Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Category: Books

  • A Manichaean Prayer and Confession Book

    Sims-Williams, Nicholas, John S. Sheldon & Zsuzsanna Gulácsi. 2022. A Manichaean prayer and confession book. (Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum: Series Iranica 1). Turnhout: Brepols.

    The Manichaean Prayer and Confession Book is the best-preserved Manichaean book found in the Turfan area and the only one which survives in the form of a bound codex. It constitutes a precious treasure-trove of information on its three Iranian languages, on the Manichaean religion itself, and on Manichaean codicology and book-art. The surviving parts of this beautifully decorated miniature paper codex include Middle Persian and Parthian hymns and readings for the Bema festival, the high-point of the Manichaean liturgical calendar, followed by an elaborate confessional formula for the Elect in the Sogdian language. Until now this manuscript has been accessible for scholarship only from its 1937 edition in German by W. B. Henning, titled ‘Ein manichäisches Bet- und Beichtbuch’ (BBB). This new edition provides the first English translation by Nicholas Sims-Williams, the first codicological study by Zsuzsanna Gulacsi and an introduction by John S. Sheldon. It also includes the supplementary Sogdian texts which Henning added to his ‘BBB’. It incorporates magnificent colour photos, codicological diagrams, and digital reconstructions never seen before. This beautifully-produced volume appropriately inaugurates the Series Iranica of the Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum.

  • Culinary and Dining Practices in the Greater Iranian World

    Farridnejad, Shervin, and Touraj Daryaee (eds). 2022. Food for gods, food for mortals. Culinary and dining practices in the greater Iranian world. University of California, Irvine.

    Preparing, serving, and consuming food can be political, as it was arranged in the royal banquet of the great kings. It could also be considered as a ritual, both in the frame of the greater ritual practices in the banquets for the gods, as well as according to a set of family costumes and gestures, which endures from one generation to the next. All these aspects have been one of the major human’s activates during the history of the civilizations and have fascinated the scholars to investigate and decode the culinary customs of the peoples during the history. The contributions of this volume present a small collection of writings, which put focus on various aspects of culinary and dining practices in the Greater Iranian World from the ancient period to the contemporary religious feast of Sufi Orders in the Balkans. They aim to overview the recent developments in the field and discuss selected aspects of the rich variety of culinary practices.

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  • Centaurs and Gandharves

    Janda, Michael. 2022. Kentauren und Gandharven. Verlag Thomas Kubo UG.

    How the idea of half-man, half-horse creatures came into the world has puzzled poets, scholars and writers since antiquity. With the connection of Centaurs and Gandharves by Adalbert Kuhn some 170 years ago, these enigmatic mythical figures became a cross-cultural object of study for the first time. Michael Janda’s latest study is devoted to proving their historical-genetic relationship and analysing both names.

    The path of investigation combines philology and linguistics with the history of religion and archaeoastronomy and leads from the earliest evidence from Greek and Indo-Iranian, and finally to the firmament. Along this path, Janda is able to take up numerous problems that would initially remain contradictory when viewed in isolation from specifically Greek, Avestan or Vedic philology, but which become immediately comprehensible within the mythical world conception of the Indo-Europeans.

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  • The Rise of Persia and the First Greco-Persian Wars

    Kambouris, Manousos E. 2022. The Rise of Persia and the First Greco-Persian Wars: The Expansion of the Achaemenid Empire and the Battle of Marathon. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military.

    Manousos Kambouris revisits the epic events of the first Greco-Persian War and the Persian invasion of Greece. He gives excellent detail on the Persian perspective and sets the war in the context of the rise of Achaemenid Persia as the superpower of the day and the expansion of their empire into Europe. After relating the earlier Persian campaigns in Europe the author shows how the Ionian Revolt, by the Greeks of Asia Minor already under Persian rule, was instrumental. Darius I, the Persian King of Kings ordered the invasion of Greece ostensibly to punish the Greeks, and more specifically the Athenians, for their support of the Revolt and to contain further insurgencies but in truth to achieve god-ordained world dominance.

