Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Review: The nativist prophets of early Islamic Iran

    Dabiri, Ghazzal. 2015. Review essay: The nativist prophets of early Islamic Iran: Rural revolt and local Zoroastrianism. Journal of Persianate Studies 8. 115–121.

    The bibliographic information for the book under review is:

    Crone, Patricia. 2014. The nativist prophets of early Islamic Iran: Rural revolt and local Zoroastrianism. Cambridge University Press.

  • Study of religions, translation & Zoroastrianism

     

    Directions in the Study of Religion: Daniel Sheffield.

    Listen to Daniel Sheffield, Professor of History at the University of Washington, talk with Kristian Petersen about Translation & Zoroastrianism in Iran and South Asia.

  • 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.

  • Judæo-Iranian Languages

    Torat Adonai, Constantinople: Eliezer ben Gershom Soncino, 1546 Detail. The right column contains Jacob Tavusi’s Judeo-Persian translation (BL Or. 70.c.10) © The British Library

    Borjian, Habib. 2015. Judeo-Iranian Languages. In Lily Kahn & Aaron D. Rubin (eds.), Handbook of Jewish Languages, 234–296. (Brill’s Handbooks in Linguistics). Leiden: Brill.

    Judeo-Iranian languages referring mostly to a group of Jewish variants of Iranian languages, many of them dialects of Persian, spoken or written with the Hebrew script by Jews in greater Iran over a period of more than a millennium. The corpus of Judeo-Iranian literature is very important for both linguistic and literary reasons, as it includes some of the earliest documents of New Persian, and because it constitutes a sizable literature written by Persian Jews.

     

    About the Handbook of Jewish Languages

    This Handbook of Jewish Languages is an introduction to the many languages used by Jews throughout history, including Yiddish, Judezmo (Ladino) , and Jewish varieties of Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Berber, English, French, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Iranian, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Malayalam, Occitan (Provençal), Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Syriac, Turkic (Karaim and Krymchak), Turkish, and more. Chapters include historical and linguistic descriptions of each language, an overview of primary and secondary literature, and comprehensive bibliographies to aid further research. Many chapters also contain sample texts and images. This book is an unparalleled resource for anyone interested in Jewish languages, and will also be very useful for historical linguists, dialectologists, and scholars and students of minority or endangered languages.

    Habib Borjian is a scholar of Iranian lingustic, comparative historical philology and typology in Center for Iranian Studies at the  Columbia University as well as the senior assistant editor of Encyclopaedia Iranica.

  • Photography of the Persian Past

    Persepolis in Qajar era, c. 1902. © Wikimedia

    Exhibition: The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past

    October 22, 2015- January 17, 2016
    Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 11am-6pm, Friday 11am-8pm, Closed Monday and Tuesday

    The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past explores a pivotal time in Iran, when the country was opening itself to the Western world. With over 150 photographic prints, a number of vintage photographic albums, and memorabilia that utilized formal portraiture of the shah, the exhibition shows how photographers—many of them engaged by Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848-1896), the longest reigning Shah of the Qajar Dynasty (1785-1925)—sought to create a portrait of the country for both foreigners and Iranians themselves. Most of the photographs in the exhibition have never been publicly displayed.

    The Eye of the Shah includes unprecedented photographs of life in the royal court in Tehran, such as images of the last shahs of the Qajar Dynasty, their wives and children, and court entertainers. These are complemented by photographs of iconic ancient monuments and sites, such as Persepolis and Naqsh-e Rostam, capturing Iran’s expansive and rich historical past, which further promoted Iran and Iranian culture to the West. The photographers depicted the Iran of their day through images of modernization initiatives, such as the military, the railway, and the postal system, while the daily lives of Iranian people was revealed through photographs showing shopkeepers, street vendors, and field workers. Additionally, Eye of the Shah features pieces by two modern-day Iranian photographers, Bahman Jalali (1944-2010) and Shadi Ghadirian (b. 1974), who evoke and sometimes incorporate images of photography from the Qajar Dynasty, illustrating the continuing and powerful influence that Iranian photography of 19th and early 20th century photography has in the country’s contemporary art world.

    The image is taken from ©Wikimedia Commons.

  • Babylonian kingship in the Persian period

    Waerzeggers, Caroline. 2015. Babylonian Kingship in the Persian Period: Performance and Reception. In J. Stökl & C. Waerzeggers (eds.), Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context, 181-222. Berlin: De Gruyter.

    The Persian conquest of Babylon set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to the partial return of Judah’s exilic community and to the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem. Despite Cyrus’ prominent role in the biblical narrative  about these events – and despite the historical reality of Yehud’s place within the Persian Empire – the Hebrew Bible constructs the context of the return as a kingless arena which required a profound reworking and re-interpretation of the traditional alignments between the Davidic king and Yahweh.¹ In this paper, I will contextualize these reflections by asking how Babylonian audiences responded to their loss of indigenous kingship following the Persian conquest – for, even  though the institution of ‘King of Babylon’ with its rituals and symbols survived into the Persian period, there is evidence of profound change during the Empire’s two hundred years of existence. After an introduction, the first part of this paper deals with contemporary responses to Persian rule in Babylonia; the second part moves on to a discussion of the reception of Persian period kingship by later generations of Babylonians.

  • 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.

  • Achaemenid Religion

    Skjærvø, Prods Oktor. 2014. Achaemenid Religion. Religion Compass.  8(6), 175-187.

    Achaemenid religion” was the religion of the rulers of Iran in the second half of the first millennium BCE and the local form of Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of the Iranians. The earliest form of Zoroastrianism is known from the Avesta, their sacred texts, which probably originated in the last half of the second and first half of the first millennium BCE, but were transmitted only orally until priests began writing them down in the seventh century. The “Achaemenid religion” is known from cuneiform inscriptions in the local Iranian language, Old Persian, and from tablets in Elamite found at Persepolis, as well as from other sources. It was a dualist religion, postulating the existence of good and evil from the beginning, as well as a polytheistic religion, but with one god, Ahura-Mazdā, outranking the others. Scholarly discussion has centered on the question whether the Achaemenids were real Zoroastrians, in the sense of following the reformed teachings of the historical Zarathustra. As the assumed historicity of Zarathustra and his reform are increasingly being questioned, scholars are now focusing on the interpretation of the inscriptions, notably from the point of view of the orality of Iranian traditions and their relationship with the Avesta, but also increasingly on the editing of the Elamite tablets and mining them for information.