson has revised the original Oxford Classical Text by the Danish scholar C. Hude, published in 1906 and last revised in 1927. As well as incorporating much of the valuable work on the text that has been conducted since the original edition, in particular that of J. Enoch Powell and Paul Maas, Wilson has taken into account new readings from over 80 papyri. In addition, clarity in the apparatus criticus has been improved by the collation of two previously neglected medieval manuscripts, which belong to the so-called Roman family.

A number of passages remain puzzling, and Wilson proposes new solutions and provides plausible emendations wherever possible. This new edition is accompanied by a commentary, Herodotea, written by the editor, in which he explains many of the editorial decisions he made while revising this key classical text.