    Describing the invasion in great detail, the author analyses the king’s immense (even if occasionally exaggerated) army, considering its composition and logistical constraints. The campaign leading to Marathon and the decisive battle itself are then clearly narrated. Manousos Kambouris’ meticulous research brings fresh insights to this timeless tale of defiance of the odds and victory for the underdog.

  • Ancient Indo-European Languages between Linguistics and Philology

    Bianconi, Michele, Marta Capano, Domenica Romagno & Francesco Rovai (eds.). 2022. Ancient Indo-European Languages between Linguistics and Philology: Contact, Variation, and Reconstruction (Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics, 18). Leiden: Brill.

    Studying the Indo-European languages means having a privileged viewpoint on diachronic language change, because of their relative wealth of documentation, which spans over more than three millennia with almost no interruption, and their cultural position that they have enjoyed in human history.

    The chapters in this volume investigate case-studies in several ancient Indo-European languages (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite, Luwian, Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Persian, Armenian, Albanian) through the lenses of contact, variation, and reconstruction, in an interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary way. This reveals at the same time the multiplicity and the unity of our discipline(s), both by showing what kind of results the adoption of modern theories on “old” material can yield, and by underlining the centrality and complexity of the text in any research related to ancient languages.

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  • Comparison and Gradation in Indo-European

    Keydana, Götz, Wolfgang Hock & Paul Widmer (eds.). 2021. Comparison and Gradation in Indo-European (The Mouton Handbooks of Indo-European Typology, 1). Berlin: De Gruyter.

    The ability to compare is fundamental to human cognition. Expressing various types of comparison is thus essential to any language. The present volume presents detailed grammatical descriptions of how comparison and gradation are expressed in ancient Indo-European languages. The detailed chapters devoted to the individual languages go far beyond standard handbook knowledge. Each chapter is structured the same way to facilitate cross-reference and (typological) comparison. The data are presented in a top-down fashion and in a format easily accessible to the linguistic community.

    The topics covered are similatives, equatives, comparatives, superlatives, elatives, and excessives. Each type of comparison is illustrated with glossed examples of all its attested grammatical realizations.
    The book is an indispensable tool for typologists, historical linguists, and students of the syntax and morphosyntax of comparison.

  • Persian Influence on Daniel and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature

    Dobroruka, Vicente. 2022. Persian influence on Daniel and Jewish apocalyptic literature (Jewish and Christian Texts in Context and related Studies, 19). London: Bloomsbury.

    Vicente Dobroruka explores Iranian influence on Second Temple Judaism, providing a new explanation of Persian culture and history in the context of biblical accounts by focusing on the spread of Zoroastrian ideas in the period c.300 BCE–200 CE.

    Dobroruka begins his investigation with an overview of the problems posed by a dualistic worldview-he examines the Indo-European origins of Zarathushtra and his ideas, explores the long-term implications for the notion of free-will, and clarifies the lightness/darkness paradigm that originated in Persia. Following this, Dobroruka discusses a variety of concepts that illustrate this influence, such as the role of matter and the material world, aspects of dualism and the cosmic struggle, the perspectives on the rewards for the just and the opposing punishments for the wicked, the idea of an ‘Anointed One’, shamanistic visionary experience, the resurrection, and the concepts of Sheol and Paradise.

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  • The Reward of the Righteous. Festschrift in Honour of Almut Hintze

    Cantera, Alberto, Maria Macuch, and Nicholas Sims-Williams (eds.). 2022. The reward of the righteouse. Festschrift in honour of Almut Hintze (Iranica 30). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

    The volume is dedicated to one of the foremost scholars in the field of Zoroastrian and Iranian Studies, reflecting the broad range of scholarly interests and research work of the dedicatee. In addition to an appreciation of Almut Hintze’s work and a bibliography of her publications, the volume contains thirty-four contributions written by renowned specialists in their fields. These cover a wide range of topics, stretching from antiquity to the present, and offer many new insights and original perspectives on religious, linguistic and historical problems. The articles, which include many editions of previously unpublished texts, encompass studies on (1) The oldest Zoroastrian textual sources (A. Ahmadi; J. Kellens; A. Panaino; M. Schwartz); (2) The Zoroastrian ritual (A. Cantera; E. Filippone; F. Kotwal; J. Martínez Porro; C. Redard; Y. Vevaina); (3) Avestan manuscripts (G. König); (4) Zoroastrianism in the Middle Iranian and Islamic periods (Sh. Farridnejad; Sh. Shaked); (5) Pahlavi texts, documents and inscriptions (J. Choksy/M.U. Hasan; J. Josephson; M. Macuch; D. Weber); (6) Zoroastrian and Manichaean iconography (F. Grenet/M. Minardi; Y. Yoshida); (7) Manichaean texts in Middle Iranian languages (A. Benkato; I. Colditz; E. Morano/M. Shokri-Foumeshi/N. Sims-Williams; N. Sims-Williams/Bi Bo); (8) Iranian philology (M.A. Andrés-Toledo; Ph. Huyse; E. Jeremiás; P. Lurje; M. Maggi; É. Pirart; A. Rossi); (9) Historical and cultural studies (C. Cereti; J. Palsetia; J. Rose; A. Williams).

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  • The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia

    Tor, Deborah & Minoru Inaba (eds.). 2022. The history and culture of Iran and Central Asia: From the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

    This volume examines the major cultural, religious, political, and urban changes that took place in the Iranian world of Inner and Central Asia in the transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic periods.

    One of the major civilizations of the first millennium was that of the Iranian linguistic and cultural world, which stretched from today’s Iraq to what is now the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. No other region of the world underwent such radical transformation, which fundamentally altered the course of world history, as this area did during the centuries of transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period. This transformation included the religious victory of Islam over Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, and the other religions of the area; the military and political wresting of Inner Asia from the Chinese to the Islamic sphere of primary cultural influence; and the shifting of Central Asia from a culturally and demographically Iranian civilization to a Turkic one. This book contains essays by many of the preeminent scholars working in the fields of archeology, history, linguistics, and literature of both the pre-Islamic and the Islamic-era Iranian world, shedding light on some of the most significant aspects of the major changes that this important portion of the Asian continent underwent during this tumultuous era in its history. This collection of cutting-edge research will be read by scholars of Middle Eastern, Central Asian, Iranian, and Islamic studies and archaeology.

  • Iran and the Caucasus 26 (1)

    Iran and the Caucasus 26 (1)

    The latest issue of Iran and the Caucasus (26.1) contains several interesting contributions.

    Table of contents:

    • Preliminary Material (Editors)
    • Far away from Pārsa: Empire, Borders, and Ideology in Achaemenid Bactria (Marco Ferrario)
    • A Copper Statuette from South-Eastern Iran (3rd Millennium B.C.) (Nasir Eskandari, Mojgan Shafiee, Ali Akbar Mesgar, Federico Zorzi, &Massimo Vidale)
    • On the Emergence of the Iranian Apocalypse Between the Sixth and Seventh Centuries (Domenico Agostini)
    • Armeno-Iranica, Indo-Europaeica, and Gathica (Martin Schwartz)
    • An Etymological Note on YAv. mūra-: Is it Really “Idiot, Stupid, Foolish”? (Sara Belelli)
    • New Persian yādgār (Nadereh Nafisi)
    • The Ethno-Religious Contradictions as Threats to the North Caucasus Stability and Integration (Maxim Popov)
    • Review of Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Seleukos: Studies in Achaemenid and Hellenistic History, Ancient Iran Series, vol. 5: “UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies”, 2018. 327pp (Yervand Margaryan)
    • Review of L’épopée caucasienne des Nartes. Cycles d’Ossétie, Traduits de l’ossète et commentés par Lora Arys-Djanaïéva et Iaroslav Lebedynsky, Paris: “L’Harmattan”, 2019. 325 pp. (Matteo De Chiara)